Stark: The longest home runs of the 21st century
From SABR member Jayson Stark at ESPN.com on May 9, 2016, with mention of SABR member Bill Jenkinson:
What Wernher Von Braun was to 1960s space travel, Giancarlo Stanton is to 21st-century home run travel. And this weekend, Stanton reminded us it isn’t even safe to go grab a hot dog at a concession stand in (gulp) center field when it’s his turn to hit.
On Friday night, he launched a home run in South Florida that looked more like a 767 taking off at Miami International. It roared past the fabled home-run monstrosity in ultra-deep left-center, cleared three flag poles and came to earth on a concourse that had no one had ever thought needed protection from flying baseballs. For good reason.
ESPN’s Home Run Tracker calculated it at 490 feet. And even now that I’ve watched it about 40 times, I have a tough time remembering seeing anyone hit a baseball harder. But …
Guess what? Turns out Stanton’s bomb wasn’t even one of the 10 longest homers of this millennium. Who knew? Thanks to Greg Rybarczyk, who invented the awesome ESPN Home Run Tracker a decade ago, and Bill Jenkinson, America’s foremost expert on long-distance homers, we’ve been able to do the math.
Read the full article here: http://espn.go.com/blog/jayson-stark/post/_/id/1604/1604
Originally published: May 9, 2016. Last Updated: May 9, 2016.