Can Royals star Bobby Witt Jr. become the first player in decades to hit .400 … at home?

By C. Trent Rosecrans, Stephen J. Nesbitt and Sam Blum

One night earlier this summer at Kauffman Stadium, Bobby Witt Jr. came to bat in the ninth inning with one on, one out, and his Kansas City Royals trailing by a run. He then hit a game-tying triple for his third hit of the game, raced home on a walk-off grounder, and stopped running only to conduct an on-field interview. Still catching his breath, Witt grinned at the home crowd chanting his name and said, “What do you think? Pretty cool?”

Witt, the 24-year-old All-Star shortstop, is having a sensational season, leading the majors with a .352 batting average and hitting both the fastest man And best defender in the game, he joins American League MVP favorite Aaron Judge as the only players with a WAR above 8 this season. He has started every game for the Royals this season at shortstop and second batter.

What’s more, Witt has historically been good in Kansas City: He’s on pace to become the first major leaguer in 20 years to hit .400 at home. After going 3-for-5 on Tuesday night, Witt is hitting .405 in 281 plate appearances at Kauffman Stadium this season.

Ted Williams hit above .400 at Fenway Park in 1941, 1951 and 1957. Since then, only nine batters — four from Colorado’s pre-humidor days — have hit .400 in at least 275 plate appearances at home: Joe Cunningham, Rod Carew, Wade Boggs, Kirby Puckett, Andrés Galarraga, Eric Young Sr., Larry Walker, Jeff Cirillo and Barry Bonds.

Witt could soon join that list as well.

“He’s as complete a player as you could ever imagine,” Boggs, who twice hit better than .400 at Fenway Park, said by phone this week.

“Plus power and tremendous speed,” Cirillo said.

“He’s become a very good player in a very short time,” Carew said.

Kansas City’s spacious Kauffman Stadium suppresses home runs but allows for hits. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

The stadium itself is a factor in Witt’s pursuit of .400, just as it was with Boggs and Fenway’s Green Monster, with Puckett and the Metrodome’s AstroTurf, and with the mile-high Rockies. Kauffman Stadium has the second-largest outfield in the majors, after Coors Field, suppressing home runs but provides extra space for singles, doubles and triples. The baseball field helps maximize the bat-to-ball skill and speed that contribute to Witt’s high average, but it also dampens his home run output.

In Cincinnati on Friday, Royals infielder Michael Massey gambled that if Witt played every game on the Great American Ball Park launch pad, he would have 15 more homers. Later that night, Witt hit his 25th homer of the season, a second-deck hit that would have come from any major league park. Massey was incredibly close. Witt’s Cincinnati’s expected home run total — 39 — would do wonders for his MVP status.

“I would pick Bobby in any stadium,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said.

But Kansas City is home. Witt will take the hits no matter how they come. He said his only focus is to have the same routine and preparation, home or away. “If I have that, then I feel like I’ll be the same guy every night.”

Witt’s batting average is 106 points better at home than away this season. That’s in line with the home/away splits of Puckett, Boggs and Bonds, and far smaller than the .400-hitting Rockies had. Players are more comfortable at home. (There’s a reason only one player has hit .400 away in the past 75 years: Ichiro Suzuki had a .405 away split in 2004.)

“When you’re at home and you’re playing well, everything is more perfect,” Eric Young Sr. said. “You have your own bed, your own food. It’s great.”

Boggs didn’t realize until this week that he once hit .400 at home. But he wasn’t surprised. “I kind of knew it was going to be extremely hard to get me out of Fenway Park,” he said. Boggs has a career-high batting average at Fenway: .369. He got there by being “absorbed” by the left-field wall.

“When the wind blows, I’m always confident I’m going to get two hits that day,” he said.

Cirillo didn’t know he’d hit .400 at home, either. But he does remember getting hot in the final series at Coors Field in 2000.

“I’m glad I got a few hits so we could have a conversation,” he said.

Jeff Cirillo, pictured here in 2001, loved hitting in Colorado, for obvious reasons. (Tom Hauck/Allsport)

Cirillo, the fourth Rockies hitter to reach .400 in Colorado in the franchise’s first decade, acknowledged that it wasn’t all about great reflexes and luck with the batted ball.

