Leo De Vries rocks number 12. Naturally, he can't stop homering on the 12th!
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Baseball and magic numbers go hand in hand. But this run from Leo De Vries has nothing to do with clinching a playoff spot. Rather, it’s a bit of celestial happenstance that seems fitting for one of the game’s youngest rising stars.
The Athletics’ No. 1 prospect crushed his sixth homer of the year Friday night for Double-A Midland, a towering drive that logged a 44-degree launch angle per Momentum Bank Ballpark's Trackman device. The RockHounds went on to fall, 17-8, to the Corpus Christi Hooks.
But here’s where the fun with numbers begins. The roundtripper marked De Vries’ first homer in exactly a month, when he went deep for Midland on May 12. Home runs were coming much more flush during the season’s first month, including April 12, when he slugged his first two long balls of the year.
He’s done all of this wearing … you guessed it, the number 12.
Surely, that’s where this runaround with the 12s ends, right? Wrong! MLB’s No. 2 prospect also homered last Sept. 12, making it four consecutive Minor League months of game action in which he’s launched a homer on the 12th day of the calendar.
How will things go in July? Well, that will come with a caveat. As the third-youngest hitter at Double-A and one of the future faces of the game, De Vries could likely be tied up at the 2026 All-Star Futures Game in Philadelphia, which takes place July 12. The competition on the mound figures to be stiff, but the 19-year-old has history -- as odd as it is -- on his side.