You don’t see this often
The Rockies hit back-to-back homers in the top of the 10th inning to take a 7–4 lead over the Giants in San Francisco on Tuesday night. Ryan McMahon’s two-run shot broke the tie, and C.J. Cron added an insurance run with a dinger that was much more impressive than it may have appeared at first glance.
Cron, a right-handed batter, hit a liner the opposite way that cleared the 25-foot fence in right field. As Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman of Céspedes Family BBQ pointed out, Cron’s opposite-field homer was a rare achievement. Since the introduction of MLB’s Statcast system in 2015, there have been a total of 24 home runs by right handed batters hit to the opposite field at Oracle Park (excluding two inside-the-parkers hit by Kelby Tomlinson and Javier Báez). At a projected 390 feet, Cron’s was the second-longest of all of them, trailing only Cameron Rupp’s 398-footer in 2017.
Oracle Park is consistently among the hardest stadiums in baseball to hit a home run in, especially if you’re trying to put the ball over the right field wall. The fence out there stands 25 feet tall and is as deep at 365 feet from home plate. Combine that with the marine layer (the dense air that sits over San Francisco Bay) and it takes some real muscle to hit it out of the park. The wind was recorded at first pitch on Tuesday as blowing out to center at 16 mph, but even if Cron had the wind at his back, that’s still an impressive homer.
In the Statcast era, there have been a total of 734 home runs hit at Oracle Park. That means that just 3.3% of all homers hit there during that time have been opposite-field shots by righthanders. And to hit one off of a 99 mph fastball in extras that traveled farther than all but one such homer? That’s pretty impressive.
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Around the sports world
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At least he avoided the ball
Vlad Guerrero Jr. had himself a night
Nice job just slipping that in there
You have to be a special kind of NFL-obsessed sicko to remember the chair Roger Goodell sat in a full year ago
Sports should be fun to watch without having money on the line!
An enormous alligator strolled across the field during Toronto FC’s practice in Florida
The horse with the plague pun name is only 30–1 this year?
Chris Weidman shared some X-rays of his busted leg before and after surgery
Not sports
A man in Argentina was able to buy the country’s Google domain for about $3. … Citizen Kane lost its 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes after the site added a negative review from 80 years ago.
A small town in Kentucky got its first roundabout, and nobody knows how to use it
Very cool
A good song
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