MLB early‑season power burst
MLB feeds showed a burst of power: Shohei Ohtani homered on the first pitch he saw in a recent game. (x.com) Around the same stretch Jordan Walker hit his MLB‑leading seventh homer of the season and Jackson Merrill launched a reported 425‑foot bomb. ( )
Home runs are arriving early across Major League Baseball, with Shohei Ohtani, Jordan Walker and Jackson Merrill all going deep in a three-day burst ending April 12. (mlb.com, mlb.com, mlb.com) Ohtani opened the Los Angeles Dodgers’ game on April 12 by homering on the first pitch from Jack Leiter, one day after he led off with another first-inning homer against Texas. The Dodgers’ news page said it was the second straight day he began the first inning with a home run. (mlb.com) Walker hit his seventh homer of 2026 on April 12 against Boston, a 432-foot shot in his first plate appearance that gave him sole possession of the Major League lead. The St. Louis Cardinals said the 23-year-old became the fourth player in franchise history to reach seven homers in the club’s first 15 games. (mlb.com) Merrill’s blast on April 12 traveled 425 feet to right-center at Petco Park, according to Major League Baseball’s Statcast data on the highlight clip. The San Diego Padres outfielder hit it at 107.2 miles per hour off the bat on an 89.9 mile-per-hour four-seam fastball from Colorado’s Angel Bellozo. (mlb.com) The timing stands out because the season is barely two weeks old. By April 12, the Dodgers had already hit 21 home runs in 12 games, while the Cardinals had 13 in 12 games and the Padres had eight in 13 games, according to StatMuse’s team totals. (statmuse.com) Walker’s surge is the sharpest individual jump in this stretch. His sixth homer on April 11 matched the total he hit in 111 games and 396 plate appearances in 2025, and his seventh came one day later. (mlb.com, mlb.com) Ohtani’s power came after a quieter opening week by his standards. He did not hit his first homer of 2026 until April 3 in Washington, when his three-run shot helped start a five-homer Dodgers game against the Nationals. (mlb.com) The early leaderboard can still change quickly because most teams have played only 12 or 13 games. Baseball-Reference’s 2026 batting leaders page and ESPN’s stat leaders page both list league leaders that are updated during the opening weeks, when one multi-homer series can reorder the board. (baseball-reference.com, espn.com) What the first two weeks have shown is a cluster of different power profiles at once: Ohtani setting the tone at the top of the lineup, Walker turning hard contact into a daily run, and Merrill producing distance with fewer total homers. If that pace holds into late April, the home run race will stop looking like a blip and start looking like the season’s first real trend. (mlb.com, mlb.com, mlb.com)
