The baseball rests in a large case propped in front of trophies and team pictures atop his dresser. The Wilson logo is scuffed from where Keenan Briggs’ bat made the impact that put his youth baseball career on a fast track.

This ball, the one shrined in his room at the Briggs’ home in Plano, wasn’t supposed to come for another few years. But there it is, the ball with more value than the other dozen he keeps in his room. Even the ball Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto tossed to him at a Reds game a few weeks ago is stashed away in a drawer out of sight.

The ball resting in the large case traveled over the fence. It was a full count in Keenan’s first at-bat for the Warren County South 10- and 11-year-old All-Star team in the District 1 Little League Tournament last week in Franklin.

It was Keenan’s first home run. And he swung it with one hand, the only one he has.

•••

You almost need a double take to notice that Keenan is playing without a left hand. He didn’t earn a spot on the Warren County South All-Star team out of pity. Far from it. He batted 4-for-9 (.444) with a home run, double and 4 RBIs in the district tournament.

The 11-year-old son of Crista and Kevin Briggs was born with a congenital upper limb difference, where the left arm stopped forming just past the elbow. Ultrasounds only picked up the right side of Keenan’s body, so it went unnoticed until after birth.

Kevin and Crista originally thought soccer would be his best route at excelling in athletics. Then Keenan picked up the sports where most thought you needed two hands – baseball and basketball – and showed everyone how it’s done with one.

“I’ve just adapted,” Keenan said. “I was born with one hand. I don’t know any different. I just adapted the only way I can do it.”

It hasn’t slowed him down a bit. If anything, he’s ahead of schedule.

He once hit five 3-pointers in a league basketball game. He’ll use the elbow only as a guide to set up his shot with his right hand.

On the diamond, his glove transition from catch to throw is virtually seamless. With hardly any effort, he catches a ball and shifts his glove to his left elbow to make a right-handed throw as quickly as any other fielder with both limbs.

To his Warren County South teammates, he’s just another one of the guys they’ve played Little League baseball with for years. The group went 5-0 in the district tournament, outscored teams 65-22 and will begin pool play in the state tournament against Belfrey on Saturday night in Corbin.

“They certainly see him as an inspiration when they start to get tired or when they don’t want to be out here, they see him out here and then it just picks them up to do that much better,” Warren County South 11U coach Joey Talley said. “They look up to him because they see him doing everything that they’re able to do, but he’s only doing it with one hand. … Just imagine what he could do if he had two.”

Even when Keenan hit the home run over left field at Jim Roberts Community Park in Franklin, players from the Bowling Green East team were congratulating him as he rounded the bases. Finding that right power to hit one over the fences was a feat Keenan thought would take a few more years of growth and development. Even his parents didn’t know he had that much power in his swing.

“I thought it would be a few years from now,” Keenan said. “I’ve always wanted to know what it felt like to run the bases. It felt amazing to jog instead of run.”

•••

Weekly hitting lessons with Todd Stinson have molded Keenan’s rise in confidence. He takes an hour-long lesson – 30 minutes hitting, 30 minutes pitching – at Total Fitness Connection once a week with Stinson and Jason Bartlett through the Doyle Baseball System.

Stinson was tasked with finding a way for Keenan to have the same effectiveness swinging with one hand that a normal hitter could generate.

“Probably the biggest challenge is developing power of some sort without jeopardizing the characteristics of the swing that need to happen,” Stinson said. “It’s a very unique approach.”

They tried two approaches: Keenan could use his right hand as the front part of his swing through a pulling motion or switch his right hand to the back end of his swing and use a throwing motion.

Stinson eventually found that Keenan could generate more speed and control the swing in a throwing motion so “at least he’ll be able to control the bat,” he said.

Kevin Briggs figured out a way to legally modify the bat with spacers so Keenan could have a knob grip a few inches choked up the bat – that way his right hand is spaced at the point where anyone else would place their top hand on the bat.

All Keenan has is that top hand so when he stands closer to the plate and swings, he generates quicker speed. At an early point in the lessons, Stinson was trying to figure out a way to use Keenan’s left elbow as a guide to help with the swing in the same sense that he uses it to help prop a basketball during his shot.

Then the obvious completely changed the training process moving forward.

“I racked my brain on how to use it, then I literally woke up one night and was like, ‘The kid doesn’t have a hand. Why am I trying to use it?’ ” Stinson said. “It was the Lord going, ‘Dude, I didn’t give him a hand, so what are you trying to do?’ It’s crazy and what it did for me is it allowed me to focus on what he did have.”

Since then, Keenan has ditched the left arm all together in his swing and stopped trying to use the hand that doesn’t exist in the first place.

Imagine Stinson’s reaction when his phone rang the evening of July 1 – the evening that was a few years early.

“I knew the kid had some pop,” Stinson said. “I knew that what we do as a systematic approach to that has a lot of unique possibilities and I’ve got smaller and younger people who hit the ball a long way because when they put the pieces together, they hit bigger than they are.

“Did I ever picture that? No.”

•••

Stinson’s wife was on the other end of the phone. She told him that she didn’t know what was happening, but Kevin Briggs had called her crying.

“I thought Keenan had hurt himself,” Stinson said.

Just before he could make the call, Kevin had already sent Todd a message with a video attached. Crista was the videographer from the right side of the plate behind the fence. There’s Keenan, right hand choked up facing a 3-2 count in his first at-bat in the district tournament.

Swing. See ya.

“There was no doubt as soon as it was hit,” said Talley, who watched from the team’s third base dugout.

Crista went berserk. Keenan’s grandparents, cousins, aunt, uncle and even travel ball coaches – who coached several Little Leaguers on both teams – were there to witness the homer.

Stinson watched it on his phone and hit his knees.

“I said, ‘Guys, KB, Little Hammer, just hit the ball out of the park. He hit the ball over the fence,’ ” Stinson recalls. “It went crazy inside TFC. It’s just been a fun ride.”

The spotlight the past two weeks has been bigger than Keenan ever expected it to be. His parents never imagined the video would go viral. Google search his name and the first results tell the story.

Instagram accounts for Bleacher Report, Sports Illustrated, Barstool Sports and others have combined for over one million views over the past week.

Even as the family sits at the dining room table Wednesday night, Kevin shares another media outlet with the home run kid.

“Keenan, you’re officially on ESPN,” Kevin says while scrolling through Facebook.

Keenan said he sort of likes the attention for now, but he’s more excited about bunking in a hotel room for several nights in Corbin at the Kentucky Little League State Tournament this weekend. If it weren’t for state Little League, Keenan would be in Illinois at the NubAbility sports camp, a camp that teaches sports to children missing limbs.

Keenan would rather share the spotlight at the state tournament with his teammates anyway. This way, he’s just another one of the guys playing baseball, whether it’s with two hands or one.

“I bet they forget sometimes (about the one hand),” Keenan said. “I like it in a way, but I never thought it would’ve gotten this big.”{&end}