Braves No. 12 prospect extends homer streak with THREE MORE at Single-A
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Good things come in threes, at least for Conor Essenburg in his debut season.
Not only did the Braves' No. 12 prospect go deep for the third straight game, he slugged three home runs in Single-A Augusta's 8-5 win over Columbia on Tuesday at SRP Park.
The 2025 fifth-round pick has been showing off his right-handed power all season. He leads Braves Minor Leaguers with a .522 slugging percentage and .932 OPS and ranks fifth with 14 homers, despite missing six weeks on the injured list in April and May due to a reported oblique issue.
And much of that power has come in bunches. Half Essenburg's homers have come in three different games, as he collected his first pro multihomer game on May 31 and did so again less than two weeks later.
The 19-year-old was a two-way prospect in high school, with his fastball sitting in the low-90s as a left-handed pitcher, but his strength and bat speed from the right side of the plate left his future on offense. The Braves were intrigued enough to sign him away from his Kentucky commitment for $1.2 million, which was nearly triple the slot value for the 157th overall pick.
Prospects often take a leap when they focus solely on one side of the ball, and his burgeoning raw power is apparent, as he put on display Tuesday.
Essenburg battled in his first plate appearance, fouling off five balls before turning on an up-and-in fastball from righty Ryan McDonagh (Royals) and crushing it off the scoreboard in left. He was quicker to find a pitch he could hammer the next time up, this time rocketing another inside heater from the starter off the fifth story of the apartment building beyond the left field fence.
To really give an illustration of the 6-foot-2 right fielder's raw power, the Illinois native appeared to mishit a low pitch from lefty Moises Amezquita in the eighth inning, but it still cleared the right-center wall to set a new roundtripper single-game high.
Essenburg's approach could still use refinement, as he's striking out at a 32.9 percent clip and has been especially vulnerable to changeups. But when he's clicking, he's shown to be one of the most exciting power prospects in Atlanta's system.