Kansas City Royals 1B Eric Hosmer Starts To Heat Up

By DanFlaherty

It’s been a rough start of the season for Kansas City Royals’ first baseman Eric Hosmer. The highly touted 22-year-old arrived with great expectation late last season and showed enough flashes of what he could do, that all of baseball had him on the short list of breakout young players for 2012. It didn’t work out that way for the better part of two months, but as the weather heats up in Kansas City, all signs are that Hosmer is as well.

The first baseman is 10-for-27 this month, good for a .370 batting average. He’s only hit one home run, but that’s what makes this stretch more refreshing than the early part of the season. In April and May, Hosmer would get the occasional series where he’d show a power burst, and he hit six home runs in the first couple months. But if he had two home runs in a series, the odds were good he probably went 2-for-14 for the set. If he wasn’t going deep, he wasn’t doing anything, and no one succeeds that way.

June has been different. Now Hosmer is settled in and consistently picking up hits. Certainly an American League team has to get power from its first baseman, but if you get Hosmer hitting the ball hard with consistency, the power will follow the base hits. And even as it is, he’s still on a pace for twenty home runs.

Over on the other corner of the infield, the other young gun, 23-year-old Mike Moustakas is starting to cool off a bit after a blazing start, but at 8-for-29 on the month he’s still hitting .275. When he say he’s cooling off it’s more a statement about how hot he was for the first couple months.

No one questions the ability of the Royals to score runs, and the young corner infielders are visible proof. Now, they might finally be ready to hit in tandem for the first time all season.

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