Feature Story: Kyle Vinci, Power Broker
May 17, 2023 | Baseball
The question has barely traveled the distance it takes to reach Scott Bradley’s ears when the longtime Princeton baseball coach swats it away.
He’s just said that he could throw 30 batting practice pitches to Kyle Vinci, his record-setting junior first baseman, and that Vinci could deposit 20 of them onto Finney Field, beyond the leftfield fence at Clarke Field.
That statement has an obvious follow up question. Can’t a lot of guys do that? Don’t a lot of guys have power?
Bradley’s response is immediate, definitive and most assuredly unassailable.
“Not that kind of power,” he says. “Not his kind of power. His power is at a different level.”
The number seem to bear that out. As Bradley and the Tigers head into the first four-team double elimination Ivy League tournament this weekend at Penn (Princeton, the third seed, plays second-seeded Harvard in Game 1 Friday at 11 am, followed by top-seeded Penn and fourth-seeded Columbia), Vinci has already set the Ivy League record for home runs in a season, having already smacked 20 of them, one more than former Major Leaguer Gene Larkin did in 1984 at Columbia.
So does the eye test.
If you’ve never seen Vinci up close, he looks like he was created in a lab, or a weight room, in an experiment to find the perfect baseball body. He stands 6-3 and weighs 230 pounds, and it seems like a disproportionate amount of those pounds are in his forearms and biceps.
“We were talking about it the other day,” says Bradley. “It’s really amazing when you think of the guys we’ve had in the past, for one of them to hit 10 or 11 or 12 was a big deal. It’s not easy at our park. To hit 20? It’s almost mind-boggling.”
Before this season, no Princeton player had ever hit more than 13 in a season (Michael Ciminiello in 1996), and only five had ever reached double figures. For that matter, only six Princeton players had ever reached 20 for an entire career, and the career record is 26, set by Matt Evans from 1996-99. In the Ivy League this season, only three other players reached double figures and only one had more than 11 (Penn’s Wyatt Henseler, who had 16).
Vinci started his season with two home runs on Opening Day at Georgia, and he finished that four-game series with three. He hit two against Seton Hall and Rutgers, as well as against Cornell in the league.
He also led the league in RBIs with 57 and was second in slugging percentage, .001 behind the leader. His OPS was .999, sixth best in the league. Led by Vinci, Princeton destroyed the program record for home runs in a season with 58; the old record was 43 and had stood for 27 years.
So what’s it like to crush one, to blast one over the fence?
“It’s a feeling I can’t explain,” Vinci says. “When you get it, and you know you get it … it’s amazing.”
It’s always been like that for him.
Like most kids, Vinci began playing baseball when he was 6. When he was 12, he hit his first home run over a fence, at a Little League game in Mendham, about an hour north of Princeton.
“I hit it to centerfield,” he remembers. “Before that, my father had always told me not to take my time around the bases when I hit one, so I sprinted the entire way around. It was such a great feeling. I was speechless.”
Vinci played a little basketball and soccer in addition to baseball when he was younger. He decided to attend the Delbarton School, a powerhouse private school in every way, and he thought playing football as a freshman would be a good way to make some new friends. After that season, during which he played on the offensive and defensive lines, he found at his new school, as he says, “40 guys who had gone through the summer with me.”
There’d be a few others who would go through the spring with him. Delbarton is one of the top academic schools in New Jersey, and it is also equally strong athletically. The rosters of many sports at Princeton, and throughout the Ivy League for that matter, are dotted with Delbarton grads.
Those are not the only rosters where the school is featured. One, for instance, is in the Texas League, where Jack Leiter, a Delbarton teammate of Vinci’s, is in his second professional season. Leiter, the son of former Major League pitcher Al Leiter, was the No. 2 overall selection in the 2021 MLB Draft out of Vanderbilt. Through one-plus Minor League seasons, Jack Leiter has struck out 153 in 123.2 innings.
Another former Vinci teammate at Delbarton? That would be Anthony Volpe, who is currently a rookie shortstop with the New York Yankees. Only 22, Volpe has already become beloved by Yankees fans and is already a New York sports icon. It wasn’t that long ago that he was just a high school teammate and friend.
“I met them on our spring training trip freshman year,” Vinci says. “I got taken on the trip to Florida, and that’s where I got to know them. Jack and Anthony, those are two of the nicest guys you could ever be around. I got to play with them at the end of that year. They treated me like I was part of the team, the family and the brotherhood. They also knew how to play the right way. They knew the right way to treat teammates, to treat coaches.”
Could he have envisioned that Volpe would make the leap he did, from Delbarton to Yankee Stadium, so seamlessly?
