OMAHA, Neb. — The video clip is mesmerizing.

Here he is, this mountain of a man readying to step back into the box to hit. He appears meditative, breathing deeply and staring directly at his silver metal bat. The count is 2-and-2, and he’s pinwheeling his bat toward the pitcher, while the catcher is sliding to the outer half of the plate. A breaking ball is coming, and this man seems to recognize it milliseconds into the ball’s flight.

His body reacts accordingly, his front foot landing, his hips swiveling, his eyes locked on the ball, which shoots into the sky like a firework. This is not so much a home run (in a deciding Super Regional game on ESPN, no less) as it is yet another statement: You pitch to Sonny DiChiara, you pay the price.

High and deep! 💣@SonnyDichiara slugs his 22nd to get us started!

💻 https://t.co/uSHvwQBvto pic.twitter.com/kuewOkoGLw

— Auburn Baseball (@AuburnBaseball) June 14, 2022

If you flip on the College World Series this weekend, your eyes will assuredly fixate on DiChiara. He’s a 6-foot-1, 263-pound first baseman for the Auburn Tigers with the nicknames “Thicc King” and “Sonny Di.” The Athletic’s Keith Law recently ranked him as the No. 49 prospect ahead of the 2022 MLB Draft.

His innate ability to hit, evidenced by this tank of a home run in the most important of spots, explains so much of why his name has and will continue to garner attention over these next few days, weeks and months in baseball circles. But in many ways, DiChiara’s athletic ability unlocks a window into a character that propelled one opposing SEC baseball coach to say recently: “Hell, I’d like to hang out with that guy.”

DiChiara’s joy originates from a path that included multiple surgeries, as well as a perspective gained from a close friend who was paralyzed while playing a sport. DiChiara’s love of the game derives from a father who shows up quietly to games throughout their hometown of Birmingham, Ala., simply to watch the next quick-twitch superstar who has earned everything they’ve been awarded.

Long before Sonny DiChiara became an All-American, batting .392 in 58 games for the Tigers, before he transferred to Auburn from Samford, before he even arrived at baseball tryouts as a freshman at Hoover High School, DiChiara’s left arm twitched.

“It wasn’t painful,” Mike DiChiara, Sonny’s father, said recently. “But it was twitchy.”

This was July 2012, and the family could not uncover the reason for the twitches, so they wound up in a doctor’s office at UAB Hospital, visiting a neurologist. DiChiara, then a young teenager, found himself lying on his back as an MRI machine scanned his body.

The report showed what is called a “Chiari malformation,” or an issue at the back of the skull that bulges through and applies pressure to the top of the spinal cord. Doctors explained the discovery to the family and added that they would have to operate to address both the present issues and those that could develop later.

“That was pretty scary,” Mike said. “The first time your kid goes into surgery is pretty traumatic.”

As Sonny has explained, doctors shaved the top of his skull, to relieve pressure.

“I got to the point where, if the brain fluid had grown bigger, I could’ve had paralysis,” Sonny said in a conversation with Samford Athletics. “I could’ve had migraines that were incurable. I’m just thankful that I found it in that MRI in 2012.”

By this point, DiChiara had grown to love baseball, the same way his father had as a youth in Birmingham. Mike was a catcher at UAB in 1986 before transferring to Alabama. “I had a little bit of power, too,” Mike said, laughing. “But not like Sonny.”

Mike recalled a 5-year-old Sonny, bigger than most of the other kids who had come to play, hitting dingers off of a tee. Mike also recalled kids hitting the ball, running to first, and then stopping before they got there.

“Because Sonny was playing there,” Mike said, “and he was bigger than them.”

Sonny also pitched from a sidearm slot, and as he arrived at tryouts his freshman year at Hoover, coach Adam Moseley thought of him primarily as a pitcher. That year, Sonny sat in the dugout for varsity games as a freshman, which is a rarity at Hoover. In the playoffs, against rival Vestavia Hills, Moseley reached a point at which he was going to use Sonny out of the bullpen.

The team wound up not needing his services, but Sonny continued to pitch. In the summer of 2016, Sonny stood on the mound at Rickwood Field, a rickety ballpark built in 1910 for the Birmingham Barons. Rain fell, and after one pitch, Sonny slipped and felt his back crack in multiple places. The injury sidelined him for his entire sophomore year. He returned to the mound in 2017, and in a tournament in Georgia at LakePoint, he was throwing 90 mph.

“He was up on the mound and doing good,” Mike recalled.

