Orioles Second Baseman Jackson Holliday to undergo knee surgery…..
The moment wasn’t too big for Jackson Holliday. The 20-year-old has dreamt about delivering critical hits in baseball games since he was a toddler, and his disappointing debut stint in MLB didn’t even come close to shattering his confidence.
From the moment Holliday connected with this particular pitch on Wednesday afternoon, he knew his first big league home run — a massive grand slam — was about to be logged in the record books.
“That’s about as best as I can hit a ball,” said the Orioles’ second baseman and son of seven-time All-Star outfielder Matt Holliday. “That’s about all I got.”
MLB Pipeline’s No. 1 overall prospect announced his return to the Majors with a Statcast-projected 439-foot slam in the fifth inning of Baltimore’s 10-4 win in the series finale vs. Toronto at Camden Yards. Holliday belted an 0-2 slider from Blue Jays right-hander Yerry Rodríguez, with the ball leaving the bat at 109.2 mph.
The gargantuan blast sailed over the right-field flag court and onto Eutaw Street, as Holliday (20 years, 240 days old) became the youngest player in franchise history to hit a grand slam.
It was the seventh Eutaw homer of the season, the fifth by an Orioles player. Of the 129 total home runs hit to Eutaw Street, only two have been a player’s first career homer, with Holliday joining the Astros’ Robbie Grossman, who achieved the feat exactly 11 years earlier on July 31, 2013.
“He’s got one more Eutaw Street home run than me. I was messing with him about that,” said outfielder Colton Cowser, who also went deep in the victory. “But yeah, really happy for him.”
Holliday is the third player in Orioles history (since 1954) to hit a grand slam for his first MLB home run, joining Frank Baker (Sept. 28, 1973) and Fritz Connally (April 19, 1985). He’s the eighth-youngest in AL/NL history to have his first homer be a slam, per the Elias Sports Bureau.
