Jasson Dominguez's first home run ball looks like it was scorched by a tire iron
Hard-hit rate through the roof on this kid.
It seemed fair to doubt whether 20-year-old Jasson Dominguez was ready for the Yankees, especially after a difficult first three months at Double-A this summer and only nine Triple-A games under his belt.
As it turns out ... when you're built different, you're built different. Those nine scorching games in Scranton, where Dominguez hit .419, might've been a better indicator of his readiness to enter the bigs.
The Martian has massive expectations to live up to, but for the time being, it makes sense to use him at the big-league level while he's as locked in as he's ever been in professional ball. While the tools might not translate into production every single day down the stretch, they sure did on Thursday, when Dominguez greeted Justin Verlander with a laser opposite field home run on the first swing of his MLB career.
Not for nothing, but his second at-bat also produced a scalded liner to left, though that one ended up in Yordan Alvarez's glove instead of ripping through the Crawford Boxes.
As David Cone and Michael Kay so snidely put it on the Yankees broadcast, Astros security actually did something good, securing Dominguez's first dinger ball from a fan in the stands. When it arrived back in the dugout, it was significantly smudged, as if hit with a jackhammer at high velocity.
Yankees Martian Jasson Dominguez's first home run ball was heavily damaged by his bat
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, but for real, that baseball looks like it got laser tattoo removal. It looks like the horse that provided its hide was bruised before he shuffled off this mortal coil. It looks like it was branded with a red-hot poker for disobeying the orders of Sigma Delta Chi.
Dominguez's career will likely be stuffed with significantly more homers and significantly more injured baseball. Hopefully, he reaches the same heights as the last Yankee to homer in his first at-bat: Aaron Judge, who scorched No. 250 of his career later in this game (and did it faster than any other player in MLB history).
Challenge accepted for Dominguez, who already rips the skin off baseballs to a Judge-ian degree.