KANSAS CITY, Mo. — There may have been 30 people inside Kauffman Stadium on Tuesday with a view of the field, including a couple of workers who were busy hosing off seats hours before the Kansas City Royals hosted the Cincinnati Reds, yet all would occasionally turn to see where the baseball landed when they heard the crack of the bat.
Inside the cage, hat flipped backward à la Ken Griffey Jr. and with a left-handed swing nearly as sweet, was the hottest thing to hit the sport in quite some time. Elly De La Cruz pounded ropes into the stadium’s massive alleys and sent shots soaring that rattled around in the outfield seats or splashed into the stadium fountains.
An hour later, De La Cruz finally walked toward the visiting dugout with a few of his Cincinnati teammates.
It was 2:58 p.m. First pitch was still more than four hours away.
Rarely do players widely considered baseball’s top prospect exceed expectations from the start. Even rarer is a talent like De La Cruz, the 21-year-old switch-hitting infielder whose first week in Major League Baseball was the stuff of legend.