PHOENIX – Rece Hinds has just 10 plate appearances in his minor-league career, but the stories about power are legendary.
During the instructional league last fall, he broke his bat swinging at a 95-mph fastball and the ball traveled 375 feet for a home run. Yes, a homer on a broken bat.
He had another instructional league game, against Los Angeles Dodgers minor leaguers, where he pulled a homer about 415 feet to left-center. Then later in the same game, he crushed an opposite-field homer to right field that went about halfway up on the tall netting that protects the street behind the field.
Hinds hit with exit velocities as high as 117 mph in the fall, according to Baseball America. For reference, there are only three players who have hit a ball that hard in an MLB game this season: Giancarlo Stanton, Shohei Ohtani and Pete Alonso. Throughout the 2019 season, there were just 11 players who reached a 117-mph exit velocity on a swing.
“He hit some balls on screws that were like there is no way people want to play in with a runner on third, I can tell you that,” Reds farm director Shawn Pender said of Hinds.
The raw power isn’t a surprise. It was a reason why Hinds was drafted in the second round of the 2019 MLB Draft (No. 49 overall). With a metal bat, he’s the kid who hit a ball that traveled 485 feet over the left-field stands and onto the concourse at Nationals Park during the high school home run derby in 2018.
Hinds, from Niceville, Florida, has a 6-foot-4, 215-pound frame and he routinely sends balls over the batter’s eye in batting practice. But he didn’t always have his power.
