Kansas City Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. getting more dangerous the more he sees pitchers
Go back to the well one too many times against Kansas City Royals rookie shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. and you’re liable to watch a baseball deposited into the fountains. Sunday, instead of launching a ball into the Kauffman Stadium fountains, Witt simply shot a laser beam into the visiting team’s bullpen for his eighth home run of the season.
Witt’s 397-foot homer tied him for the second-most by a rookie in the majors this season. It came as the Royals attempted to rally in a 10-7 loss to the Baltimore Orioles. Witt went 3 for 5 with two runs scored and an RBI. He’s recorded all three of his three-hit games since May 27.
“Seeing more guys, seeing teams twice, seeing them again, I’m going to be facing these guys for the rest of my career so I think it makes it kind of more fun,” Witt said. “They’re going to try to pitch you differently, then you’ve got to game plan differently. Whenever it kind of gets that one-v-one match, it’s always fun being able to game plan against guys you’ve played against already.”
The “fun” may tilt in Witt’s favor as opposed to those pitchers on the mound facing him in subsequent at-bats.
In the case of Witt’s seventh-inning home run, the cat-and-mouse game dates back to the Royals’ series against the Orioles at Baltimore’s Camden Yards a little more than a month ago. That’s when Witt faced Orioles reliever Keegan Akin for the first time.
Akin, a left-handed reliever, struck Witt out on three pitches in the top of the eighth inning on May 8. The first two pitches he got Witt to foul off and then swing and miss on in that matchup were changeups.
“That’s what I think baseball is, it’s you versus the pitcher and then you’ve got your team to back you up,” Witt said. “You’ve got to just do your job. You know the rest of the team is going to do their job as well.”
Sunday, Witt came to the plate ready for that changeup. He took it for a ball on the first pitch, and then fouled it off on the second pitch.
Then after he fouled off a fastball — the same three-pitch sequence Witt saw in Baltimore — Akin went back to the changeup and left it over the heart of the plate. Witt wasn’t fooled. He turned it around with an exit velocity of 108 mph on a line over the left field wall.
“I was just hoping to be on time with the fastball,” Witt said. “Whenever I’m on time with the fastball, I’m able to kind of catch that out in front. That’s kind of what happened. It felt good.”
So far this season, Witt has hit three home runs against pitchers when facing them in a second series. That group includes St. Louis’ Dakota Hudson, Minnesota’s Joe Smith and Akin.
Witt has also homered twice against starting pitchers Lucas Giolito of Chicago and Jose Urquidy of Houston after having seen them for the first time in a previous at-bat in that same game.
That’s five of his eight home runs having come against pitchers he’d at least had one previous at-bat against.
“The same way when we face a pitcher, when you see him again you get a little better idea,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said. “When you face a club, you’ve got a pretty good idea what they might be trying to do get you out, especially when you face head-to-head. There’s so many guys in the league that he hasn’t seen. It’s going to be a first-look.
“Every time he does, you can tell he’s keep a really good notebook of where these guys are wanting to go, where they think they can get him out and try and be ahead of it. He’s able — he’s not just a one-trick pony — he can hit just about everything as long as he keeps himself in the zone.”
This story was originally published June 12, 2022 at 7:53 PM with the headline "Kansas City Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. getting more dangerous the more he sees pitchers."
