No matter what you may have heard, it's absolutely not true that Eric Thames came out of nowhere to become baseball’s April home run sensation.
He came out of Korea, where he won MVP honors for the NC Dinos by hitting 47 home runs in a season. He came out of the Toronto Blue Jays minor league system, where he displayed his power impressively but only occasionally. He came out of Pepperdine University in California, where a Blue Jays scout named Jon Lalonde fell in love with a powerful bat.
“You walk into the park some days and you just get that feeling, that ‘I’m seeing a major league hitter,’” Lalonde said Wednesday.