An interstate runs behind the baseball field at Strawberry Crest High in Dover, Fla., outside Tampa. It’s beyond the outfield fence, some 400 feet away from home plate. It’s not normal for high school hitters to deposit balls onto its surface.

Then again, Arjun Nimmala is not normal in the classic sense of the word. The 17-year-old shortstop is one of the highest-ranked baseball players in the country. When the MLB Draft starts on Sunday, he is expected to be one of the first high school players off the board.

So let’s go back in his senior season, to the day he put a charge into a ball that sailed through the air above his hometown field, over the outfield fence and onto that highway. His high school coach, Eric Beattie, said the game was tied at 3-3 when Nimmala came to the plate. There were two runners on base and Nimmala got a good pitch to hit. The ball was a goner.

“That’s probably the moment in a game that stands out more than any other time he’s had,” Beattie said. “He’s obviously performed very well on a lot of different occasions but that particular hit was pretty incredible and it was in a big moment against a team that was undefeated at the time. We went on to win the game and it was kind of a momentum changer.

“It was fun to watch. Even the coach we played against was saying how fun that was to watch.”

It was even more fun considering the type of player who hit the bomb. Nimmala, a right-handed hitter, isn’t a big-bodied slugger. He’s a 6-foot-1, 180-or-so-pound shortstop who has yet to fill out his frame. He batted .479 with six home runs and posted a .573 on-base percentage as a senior at Strawberry Crest. He shouldn’t hit with as much strength as he does. Yet there he was dumping a baseball onto a distant highway.

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