It looks at how the ball traveled before hitting the stadium and projects how far it would have gone on flat ground.
https://www.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/projected-home-run-distance
Distance is home to projected landing spot.
>Or is D accounting for arc length?
That's how I'm reading it. C represents a straight line from home plate to calculated landing spot, and D follows the path of the ball to that same landing spot.
I'm glad OP asked about this -- I've always wondered how it works.
That’s the issue they have in Camden yards when the balls hit eutaw street
In the old days, it was measured with a simple tape measurer.
Now, with the science and trajectory, you’ve got balls that are clearly in front of other past balls closer to home listed with longer distances.
By this same measure, I remain super skeptical of any home run pre-1980s where the reported distance is 480+ feet. Just doesn't even seem remotely possible given the difference in strength and conditioning between then and now.
For example, I saw the other day that Willie Stargell has a 506 ft homer at Dodger Stadium in 1969. I just don't buy it. Or maybe someone can explain how that actually happened, was the pitcher grooving one and the batter was off a cocktail of illicit substances??
The Stargell home run is one of only 6 ever hit completely out of Dodger Stadium. The shortest of these was by Tatis Jr in 2021 measured at 467 feet by modern standards. It bounced off the roof of the pavilion and landed behind it. Stanton's in 2015 (475ft) also bounced off the roof.
Stargell is the only player to do this *twice*, so I can believe he hit one 500 feet, particularly as contemporary accounts say it completely cleared the pavilion roof. His other homer out of the stadium did hit the roof and was measured at 470, so it lines up with the two modern examples we have.
Maybe more than athlete conditioning is what balls they were using.
MLB messes with the balls (or balls have year to year variability based on a number of factors including availability of raw inputs and the particular manufacture specifications) and that can significantly impact how far the ball travels
It's not only balls. Up to a point, heavier bats can produce more higher exit velo and thus further distances. It just helps when the pitching is slower and it's easy to use a heavier bat cause you have time to catch up. Per lb of player, bats are way lighter now than they were 60+ years ago.
Legend has it that Bob Montag once hit a 500 mile home run when his dinger exited the stadium and landed on a passing train car. https://blogbeckett.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/the-longest-home-run/
this is actually super funny to me. like every incentive to maybe even grease the area outside the park to juice the numbers. or some kid could kick it if the scorekeepers isn't paying attention
how good were they at detecting cheaters back then? corked bats or maybe even the opposite and have a heavier bat that would allow a harder hit? the ball couldve been juiced too.
>the switch from Spalding to Rawlings as the supplier of major league balls in 1977 coincided with a 50 percent jump in home runs across the two leagues.
how consistently were baseballs produced in the 60s?
Bat drop was lower. Way more power behind the swings because of it. Now you need a lighter bat to keep up with the crazy pitching speeds. The bat’s momentum isn’t impacted as much when the bat is heavier.
I've read that balls that bounced over the walls used to be counted as home runs. The article claimed there's controversy over Babe Ruth's records because they didn't keep track of those separately. I'm not a fan, so I didn't verify any of that.
Yes, the last bounce home run was called in like 1930. But on the flip side, balls that wrapped around the foul pole and landed foul were called, well foul. So I'm sure there are some old school ones that were absolute blasts but weren't recorded cause they were fouls
while obviously sensible to question those distances, they aren't totally outrageous when you consider the wind factor.
stadiums today are in such densely developed urban areas a strong tailwind to carry a ball 550 feet doesnt exist.
that wouldnt be the case back in the day where the stadiums were often the biggest buildings in the area. a strong wind would have a straight path onto the field, and all it takes is a strong breeze on the beaufort scale for a well hit ball to be carried into the upper 500s
To further complicate, home plate was in a different spot for the 2001 season and right & center fields were consequently a bit deeper, so home runs from that year on Eutaw Street are actually longer than they appear even before considering their trajectory.
Source: https://www.mlb.com/orioles/ballpark/ground-rules
Mixing historical data on home run distances with modern data is going to cause all sorts of problems.
A few years ago Rowdy Tellez hit the longest home run in Fenway Park history. 3ft further than Ted Williams' famous red seat homer.
Then they "recalculated" the Tellez homer to make it shorter than Ted's.
You jest, but aside from the added difficulty in actually hitting the ball and squaring it up due to reduced reaction time, standing closer would give you extra HR distance in the event you hit one.
Of course, there's the difference of being a foot or two ahead, but there's also a slight difference in pitch velocity at the reduced distance as well. By the laws of physics, each reaction has an equal but opposite reaction, meaning a pitch *coming in* at a slightly increased velocity is also going to *go out* at a slightly increased velocity, resulting in a longer distance.
