Royals outfielder MJ Melendez couldn’t believe he hit this home run. Here’s why
It’s only spring training, still three weeks shy of the games that count, so everything happening inside Surprise Stadium these days carries the weight of a practice more than anything that will be stamped on the back of a baseball card.
Which means..
Whack!
Well, wait a minute. The sound will interrupt your train of thought, whether your eyes are fixated on home plate or you’re in line to buy nachos at the stand. If it’s the latter, the baseball cleared the fence by the time you could find it in the air.
Royals outfielder MJ Melendez hit a scorching line drive into the bullpen that left the yard in a hurry Wednesday, part of a 9-6 Royals win in a spring game.
We can underscore that part again, just to be sure: spring.
The statistics this time of year are of such little importance that they aren’t even displaying them on the JumboTron here at Surprise Stadium. But there is something about that home run — something about that swing, about that sound — that just might have some meaning.
Here’s why:
“I definitely surprised myself a little bit,” Melendez said.
In a sensation resembling best-shape-of-my-life form, a revamped Melendez swing has caught the rage this month. And, look, rightfully so.
A free-swinging lefty with a stance consisting of more moving parts than a car engine suddenly looks like the calmest guy in the batter’s box. It’s a 180-degree change in process, with the objective the change in results will follow.
Who knows? It’s early.
Melendez has hit a couple of home runs (and a triple) this spring, but he’s stepped to the plate 22 times, which represents just 4.9% of his total last year.
But what unfolded Wednesday evening can’t mean nothing. It’s not the home run. It’s the circumstances tucked within it.
Seattle pitcher Bryce Miller, who posted a 2.94 earned-run average a year ago, threw Melendez the kind of pitch that so frequently tied him up a year ago: a cutter on the inside part of the plate. It was a perfect location, really, on the black of the inner half.
Melendez has hit that pitch out before, though infrequently. This was different.
To him.
And that’s a pretty important piece.
“Not that I’ve never gotten to a pitch like that,” Melendez said, “but it felt a lot easier than it might’ve in the past.”
In the ongoing trial run of MJ Melendez 2.0, you’d like to see some success early, whether it counts in the stat line or not.
Melendez, the player the Royals tried to recruit over — they were in the market for a corner outfield bat this offseason — might just be the very key to reaching the peak of their lineup. Because it’s in there. Somewhere.
The team is optimistic his swing will provide the enhancement they initially hoped the open market would supply, but there’s a message about that point that Melendez might as well write on his bathroom mirror:
He has to stick with it.
That’s the hard part, and it’s not being tested on a March weeknight in spring training. It will be tested when he’s stuck in a 1-for-21 skid in the middle of June.
Then what?
Those moving parts have encompassed his stance and swing since literally as long as he can remember. It helps that he wanted a change.
“The league is very hard,” he said. “You either evolve and you make adjustments, or you get sent out of it.”
That’s been the sentiment all spring. He tinkered with several variations of a new swing before landing on the current simplification. It felt awkward initially. Still does on some days. The early returns have been mixed. That was to be expected.
But they know the power is there. It might have to be.
If the Royals are to improve offensively, there’s only so much you can ask of Bobby Witt Jr., a soon-to-be 35-year-old catcher and Vinnie Pasquantino, even if those three will never shy away from asking more of themselves. The best path — the most obvious path — toward offensive improvement in this lineup needs to come from the rest.
And the ceiling might be higher for Melendez’s bat than anyone.
The stance has robbed him of reaching that ceiling. MLB pitchers thrive on hitter movement.
Melendez isn’t the first player to fall victim to it. Not even in the first player in this clubhouse.
George Brett, the lone baseball Hall of Famer in Royals history, has told a story about his hitting coach, Charley Lau, instructing a 21-year-old Brett to show up to the ballpark during the All-Star break. Brett was hitting .242 and slugging just .308.
“If you change some things, you can survive at this level,” Lau told him, as Brett recalled.
Here’s where the similarity arrives. Lau changed Brett’s stance. Wanted to make it easier for him to get his hands to the baseball.
Brett hit .317 in the second half. Never looked back.
He told that story at the onset of spring.
In his audience? Melendez.
“It’s cool to hear. Obviously it’s something I’m going through right now,” Melendez said. “It’s cool to hear those stories as well. Hopefully, God willing, I’m able to tell this story 20 years from now.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2025 at 10:32 AM with the headline "Royals outfielder MJ Melendez couldn’t believe he hit this home run. Here’s why."