“At the time? No,” Vinci says. “I was just watching him grow as a player and that was really impressive. He was always the best player on the field. You could see over the three years I got to play with him. His arm strength increased. His bat to ball increased. His power increased. Everything came together for him at the right time. It’s awesome to see what he’s doing today.”
With that amount of talent, it’s not shocking that Vinci was part of one New Jersey Non-Public A state championship team and one runner-up. His shot at another title run his senior year, even without Volpe and Leiter, barely got off the ground.
“Basically, life is about hard work and dedication, learning not to give up,” he says. “Delbarton’s school motto is ‘Cut Down, Grow Back Stronger.’ Everybody lived by that. You’re going to have your struggles on the classroom and the field. Work hard, and you can come back from anything.
As it turns out, he’s had to deal with being cut down and with growing back stronger. He’s come through both well.
Delbarton was back in Florida for a spring training trip in March of 2020, and, well, you know what happened next. Covid.
“Our coach brought us together and said we were going to have to spend two weeks apart,” Vinci says. “Then two weeks kept growing. Finally it was all shut down. We never got back together. It was very upsetting.”
By that point, Bradley had found Vinci and was ready to plug him into his lineup.
“He does things people can’t teach,” Bradley says. “He has a lot of swing and miss, but it’s never one thing. Some teams might throw him some breaking balls and he might chase one, but then they throw another one and he hits it out. He makes really good adjustments. You throw him a fastball up and he misses, and then you throw another one up and he hits it over the scoreboard. He has really good instincts as a hitter. He recognizes pitches after he sees them, and he learns.”
Because of the pandemic, Vinci had to do his freshman fall online. He was on campus for the second semester, when the team was able to practice but not play any games.
“He showed flashes during our Covid development program of being able to pack a punch with big-time power,” Bradley says. “He was there every day, doing what he could to get better.”
After missing pretty much two full spring seasons, Vinci finally got to play in the summer of 2021. He was then ready to come back and play for real for Princeton in the spring of 2022, which turned out to be a tough year all around for Princeton baseball.
For one thing, there was very little in the way of game experience. For another, there were a lot of injuries. One of the worst was Vinci’s, who started to experience arm pain early in the year. It turned out to be bone chips in his elbow and problems with his bicep. His first Princeton season would end with 23 at-bats and one home run.
“Getting hurt was really strange,” he says. “I had been hurt before, but it had always been minor. I’d always come back quickly. This was much different. I couldn’t even move my arm.”
It would be three months before he could even start to rehab and then another two months before he was healthy enough to swing a bat and throw a ball.
“It made me realize who much I missed playing during my recovery,” he says. “I just wanted to get back on the field and keep playing with my teammates.”
With all of the injuries, Princeton struggled to a 3-18 Ivy League record, which left the team in eighth place. The overall record was 7-33.
“We never wanted to feel like that again,” Vinci says. “It was embarrassing to say the least. We have sort of the same team this year as last year, so we just got back to work. We tried to put our best foot forward. When we passed the seven-win mark, we were like, ‘wow, this is how many we had all of last year.’ It felt good to be on the right side again.”
The 2022 season was also the last time that the league would decide its NCAA tournament representative with a best-of-three playoff between the two top teams, this after the previous way, with two divisions and a best-of-three between the two winners.
“Over the summer, Coach Bradley got us all on a Zoom,” Vinci says. “He told us they were changing the format to a four-team tournament. Instead of being super stressed about having to get into the top two, he said we had to be better than 50 percent of the league. We knew that was something we could do.”
The 2023 Tigers got to the seven-win mark with a week to spare in March. When the Ivy season started, Princeton zoomed out to a 4-2 record after the first two weekend series and then spent the entire season chasing the regular season title before finishing in third, comfortably in the tournament.
A Near-Eastern studies major who can speak Arabic, Vinci is hoping for a shot at pro baseball after graduation next year. His Delbarton experience had him well-prepared for Princeton, on and off the field.
Next up, though, is the tournament this weekend. The prize at the end is a trip to the NCAA tournament. It would be the cap on what has already been a remarkable turnaround season for Princeton.
This weekend gives Vinci a chance to add to his already historic season.
“I didn't anticipate breaking any records,” Vinci says. “Coach Bradley told me wanted me in the middle of the lineup when he was recruiting me. He told me he thought I could hit some balls into the trees.”
Perhaps those trees are proverbial. The fences that he has ripped baseballs over all season are very real.
There is a majesty to the home run, and nobody in the Ivy League has ever done it quite like Vinci has this year.
— by Jerry Price
