Baseball’s hottest prospect makes Mike Bryant the proudest of papas

There was a man on base in the bottom of the third inning Saturday. The sun was beating down on the backs of necks and the tops of ears at Cashman Field, turning them pink, when there was a loud crack of the bat.

The baseball, now a tiny speck, sailed toward the right-field wall on a long and high arc. You could tell it was easily going to clear the fence.

In Section 15 just to the first-base side of home plate, a blue-eyed man wearing an Iowa Cubs ballcap and a shirt colored Cubbie blue jumped to his feet and broke into the widest of grins.

If Mike Bryant had seen this once, he had seen it a hundred times. Or a thousand, if you go back to Little League and Wiffle Ball in the backyard and whatever: The baseball sailing toward the outfield fence on a long and high arc, easily clearing it, his son Kris breaking into a home run trot.

But this was different.

For starters, Kris was wearing the strange number of 76 on the back of his jersey. And this was against the Oakland A’s, in a major league ballgame, or at least a major league exhibition game, in a ballpark jammed to capacity — a ballpark in which Kris probably dreamed of playing when he was a little slugger, though the dream of hitting a long home run at Cashman Field in front of hometown fans seems a bit on the modest side now.

Mike Bryant had played pro baseball, too; he had made it as far as Double A for his hometown Red Sox. So it probably was preordained that Kris would play baseball. There is a batting cage in back of the Bryant home. There are dozens of baseball bats on the walls, and a couple of guitars.

Mike Bryant had played the guitar. He was in a band once; they played Southern-style rock music, though Mike Bryant grew up near Boston.

He says he would have been just as proud had Kris picked up a guitar instead of one of those baseball bats at an early age.

At least that’s what Mike Bryant says.

But then there was the crack of the bat, and then Kris was trotting around the bases in an unassuming way. And then a lot of people in Section 15 were jumping up and down, and a lot of people in the adjoining sections were offering to buy Kris Bryant’s old man a $7 beer, though Mike Bryant doesn’t drink beer anymore, or at least not a lot of it.

So, yeah, Kris Bryant, the hottest prospect in the Cubs’ organization — the hottest prospect in all of baseball, really — had just made Mike Bryant the proudest of papas.

“Kid just gets it … !” he wrote in a text after Kris’ home run ball sailed over the wall in right-center field.

“So what did I think?”

Mike Bryant was now speaking with a sports writer who had carved his way from the right-field foul pole to Section 15, elbowing aside the sardines on the concourse who were waiting in line for another beer or to use the restroom.

“You know, he’s always hitting it in the air, and I knew when he hit it in the air and he hit it hard, it had about a 99 percent chance of going out of the park,” Mike Bryant said. “So that’s pretty much what I was thinking.”

And then people in Section 15, a lot of Bryants and a lot of Bryants by marriage, started jumping up and down.

“The whole section did. We got really mental over here,” Mike Bryant said.

The mentalness dovetailed into conversations about unrealistic expectations of seeing Kris hit the ball in a long, high arc virtually every time he comes to the plate, and of once taking batting practice with Jim Rice during spring training in Winter Haven, Fla., and of Mike Bryant telling the Red Sox slugger how much he admired his professionalism.

And how, when he was growing up, he expected Jim Ed, which was what the other ballplayers called Jim Rice, to hit a home run almost every time he stepped to the plate. Although that was unrealistic.

This is what Mike Bryant said after his son, Kris, hit a home run in the bottom of the third inning at Cashman Field on Saturday.

And then in the bottom of the sixth, when Kris Bryant came to bat a second time, he hit another one.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.