“We did it at Coors Field,” he said. “There might be a little bit of an asterisk there. What (Witt) does is absolutely incredible.”

Larry Walker hit .418 in 1998, .461 in 1999 and .406 in 2001. In 2002, a humidor was installed to suppress the strike. No Rockies hitter has hit .400 at home since the change, although Todd Helton came close — .391 in 2003.

On his way to the clubhouse for games in Colorado, Cirillo walked across the vast outfield at Coors. It felt to him like a links-style golf course, where you hit wide-open fairways.

“If you used the midfield,” he said, “you never really got into a slump.”

Kauffman Stadium never felt that way. Cirillo batted .234 in 32 road games in Kansas City. “It was always really hot, so your legs felt mushy in the box,” he said. He finds Witt’s performance remarkable, especially given the speed of today’s game and how technology can help expose hitters’ shortcomings.

Boggs loved hitting in Kansas City — not because of the size, but because of the AstroTurf that was there until 1994. Not only did Boggs hit .336 at Kauffman Stadium, it was also where he hit his only inside-the-park home run.

“It was like playing on a pool table,” Boggs said. “If you hit a ball two or three steps to the left or right of an infielder, he was through. It was that fast.” But it’s a grass field now, and even with the grass, no one hit .400 at Kauffman. When Hall of Famer George Brett hit .390 in 1980, he was “only” hitting .392 at home.

In the summer of 1977, Rod Carew wanted to be left alone. He had a .411 batting average in early July, and reporters were flocking to Minneapolis and the Twins’ away games to talk to him. Carew had so many writers calling his hotel rooms that he began changing the name on his reservations. He asked writers to arrive at the ballpark extra early if they wanted an interview. When they refused, he had Twins manager Gene Mauch repeat the request.

“I didn’t want to take that .400 thing on the field,” Carew said.

At one point, Carew stopped talking to reporters altogether. But the attention was impossible to avoid. Carew’s batting average dropped to .374 on August 25, and though he hit .441 the rest of the way, he still fell 12 points short of a .400 season. He did, however, hit .401 at home.

Carew doesn’t mind reporters asking. He likes Witt, who was born 15 years after Carew’s last major league game. The Hall of Famer has seen some stars emerge with batting styles that remind Carew of himself, guys like Brett, Suzuki and now Witt. They have the speed to hit infield singles. They sit on fastballs but adjust to wreak havoc on off-speed stuff.

Rod Carew tips his cap to fans after a double raised his batting average to .400 in June 1977. (AP Photo/JM)

Not many reporters ask Witt about his .400 batting average, but he doesn’t have much to say. “You just have to go out there and have good at-bats,” he said, “and whatever happens, happens.” The numbers speak for themselves, and they say that Witt’s season-long home-run is anything but smoke and mirrors. He doesn’t hit bloops and bleeders. He hits balls and finds holes.

Witt has 17 three-hit games in Kansas City this season, including a six-of-seven home streak in July. Batting average is as hard to come by these days as it has been since 1968. The league-wide batting average is .244; for home teams, it’s .245; at Kauffman Stadium, it’s .259. Witt is in a different stratosphere.

Young, like a handful of other .400-at-home hitters, played against Witt’s father, pitcher Bobby Witt, during his career, watching Bobby Jr. grow up around the game and become a superstar.

“He’s mentally on a different level than a lot of the kids in his class,” Young said. “That’s special because he can see, play and execute a little bit quicker in a way than the other guys.”

In a three-hit road game on Friday, Witt became the third Royals player with 25 home runs and 25 steals in consecutive seasons, following Carlos Beltrán and Bo Jackson.

“It’s unbelievable,” said recently acquired Royals starter Michael Lorenzen. “You watch it every night on MLB Network and you get a little tired of it, to be honest with you, because he’s on there every night with his highlights. And then playing with him, it’s the real deal. There’s not many people you can say that about. You can say that about Bobby. It’s the real deal.”

Witt is on his way to 11.6 fWAR, more than any shortstop in history except 1908 Honus Wagner (11.8). As the Royals bounce back from a 106-loss season to contend for an AL Central crown, their face-of-the-franchise shortstop is putting on show after show for the home crowd.

What do you think? Very nice?

(Top photo of Witt: Ed Zurga/Getty Images)