Sanó's mighty swat powers Twins' attack

Deep in left field at Kauffman Stadium, behind the cavernous visitors’ bullpen and several rows of seats, the Royals house their Hall of Fame in a rectangular, two-story building that contains such notable items as George Brett’s pine tar bat and the jerseys of the three players whose numbers have been retired by the organization.

Miguel Sanó doesn’t play for Kansas City. He tried to make a deposit, anyway.

The big first baseman stepped to the plate in the fourth inning, worked a full count against Royals starter Brady Singer and unloaded on an inside fastball. It hit near the top of that Hall of Fame building on the fly, the only barrier preventing it from completing its 458-foot arc, as projected by Statcast. Sanó’s blast wasn’t his most pivotal swing in the Twins’ 7-2 win over Kansas City on Saturday night, but it sure was the most impressive one.

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Impressive to everyone but him, anyway.

"You know what's the funny part about that? I didn't hit it really great,” Sanó said after the game. "If I got the whole barrel on it, I would have got it over [the building]."

Sanó’s brutal slump to start the season now seems like a figment of the past. His bat is waking up in a big way, and the most recent example of that was his two-hit, three-RBI performance on Saturday featuring his towering solo shot and a single that tacked on a pair of seventh-inning insurance runs.

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Eddie Rosario also went deep with a three-run blast in the first inning, Randy Dobnak pitched five frames of two-run ball to add to his bid for the Rookie of the Year Award with his fifth consecutive win and Tyler Duffey escaped a bases-loaded jam in the sixth to help it all stand.

Rosario, Dobnak and Duffey have been pretty good all season, though. Sanó’s bat starting to really wake up is a bad sign for opponents -- and baseballs.

"That's no surprise for me,” Rosario said. “I see nobody here has the power that he has. When I see him at home plate, I want him to try to make contact. When he contacts [with] the ball, he's 100 percent hitting it hard. He has too much power. It's good to see when he's hitting these bombs. I feel happy for him."

That fourth-inning homer had an exit velocity of 115.8 mph, marking the hardest-hit ball of Sanó’s career. The previous record, by the way, had been set on Thursday, when he clubbed a 115.3-mph double off Milwaukee’s Brandon Woodruff. Sanó smoked another pitch with his seventh-inning single at 106.6 mph, a feat all the more impressive considering it came on an 0-2 count, a situation in which he’d previously been 0-for-20 with 16 strikeouts in 2020.

“There are not many people in the world that can hit a ball as solidly and as hard as Miguel Sanó, and there are some very, very impressive athletes out there in the game right now,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “When he hits it, it doesn’t come off the bat like someone hit a baseball with a bat. It’s more golfball-ish, and it just continues to go, and the ball gets very, very small to the eye and lands in places where you really don’t expect baseballs to land.”

Sanó began the season 5-for-45 (.111) with 23 strikeouts following a late start to camp due to COVID-19. Since then, he’s hitting .353/.488/.706 with six doubles, a pair of homers and nine walks in 43 plate appearances, raising his OPS from .504 to .817. Saturday’s performance extended his hitting streak to six games, a stretch that includes all six of those doubles.

An important sign is that both of Sanó’s hits on Saturday came on fastballs, as he had been working recently with the velocity machine to better catch up to heaters. He emphasized again on Saturday that he’s been working hard recently off a high tee to make sure he’s not missing that high heat.

"That's one of my routines from last year,” Sanó said on Friday. “I've been doing it with [hitting coaches Rudy Hernandez and Edgar Varela] right now. I try to get on top of the ball because when I do that, I'm a better hitter. That's something we have been doing the last few days, and I feel much better at the plate now."

“I think he does a good job of controlling the zone, but when he does get that pitch to hit in the zone, being on it, and when people are attacking him in the zone maybe with something hard, being able to put that ball in play [is key],” Baldelli said. “Because when he does put it in play ... when he does get on the barrel and find it, it’s explosive and it’s game-changing.”