Who the heck is Rhys Hoskins?
He's the Philadelphia Phillies' mystery man crushing dingers at a historic pace to kick off his career, but Rhys Hoskins is hardly a household name. Soon, he will be.
Hoskins hit his ninth home run of the season Friday night in only his 16th MLB game. He grooved a high fastball from Chicago Cubs starter Jose Quintana into the left-field seats, and he looked as surprised as anyone as he shrugged toward the dugout after touching home plate.
With the bomb, Hoskins is the only batter since at least 1913 to hit nine or more homers in his first 16 games, according to MLB.com's Todd Zolecki.
So, who is Rhys Hoskins?
Hoskins is a 6-foot-4, 225-pound first baseman who has been forced into the outfield because he's blocked on the Phillies' depth chart by Tommy Joseph. Partway through his 16th career game, he's batting .304/.418/.804 and has already driven in 21 runs to go along with his nine jacks.
His ascent, while generally shocking in terms of scale, isn't totally out of nowhere. At MLB.com's midseason update, Hoskins was listed as the Phillies' sixth-best prospect and 70th in all of baseball. In other words, there is some pedigree here.
A fifth-round draft pick in the 2014 amateur draft, Hoskins has risen through the minor-league ranks pretty quickly. In Low-A ball in 2014, he only hit .237 in 70 games, but he hasn't hit worse than .280 at any level since.
It was his Double-A party in 2016 that started opening eyes. He walloped 38 home runs in 135 games with 116 RBIs, slashing .281/.377/.566 in the process. Moving up a level in 2017, he didn't slow down one bit. He mashed in Triple-A before getting called up in August, blasting 29 more long balls with the Lehigh Valley IronPigs.
His power is palpable.
What could truly set him apart from his peers is that he's a power hitter who doesn't strike out an inordinate amount of the time. New York Yankees behemoth Aaron Judge was a known power threat from the second he was drafted, but he's never been able to cut down on his strikeout rate. Hoskins topped out at a 21.2 percent K-rate in 2016. In Triple-A, he only struck out in 15.8 percent of his plate appearances.
His long term major-league success is impossible to project off such a freakishly small sample size, but he's going to cool down because, well, no one keeps such a scorching pace.
But Hoskins has shown that he has power for days, and if he can maintain a solid walk-rate without becoming a whiff machine, he could help usher in a new era for the Phillies - a team that already has seven of baseball's top 100 prospects.