Edward Olivares made the scoreboard literally start smoking with a monster home run.
There have not been many highlights for the Kansas City Royals through the first two months of the 2023 MLB regular season. The Royals are off to a 16-38 start, which puts them in the basement of the AL Central and gives them the second fewest wins in baseball to this point in the season. Only the Oakland Athletics have been worse.
On Sunday, Royals fans finally got a moment worth celebrating. With Kansas City trailing the Washington Nationals by one run in the bottom of the eighth inning, left fielder Edward Olivares smashed a game-tying home run 452-feet. The ball was hit so hard that it broke the left field scoreboard and made it start smoking.
The Royals beat the Nationals, 3-2, when Michael Massey drove in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Watch Olivares’ towering homer that blacked out full sections of the video board here:
Here’s the broadcast angle of Olivares’ homer.
Olivares’ dinger had an exit velocity of 111 miles per hour, and was hit at a launch angle of 25 degrees. There isn’t a ballpark in baseball that was keeping that one inside the yard.
Here’s what it looked like to fans inside the stadium:
It was Olivares’ fourth home run of the season.
The great thing about baseball is that the game has been played since the late 1800s, but you can still see something new any time you go to the ballpark. That’s even the case for a team as hopeless as the 2023 Royals.
