Kansas City Royals’ MJ Melendez puts power on display with pinch-hit homer
Kansas City Royals prospect and Minor League Baseball’s reigning home run king MJ Melendez came off the bench for one at-bat, connected on one swing and made an impact on the scoreboard on Friday.
His ability to unfurl a powerful and game changing left-handed swing has the Royals thinking “creatively” about options that might get the catcher in the lineup.
Melendez, 23, has taken ground balls at third base early in the mornings during spring training prior to full-team workouts begin, and he played third base in an exhibition game on Wednesday.
That power Melendez displayed with a ninth-inning pinch-hit home run to deep center field in the Royals’ loss to the Texas Rangers on Friday just might force his bat into the major-league lineup in the not-too-distant future while they’ve still got a starting catcher in Salvador Perez who has four Silver Slugger Awards, led the majors in RBIs and tied a franchise single-season record for home runs (48) last season.
“That’s twice now he had another swing [Thursday] when it looked like he just kind of wristed it and short-hopped the left field fence,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said of Melendez. “Then this one, the ball was a little bit elevated and it wasn’t like it was a cheat swing or he was just going for broke. He just kind of used his hands again. A no-doubter to center field on a day when the winds weren’t howling out of here.
“He’s really improved all the way around, defensively, his game calling, in his maturity. He’s absolutely come a long with his swing, and he’s dangerous.”
Melendez, rated among the Top 60 prospects in baseball by Baseball America and MLBPipeline.com, had to wait a little longer than he thought to show off how dangerous he can be in the batter’s box on Friday.
He’d been called on to pinch hit in the sixth inning, and he was on deck when the third out stopped the inning before he got a chance to step into the batter’s box.
So he went back to the bench and spent the final three innings scouting out each opposing pitcher that entered the game and formulating a game plan for what he wanted to do at the plate if called upon again.
He got his chance with two outs in the ninth, and he swatted a two-strike fastball on the outer half of the plate over the center field fence onto a grass berm where a spectator settled under it in time to make a catch.
Melendez said that the previous day in his final at-bat he “tried to do too much” and struck out. He told himself to go back to the approach he’d settled into last year during the season.
“Two strikes, just put the ball in play,” Melendez said. “I want to be a tough out every time, even if that means seeing a lot of pitches that at-bat and, even though I don’t get a hit, at least I’m able to get the pitcher’s pitch count up.”
Last season, Melendez enjoyed a monumental bounce-back year.
He re-established himself as one of the top young two-way catchers in the minor leagues with a slash line of .288/.386/.625 to go with 41 home runs in 123 games between Double-A (28) and Triple-A (13).
He became the first player since 2016 to hit 40 homers or more in a single minor-league season (the 14th since 1990) as well as the first primary catcher with 40 homers or more in the minors since Todd Greene hit 40 in 1995.
As far as any potential pressure to try to surpass his output of a season ago, Melendez will simply lean on routine as opposed to results as a means to find consistency.
“It’s just being able to be where my feet are. The past is in the past. In the future, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Melendez said. “But I can, every day, try to do my best and do my routine whether it’s in the cages before the game or early work.
“I just try to repeat everything the same way, try to be as consistent as possible and the results will kind of just take care of themselves. Just being consistent in my routines every single day and focusing on that at-bat, that pitch, one pitch at a time.”
