NC State baseball’s Tommy White has the look, the nickname and the game to back it up

TOMMY WHITE SAYS he has two types of swings. This is an important point when dissecting his torrid start to his NC State career, which included nine home runs in his first eight games.

The first is his “game swing.” It’s malleable. On his first swing of an at-bat, it’s pure muscle, attacking the center-field wall. With one strike, he’s thinking situationally, happy to hit to all fields. Check out his high school spray charts, and it’s a study in symmetry.

With two strikes, he gets wider — his dad, Tom Sr., compares it to Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell’s approach — just looking to put the ball in play. If most big league power hitters have embraced the swing-and-miss as the cost of doing business, White absolutely abhors strikeouts.

Each approach is some variation on the same “game swing,” aiming for clean, hard contact. He’s a power hitter who wants to hit for average, he said.

The second swing is his “home run derby swing.” That one is just for showing off.

All of that is to say that, when White hit those nine home runs, including three in his first game as a college player, he wasn’t swinging for power. That was just the normal game swing, and his dominant debut was something of a happy accident — good swings at the right time, and the ball just happened to fly out of the park. No showing off.

“I was just focused on getting a couple hits that first weekend,” White said. “I only had five home runs my entire senior year [of high school].”

Still, with Major League Baseball working through the final stages of a tumultuous lockout, college ball was the only game going, and White’s hot start, combined with a quirky image complete with dangling jewelry and a scraggly beard, instantly made him a cult hero. Within days, he had a classic nickname (Tommy Tanks), a merchandise line from Barstool Sports courtesy of an NIL deal, and a legion of fans who show up to home games with mullet wigs, fake beards, reflective sunglasses and gold chains.

But the thing White wants you…