Jac Caglianone hit a baseball 438 feet at 113.7 mph off the bat on Thursday night, and the Royals still found a way to lose.
Caglianone squared up a pitch from Twins starter Bailey Ober in the third inning at Target Field and put it somewhere over Minnesota that a baseball has no business going, a two-run shot that was his 17th homer of the year and put Kansas City up 2-0. For about six innings, that lead looked like it might actually hold up.
It did not hold up. Lucas Erceg opened the ninth, Matt Strahm relieved him, and by the time the dust settled, the Twins had walked it off for Kansas City’s ninth walk-off loss of the season. We already covered that at-bat in full on this site, so I’m not running it back here — just know it happened, and know the Royals now own nine of these.
https://x.com/MLBHR/status/2082892749276148161
Nine walk-off losses in one season stopped being bad luck a while ago.
Meanwhile Caglianone just keeps doing this. He hit a 477-foot homer at 113 mph in the first round of this year’s Home Run Derby, which should’ve been the exit-velocity headline of his whole summer. Then he turned around a 110 mph three-run homer back in June, and somewhere in between put up an exit-velocity reading north of 120 that made half of baseball Twitter forget how sentences work. Thursday’s 438-footer off Ober wasn’t even his most absurd swing of the year, just the one that happened to come with a bullpen collapse attached.
The bat was never the problem — a bullpen that can’t protect a lead is, and every one of those homers keeps getting spent on a record that reads 46-64, which makes this somehow both the funniest and saddest thing going in baseball right now. The talent and the roster are on two completely different trajectories.
I’ll give the Royals this much: nobody in that bullpen is trying to lose. Erceg and Strahm aren’t suddenly bad at their jobs, and blowing nine leads in a season is a bullpen-construction issue, not a character flaw — one that’s fixable in a way that “our best hitter isn’t good enough” never would be. I’ve still got a small bet down that this team doesn’t reach double-digit walk-off losses before Labor Day, and after Thursday I already regret it.
Caglianone deserves a bullpen that can hold a lead long enough for one of his homers to mean something other than a great highlight in a loss.
