Royals Prospect Bobby Witt Jr.’s 484-Foot Homer Made the Most Beautiful Sound
He really got all of it
It’s really easy to go overboard romanticizing the sensory experience of watching a baseball game. The smell of the grass, the roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat. But let me tell you, the crack of Bobby Witt Jr.’s bat on Monday afternoon was something special.
Witt, the son of a 16-year MLB veteran and the No. 2 pick in the 2019 draft, is one of the top prospects in baseball. (MLB.com ranks him No. 7, while Baseball Prospectus has him at No. 9.) The 20-year-old shortstop turned heads with his play at the Royals’ alternate training site last summer and earned an invite to big-league camp this spring, where he’s picked up six hits in 17 at bats.
Two of those hits were home runs, and one of them, off A’s pitcher Yusmeiro Petit, was the longest homer by a Royals player since MLB’s advanced Statcast system began tracking batted-ball data in 2015. It traveled 484 feet.
But you didn’t need an expensive battery of cameras and radar devices to know Witt hit the crap out of the ball. Just listen. I’ll drop three videos below, because it sounds equally beautiful from each angle.
That’s the platonic ideal of a bat-to-ball sound. He hit it so cleanly it must have felt like he swung right through it.
Royals manager Mike Matheny was hesitant to give the youngster too much credit.
“It was all wind,” Matheny joked with reporters. “That’s what I told Bobby.”
Witt really looks like the total package. After a misplay in the outfield during a game last week, he circled the bases in fewer than 15 seconds.
He’s expected to play in the upper levels of the minors this season, but it shouldn’t be too long before we see him in the majors.
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