The Potential Highest Home Run On Record

This is a weird home run, that Yoenis Cespedes hit off Trevor Bauer Monday night:

It’s weird for a few reasons. The pitch was down. Cespedes hit it to the other side of center field. It was a low rocket, and the majority of these low-rocket dingers tend to hug the lines. Pretty good demonstration of Cespedes’ strength, or bat speed, if you think of those as different things. Things that are weird make me curious. Alas, I found a recent home run that was even weirder. It happened just this past weekend.

I hear you guys. You’re sick of reading about the Red Sox. You’re sick of reading about Hanley Ramirez. It’s totally understandable, but let me assure you — this isn’t being written because it’s about Hanley Ramirez on the Red Sox. That’s a coincidence. This would’ve been written about, I don’t know, Shin-Soo Choo on the Rangers, if that had been what’d happened. But there was a weird home run, and Hanley Ramirez hit it, and, dammit, it’s going to get words.

Video of the home run in question, slugged against a Chris Young fastball:

Maybe nothing really stands out to you. It’s not an immediately remarkable home run, aside from it just having been a home run, off a home-runnable pitch. It’s obvious that the ball hung up for a while. This is the real key of it. That ball took a while to come down. Which means it achieved an awfully high height. An awfully high height.

You’re familiar with the ESPN Home Run Tracker. The ESPN Home Run Tracker isn’t based on Statcast data, but it matches up fairly well with what’s available, and it stretches all the way back to 2006. For each home run, the tracker calculates an estimated apex. The site’s definition:

Apex – the highest point reached by the ball in flight above field level, in feet.

Simple concept. Every home run is hit on an arc. The apex is the highest point on the arc. It isn’t measured directly, but there are math-y formulas to figure it out. I’m not smart enough, but somebody is. According to the site, Hanley’s home run off Young reached an apex of 180 feet above the playing field.

Problem: we don’t know what that means. Not by itself. So, how about some useful context? This year, the average apex for the average home run is 89 feet above the playing field. In other words, half of the Hanley homer apex. The second-highest apex this season: 154 feet, done three times. That’s a difference of 26 feet. That’s a big difference!

Which makes you wonder about any data errors. But while we’re here, why not examine the archives? The ESPN Home Run Tracker goes back to the start of 2006. Here are the highest home runs on record:

Playoffs, of course, are included. Doesn’t matter. On the site, there are four home runs with an apex of at least 170 feet. There’s one with an apex of at least 180 feet. It was just hit a few days ago. I love to talk about extraordinary events. This seems like it was absolutely an extraordinary event, even if it only seems extraordinary upon deeper analysis.

I mentioned the possibility of data errors. Maybe the ESPN Home Run Tracker just got something wrong. It calculated a speed off the bat of 111 miles per hour, and a launch angle of about 40 degrees. Well, would you look at that? Gameday’s input, based on Statcast:

Perfect agreement on speed off the bat. And according to Statcast, the ball left the bat at an even more extreme angle. Trying a third route, here’s manual confirmation.

You can just see the ball, as a blur, which means it’s possible to measure the launch angle with just a few coordinates (or a protractor on your screen). Based on this replay, the launch angle was…44.7 degrees. So, 45 degrees. So, what Statcast said. Everything’s making sense, and while there’s no confirmation of the calculated apex, the inputs aren’t wrong. Meaning this is less likely to be a mistake.

For a good idea of how unusual this was, here are all 2015 home runs, with launch angle and batted-ball speed. Hanley’s home run is clearly marked, and note that this doesn’t use the Statcast launch angle. Trying to be consistent.

That yellow dot doesn’t want to play with those gray dots. It’s not even trying to fit in. Kind of like Hanley Ramirez himself! There are some other weird home runs, but none quite like this one. By apex, the second-highest homer this year is 3.2 standard deviations from the mean. Hanley’s home run comes in at 4.5. It’s crazy enough you don’t want to completely write off the possibility of a calculation error, but we know the angle and we know the speed. Calculating the apex ought to be the easy part.

Side view:

You can see how aggressively Hanley loads. You get a sense of the uppercut, by watching Hanley’s back as he swings through the baseball. The pitch he hit wasn’t that high, but against Chris Young, it makes sense to prepare yourself for a pitch up. Hanley might’ve already been thinking about finishing his swing high. With the pitch in the middle of the zone, vertically, that might’ve led to his swing path. He obviously didn’t sacrifice anything in the way of bat speed or force.

Which, hey, that’s good news for Hanley Ramirez. From Baseball Savant, his average batted-ball speeds by week:

He was trying to recover from a shoulder injury. Before getting hurt, his average exit velocity was 98 miles per hour. Over the next month, it dropped to 87. This past week, he’s at 97. Maybe this is Hanley getting right. Or maybe this is just a hot week. I don’t know. This is more about the homer than the hitter, and the homer was apparently insane.

Noted Royals broadcaster Rex Hudler during a replay:

This ball was hit as high as it was long.

It wasn’t, exactly. Really wasn’t close, if you want to be literal about it. But, if you want to be literal about it, rare is the home run that comes closer.