Rhys Hoskins Sets Baseball World On Fire: 2017 Year In Review

Phillies slugger Rhys Hoskins' summer of home runs was one of the biggest sports stories of 2017. After being called up from the minor leagues in mid-summer, Hoskins hit an astounding 18 home runs in just 50 games, blowing previous Major League Baseball records off the books. The story below, written after Hoskins hit his 10th homer, was published on Aug. 27.

It was an off-speed pitch, low and out of the zone, thrown on a 1-2 count from the hand of the reigning National League ERA champ. Rhys Hoskins leaned across the plate, knelt with his back knee nearly brushing the dirt, and golfed the pitch through the pre-dusk sky into the left field bleachers.

The off-balance, unlikely swing catapulted the Phillies rookie into Major League Baseball's record books and cast a din of magic over the stadium in a moment when the score, and the standings, didn't matter.

With Saturday night's dinger in the books, the first baseman turned left fielder has now hit 10 home runs in his first 17 big league games, a feat accomplished by no other athlete in more than a century of competition.

The homer came on Hoskins' first at-bat in the bottom of the first inning. Cubs pitcher Kyle Hendricks wouldn't make a serious mistake the rest of the night, shutting the Phillies out over the next six innings. The defending World Champion Cubs would go on to rout the Phillies, 17-2.

But the score itself seemed but epilogue to the improbable feat in the first inning that electrified the crowd of nearly 30,000 and filled the ball park with portents of glory for summers to come.

According to Baseball Reference, the previous record for fastest to 10 home runs was a tie between George Scott in 1966 and Trevor Story in 2016, who each took 21 games to reach the mark.

Hoskins, 24, has roared through the Phillies minor league system over the past two years, hitting 38 home runs in Double-A Reading last year and belting 29 in Triple-A Lehigh Valley this year before his promotion on Aug. 10. He went largely unnoticed on the national scene until July of this year, when he appeared at number 70 on the midseason update of MLB.com's top 100 prospects list.

The Phillies' loss dropped them to an MLB-worst 47-81 on the season. But there are reasons to be hopeful. Since the All-Star break, they are 18-19. A certain amount of bad luck has contributed to their overall record, just as luck helps crown the sport's champions come each fall. All any team can hope for are players good enough to tip the scales of luck in their collective favor; in rare cases, they can hope for a player dominant enough to fight back against the sport's prevailing entropy.

That doesn't come along often, and when it does, it's not reckoned by models of the ordinary or quintessential. Every single one of Rhys Hoskins' first nine home runs were of this mold, beautiful, effortless, loping, Mike Trout-esque swings on fastballs which pitchers likely began to regret before they even threw them. Saturday night's blast was something else entirely: an oft-unhittable pitch slicing through the August night that should've gone past for a typical ball two, but was instead chipped out of the dirt and toward the stars along with the hopes of the franchise itself.

Image via Wayne Heinze