Top Royals pick Caglianone crushes first pro homer … off a position player?
Ben Weinrib
After setting the single-season (35) and career (75) home run records at Florida this year, it was a matter of time before Jac Caglianone brought his light-tower power to the Minors.
He just didn’t draw up his first professional home run looking like this.
The sixth overall pick in July’s Draft by the Royals, Caglianone crushed a grand slam off a position player — infielder Jose Acosta — in the eighth inning of High-A Quad Cities’ 13-2 win over Wisconsin at Modern Woodmen Park on Saturday night.
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The 6-foot-5 slugger, who is expected to slot into the top half of MLB Pipeline’s updated Top 100 Prospects list next week, actually swung and missed at the first offering of the at-bat and fouled off a pair of pitches while working a full count. But after finally getting a pitch in the zone, Caglianone hammered it at a reported 109 mph into the Mississippi River.
“My first swing was absolutely terrible,” Caglianone said. “Having to mentally lock in, that it’s still a game. I’m not trying to take the swing off. But after that, a good result came from it. It was a cheap one. I’m not really counting it, to be honest with you.”
Perhaps there’s some irony that Caglianone, who has been college baseball’s premier two-way player the past two years, hit his first pro roundtripper off an infielder. The Royals, for what it’s worth, plan to have him focus solely on hitting the rest of the season — he threw 73 2/3 innings with the Gators in 2024 — before he resumes playing both ways next year.
Acosta wasn’t throwing it particularly hard, but the right-hander would pause his leg lift and mess around with his delivery. It was unlike anything the Tampa native saw during three seasons in the SEC.
“That was the first time for me,” Caglianone said. “So it was comical to start just because that’s just how it is when they bring in a position guy who’s got the funky delivery. The game feels not like a game, it feels like you’re in the backyard. Kind of reminding myself that it’s still a game and it’s still an at-bat that counts really helped me and got the result that it did.”
Just four games into his tenure with the River Bandits, Caglianone knows that that first “real” home run will come before long.
“I’m just going to keep attacking each day as a new day and just take everything pitch by pitch,” Caglianone said, “and eventually when it does come, I’ll savor it a little bit more.”