After one pitch, though, Sonny stepped off the rubber and flexed his arm. He tried to throw a few more pitches, but the velocity dipped. Sonny, who knew he’d returned from the back injury too quickly but wanted to play too badly, removed himself from the game.

A trip to Dr. Jeffrey Dugas in Birmingham showed a torn ulnar collateral ligament. Dugas performed Tommy John surgery, which ended Sonny’s junior season. He returned for his senior season, hoping for nothing more than health, and fortunately for Hoover, he was able to remain on the field.

“He pitched for us in the state playoffs that year,” Moseley recalled. “And we don’t win it without him pitching some. He’s a heck of a player, man.”

Casey Dunn, a fixture in the Birmingham baseball sphere who coached Samford from 2005-21, has known Sonny DiChiara for more than a decade. Dunn’s cousin was a close friend of Sonny’s. They traveled and played summer ball together. Some days in the humid Alabama summer, Dunn would drive to watch them play.

And his observation was always the same: Sonny was consistently the best hitter.

“He’s been that guy where, regardless of the team, you look up at the end of the day and he’s the best,” Dunn said.

Mike DiChiara would not accept credit for this.

“You’d throw that to him in the backyard when he was 3 years old, and he could really swing it then,” Mike said. “Kids were looking at him, like, ‘Daddy, I want to do that.’ He’s always had a pretty good swing. That’s natural. Because what can you teach a 3-year-old?”

Yet Mike knows being a successful hitter goes beyond a swing. Asked what he thinks makes his son so dangerous, Mike recalled a vision test. One summer at LakePoint during a tournament, players participated in a test to see how many pitches they could recognize. The winner won a $250 gift certificate to a store called Better Baseball.

The challenge began with each boy peering into a device. Quickly, the device would flash a brief picture of a baseball. The young boys were tasked with guessing the pitch: fastball, curveball, changeup, etc. Sonny, according to Mike, guessed 41 out of 50 correct.

“Which was the best they’d ever seen,” Mike said. “The next closest was, like, 20. That’s when I knew something was great about his vision. He just sees it better than most.”

Dunn saw this, especially as Sonny aged and led Hoover to a state championship as a senior, which was why he offered him a scholarship at Samford. Dunn initially thought DiChiara could pitch and hit, but back troubles during DiChiara’s freshman year eliminated that thought.

“He was such a good hitter,” Dunn said, “where pitching wasn’t worth it. It was just, ‘Let’s just let him bang some baseballs.’”

The season was not without struggles, though. Slumps seek all hitters, no matter their cognitive ability. At midnight one evening that season, Sonny called his father.

“What are you doing?” Sonny asked.

“What do you think I’m doing?” Mike responded. “It’s midnight.”

Sonny wanted him to drive to the facility to throw to him.

He went and threw to his son for nearly two hours until almost two in the morning.

“My arm fell off,” Mike said, “and that’s the last time I threw to him.”

“I never really critique him,” Mike said. “He knows when he does something wrong. He can feel it. If you have a slight movement, you can swing and miss.”

Sonny did not swing and miss much the rest of his freshman season. He belted 21 home runs, which was the most by a freshman in the school’s history. He batted .293. He drove in 55 runs. His production earned first-team All-SoCon honors. Baseball America also named him a freshman All-American.

Present in Dunn’s mind, even to this day, is a moment against Western Carolina in the conference tournament. It was the bottom of the 10th. The game was tied 4-4. DiChiara crouched into his stance within the batter’s box. The count was 3-1, and again, here’s a mesmerizing video clip. Sonny uncorks on a fastball so quickly you wonder if there are pistons firing within his body. The ball leaps from the bat and into orbit, flying over the fence in left field. His arm floats in into the air. As he rounds the bases, tossing his helmet into the sky as he nears home, teammates excitedly await his arrival.

As coaches prepare for each series in college baseball, they tend to pinpoint opposing players they do not want to pitch to. Sonny DiChiara became one of them.

“We saw the numbers,” said Karl Nonemaker, an assistant at Auburn.

In 2020, DiChiara batted .328 in 15 games. Samford was supposed to face Auburn that year, but the COVID-19 pandemic ended the season. In 2021, DiChiara hit 18 more homers and batted .273. Samford faced Auburn twice, and DiChiara went 1-for-7.

“We were able to get out unscathed,” Nonemaker said.

Still, they knew how talented DiChiara was, and when Dunn decided to leave Samford for UAB at the end of last season, and DiChiara entered the transfer portal, Auburn leaped at the idea of adding him.

