Twins announcers could only laugh after Byron Buxton's 479-foot homer

All home runs are worth celebrating. Of course, it's also true that not all home runs are created equal. You'll see a lot of long balls over the course of a 162-game MLB season, but you'll see hardly any as majestic as the moonshot that Minnesota Twins outfielder Byron Buxton deposited way up into the center-field bleachers at Target Field against the Texas Rangers on Wednesday night.

The ball left Buxton's bat at an eye-watering 111 mph, and wound up traveling an estimated 479 feet. But really, numbers don't do this justice. This thing flew so far that the Twins broadcast had a hard time even keeping it in the camera frame — and afterwards, all announcers Cory Provus and Justin Morneau could do was start laughing as Buxton rounded the bases. One look at the video and you'll see why.

I mean, what else are you supposed to do with that? There's no analysis needed, beyond "strong man hit ball far"; home runs are the universal language, and Buxton's bomb spoke volumes.

Really, though, you could argue they shouldn't have been surprised. After all, they've watched Buxton every day for years now; they know as well as anyone what he's capable of on a baseball field — that is, when he's healthy enough to be on one. That's long been the box that Buxton has been unable to check, but this year [knocks furiously on wood] he's begun to flip the script to jaw-dropping results.

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We might finally be getting the healthy Buxton season we've dreamed of

Buxton has always oozed talent. He was taken No. 2 overall back in the 2012 MLB Draft out of Georgia's Appling County High School, and he established himself as arguably the best prospect in the entire sport based on his five-tool potential in the Minor Leagues. Not only was he one of the fastest men in baseball, but he also brought that speed into the outfield, all while doing serious damage at the plate.

It looked for all the world like that profile would translate to stardom at the MLB level. But his big-league career seemed to short-circuit every time he tried to get it off the ground: It took a few years for Buxton to find his footing at the plate, and then once he did, he couldn't stay healthy long enough to make it matter.

He's played more than 102 games in a season exactly one time in over a decade in the Majors. There were spurts of superstardom in there; he hit a combined 47 homers and stole 15 bases across 153 games spread between 2021 and 2022. Just when it looked like he was about to reach escape velocity, though, something would pop up, from a knee to a shoulder to seemingly everything in between.

Until this year, that is. The Twins put Buxton back in center field, no longer hiding him as a DH in a vain attempt to keep him in the lineup. And after a rare healthy offseason, he's managed to stay that way once the season began, appearing in 51 of his team's first 66 games while requiring just one brief IL stint back in April. The results speak for themselves, as they always have: Wednesday's blast was his 11th on the year, part of a three-hit attack that will up his already lofty .817 OPS. Oh, and he also stole his 11th bag for good measure.

This is the player we were promised all those years ago, the one we swore we'd tell our kids about. It's been a long and winding road to get here, and it could all go up in smoke with one bad break over a long summer. Right now, though, Buxton is giving us a spectacular season, the kind we always knew he had in him. Let's enjoy it while it lasts.