Miami Marlins’ rookie Kyle Stowers is one of the hottest hitters in baseball. Saturday night Stowers ended the action with a pair of career firsts. Coming up to bat with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, the rookie obliterated a 103 mile-per-hour first pitch fastball.
His first career walk-off and his first career grand slam gave the Marlins a 9-6 victory at home.
“The thought that was going through my head was ‘You don’t rise to the occasion you sink to the level of your preparation’,” the rookie said in a post game interview immediately following. “I train high velocity in the cage, it’s stuff I work on and I just trusted my training.”
The grand slam was Stowers’ second homerun of the game. The rookie sent a two-run shot over the fence in the third inning. He accounted for six of the Marlins’ nine runs.
“It’s a lot of fun man- I’m just having fun,” Stowers continued. “I’m going to enjoy this one a little bit and the fun thing about baseball is we are back at it tomorrow.”
Stowers’ finds himself in the middle of one of the best starting months in Major League Baseball. He is batting .324 with six homeruns in the first 30 games of the season.
Kyle Stowers’ Amazing Start
MLB.com’s Christina De Nicola highlighted the rookies hot start, comparing his numbers to those around the league.
“Entering Saturday, Stowers ranked eighth in batting average (.320) and 31st in slugging percentage (.500) among 166 qualified hitters,” De Nicola wrote. “His barrel percentage (17.1%) and expected batting average (.303) placed him in the 91st percentile.”
His slugging has now exceed .500 as he became the latest in a long line of Marlins’ walk off wins this season.
Maniac Marlins Can’t Stop Walking Off
The Marlins’ have not enjoyed great success in the win column, but it feels like evry time they do get it done, it is in dramatic fashion.
“The win marked Miami’s fourth walk-off win so far this season,” Kari Anderson of Yahoo Sports writes. “At the end of March, the Marlins opened the season with a home series against the Pittsburgh Pirates; in three of the four games, Miami got a walk-off victory, including one in the 12th inning.”
The Marlins’ were losers of six straight coming into the series against the Athletics’. Now Miami has an opportunity to win their first series in weeks on Sunday night.
““We won, so it’s a lot of fun,” Stowers said. “Just talking about it today, just how much better the vibes are when the team wins. Obviously the moment was fun, fun for me, too. Since they brought me in, we want to bring winning baseball here, and so we want this good energy, and hopefully we can use this as some momentum and keep rattling off some wins.”
Marlins’ Rookie Delivers Stoic Quote After Walk-Off Grand Slam