Auburn coaches asked players familiar with DiChiara about the type of person he is, and that was not a difficult task because, as Dunn put it, “Sonny was the guy when he was young who played with everybody in the Southeast. If his normal team wasn’t playing, and somebody called because they wanted to pick him up for a tournament, Sonny and Mike would go. Any time we would be playing, and Sonny would talk to somebody, I’d say, ‘Sonny, I guess you played with him at some point growing up?’ He would always say, ‘Oh, yes sir, yes sir, we played together.’ And it’s like, you literally played with everybody.”

Auburn infielder Garrett Farquhar was a teammate of DiChiara’s at Hoover. Farquhar knew that during the COVID-19 pandemic DiChiara traveled with a youth team and caught bullpens — that’s how much he loves the game. Farquhar also knew how close DiChiara was with Ben Abercrombie, a former Hoover safety who attended Harvard and suffered a severe cervical spinal-cord injury that left him paralyzed.

Farquhar relayed these facts to the Auburn coaching staff, and they were sold. According to Nonemaker, DiChiara became the last position player addition to this Auburn club.

“A really good friend and coach used to say the last player you add can be one of the most important ones,” Nonemaker said. “That might be an understatement here.”

The coaching staff knew DiChiara would add power to their lineup, but external questions existed about his ability to consistently hit SEC pitching.

“I knew he could do it,” Mike said. “He knew he could do it. He just had to be in the place to show he could do it.”

Auburn scrimmaged about 25 times in the fall, and quickly Sonny showed what he was capable of. The team began its season in Arlington, Texas, at Globe Life Field. Against Oklahoma, DiChiara went 2-for-4. Against Texas Tech, DiChiara went 1-for-3 with a walk. Against Kansas State, he went 2-for-2 with another walk.

“One of the things that stood out is, this guy is a good hitter,” Nonemaker said. “Not just a good power hitter.”

Speaking recently over the phone, Nonemaker had difficulty pinpointing favorite moments because there have been so many. He referenced DiChiara’s vision but dug deeper, noting the way DiChiara’s brain sees the game. Nonemaker said DiChiara notices patterns. DiChiara’s body, Nonemaker added, fires inconceivably fast.

Each of these elements contributes to a 1.357 OPS. His average exit velocity (92.9 mph) is better than MLB average (88.4 mph). So is his walk rate (20.7 percent), his chase rate (14.8 percent), his hard-hit rate (64 percent) and his barrel percentage (31.4 percent).

“Like, when you see numbers like that,” Nonemaker said, “Believe me, it is not a fluke. There is a layered sophistication to how he goes about his business.”

Comparing prospects is fraught with issues, most notably the elimination of the fact that each human is shaped by wholeheartedly different experiences, but DiChiara brings to mind a conversation that occurred almost 15 years ago, relating to Billy Butler, who would spend 10 seasons in the big leagues.

Deric Ladnier, now a special assistant with the Arizona Diamondbacks, was once asked by another staffer who he felt the best athlete on the Kansas City Royals’ major-league roster was.

“Dude, what are you talking about?” the staffer responded.

“In the batter’s box,” Ladnier said, “he is the most athletic guy we have. Posture. Hand-eye coordination. He has all of the things great hitters have.”

In recent conversations with pro scouts asking about DiChiara, Moseley offers a similar thought.

“He just hits,” Moseley says. “Hitters can hit, man.”

Mike DiChiara, who cuts grass for a living, broke away from the job one recent afternoon to talk about his son’s growing popularity and Auburn’s climb to the College World Series. He discussed his son’s lifelong ability to hit. He detailed the Chiari malformation that scared him and his wife, Lara, who is an English teacher. And he applauded his son’s handling of the pressures of competition and national attention.

“I don’t know where that comes from,” Mike said. “I’m a hit ‘a golf ball in the woods and throw my club’ type of person. People are sitting there yelling at him. Dogging him. I’m having to stay under my three beer limit so I don’t have to beat somebody up.

“He just rolls right through it. Just laughs it off.”

To this day, Mike continuously shows up to high school games by himself. He loves baseball that much. Asked why, he referenced his college teammates at Alabama, who these days are texting him about Sonny and, yes, rooting for Auburn.

They’ll all be watching Saturday night as the team faces Ole Miss to begin the College World Series. They’ll be watching and, yes, rooting for the bitter rival.

That’s how likable Sonny DiChiara is, how proud those who know him and his family are of the way he plays the game and what he stands for.

“I’m an Auburn fan now,” Mike admitted. “War Eagle.”

(Photo: Amanda Loman / Associated Press)