I was looking at the list of Mark McGwire's longest home runs the other day, and something jumped out at me.
The longest homer McGwire ever hit came last year, on May 16, 1998, in St. Louis. He belted a ball from Florida's Livan Hernandez into the left field seats, and the ball was measured at 545 feet.
How do we know the ball went 545 feet? Because since 1988, the IBM corporation has been operating a system by which the height and trajectory of home runs are accurately figured and put on a grid to determine their distance. They can do this even if a ball hits a scoreboard, a field microphone, or even a passing bird. If the flight of the ball is interrupted, the grid will tell them the distance that the ball would have gone if it had flown free.
So, now we have something we didn't have before - namely, a perfectly accurate measurement of long home runs.
What struck me about McGwire's 545-foot blast is this: don't you remember years ago when every now and then, the papers would claim that someone hit a ball 580 feet, or 610 feet, or more?
Well, let's take a little romp through the archives.
1964 - Dave Nicholson, of the Chicago White Sox, whacks a ball measured at 573 feet.
1960 - Mickey Mantle belts one off Jim Bunning that clears the right field roof in Detroit; the ball lands in the lumber yard across the street. An article in the Detroit Free Press a year ago claimed that the ball traveled 643 feet!
1953 - Mickey Mantle hits one off Washington's Chuck Stobbs that travels 565 feet.
1926 - Babe Ruth hits one out of Navin Field (now Tiger Stadium) in Detroit, twelve years before the second deck was added to the outfield stands. Ruth's homer is measured at 602 feet.
1919 - Ruth hits one in a spring training game in Tampa, Florida that the newspapers say travels 587 feet. (This is before the new lively ball was introduced!)
My question is this: if Mark McGwire's longest blast was 545 feet, does it stand to reason that any human being - even Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth - could hit one over 600 feet?
I'm not a physicist - I was a math major in college - but my answer is, I don't think so.
First off, a lot of these long-distance shots were either "estimated", or "measured" by the team's vice president in charge of publicity. Of course, it sounds more newsworthy if some club executive goes to the hardware store, buys a tape measure, and grandly announces that he measured the blast at 580 - no, make that 605 - feet. It makes for a lot of free newspaper space, something for the writers to chew on that day. Maybe the team will sell a few more tickets.
Secondly, the people doing the measuring or estimating back then were not surveyors, or physicists, or anything like that. For example, suppose a batter hits a homer that disappears over the grandstand, and no one sees where it lands. If the ball peaks in the air at the top of the grandstand, which is 300 feet from the plate, and then starts to descend, many of us will probably think, "Look! The ball is halfway through its flight at the 300-foot mark! It must have gone 600 feet!"
Anyone who took a high school physics class - or played the outfield - knows that's not true. The flight of a batted ball looks like the blue line below, not the red line:
That's why it seems kind of disappointing to see someone like McGwire get a hold of a ball, and I mean, really catch one on the fat part of the bat and send it for a ride deep into the night - and then hear the announcement that the titanic wallop traveled "only" 484 feet. I guess I'm still expecting to hear about 550-600 footers like I heard about when I was a kid.
I believe that if Mark McGwire's maximum belt is 545 feet, then only a trained gorilla is going to hit one much farther. I don't think that anyone, even Mickey Mantle in his prime, could possibly hit a baseball 643 feet. I honestly don't think that it is physically possible for a human being to hit a baseball 600 feet.
Man, I can barely hit a golf ball that far!