I believe you, but is the way everyone does it? Like, if a stadium jumbotron tells me how far the homerun was can I be reasonably confident that this was the method they used?
And a follow up, when somebody hits a homerun at PNC park and it lands in the Allegheny river, are they using the spot it splashed down in as the measure? Because the river is well below the level of the playing field so that could give the ball a few extra feet of distance.
Right now, I'm pretty sure everyone just takes it from statcast, unless somebody goes out there with a tape measure.
For statcast, I assume the just start projecting it once they're cameras can no longer track it, and I imagine they project it to the level of the playing field.
Not sure why we need to criticize what is a very good visual depiction of the question. It’s not like this is published data.
Oh I forgot, this is the internet where we bully and belittle people just because they are not perfect.
I feel enlightened, honestly. It was a question I hadn’t even asked myself, let alone wonder about the answer. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
The way OP asked it, along with the graph,shoot…it makes perfect sense to wonder that. So I’m thankful that OP asked that.
Exit velocity and launch angle are used to approximate the distance that would be traveled if there were no obstacles other than the impact with the ground.
Statcast does not simply use exit velo and launch angle to predict hit distance, it uses the Hawkeye Camera system to recreate the exact parabolic arc for the ball and extend that arc to obtain the estimated distance it would hit the ground at
edit: so technically in this goofy picture A is the correct answer and the system extrapolates that arc to achieve horizontal distance C. Exit velo and angle are the two most significant variables of the ball’s arc, but they are not what determines HR distance projection and havent been for years now. That is why you can type in “105 mph at 25 degrees” on statcast and see a bunch of different hit distances
Ugh, typical Statcast nerds, only focused on the analytics while losing sight of the bigger picture. Are the eagles the *fastest* way there? Sure, but the whole point of the mission was *stealth*. You think Sauron wasn't going to think something was up when he saw 10 fucking eagles flying straight towards Mount Doom?
Plus, it's not like the eagles are unstoppable just because they're flying at top speed. The Nazgul have their fell beasts, which would throw a wrench into the whole calculation. Call me old fashioned, but if the statisticians were in charge, Middle Earth would be firmly under Sauron's control right now.
You’ve hit the most important points for sure. But I also like to throw out there that the eagles are not impervious to the temptation of the ring themselves
there’s calculations it does to determine spin rate, axis, launch angle and whatever other metrics based on the images it takes, but from how it was explained to me by someone familiar with the system, i believe the hit distance is just a simple recreation of the flight path from the images alone. I could be misinterpreting how it was explained to me, but i’m pretty sure the homer distance is a straightforward extrapolation of ball position over time tracking, independent of the metrics that are calculated for it, which would explain different distances for balls hit with the same metrics, which could be affected by elevation or wind or the ball itself etc. I’m not 100% confident this is correct but at least on MLB’s website it says homer distance is calculated based on the parabolic arc, which means analyzing ball position throughout the flight makes the most sense to obtain the most accurate estimate
I think that's basically what MLB does with Statcast. You can't track a full ball flight in baseball like you can in golf so the projected home run distance is like using an indoor golf simulator. It takes pictures of your hit, figures out the angle and all that then gives you a projected flight path.
It's probably a similar margin of error between an indoor golf simulator and the home run distance projection.
It's not exactly perfectly accurate, I've seen a handful of home runs that get listed as shorter than the distance to the fence and ones that are clearly off. Last season there was a fly ball down the line in right in Yankee Stadium that was about 10 rows back and statcast said 317 feet. It's not very accurate with wind.
i think i saw that sometimes at a very low rate the cameras dont accurately pick up the ball’s location which would occasionally lead to inaccurate arcs. i’ve definitely seen one or two that didnt make sense. maybe i’m not correctly remembering how it was explained to me and it actually does rely more on metrics, with things like elevation and wind being more significant than i explained
> : so technically in this goofy picture A is the correct answer and the system extrapolates that arc to achieve horizontal distance C
OP asked what was reported, not what was measured.
C is still the correct answer, A is how they get there.
Cool. I was also thinking it was mostly launch angle and exit velo, but that wouldn't take into account air resistance or spin or curve. Using the actual parabolic arc would do so. It's impressive how ubiquitous these tools are across MLB now.
Are those really the only factors? Isn’t there wide discrepancy between balls hit at the same exit velo with same launch angle depending on spin, wind, individual ball, etc. Not challenging you, just calling in to question the method
I did a quick statcast search for all home runs hit at exactly 105 mph and 25 degrees in 2023. There were 8 of them ranging in distance from 387' to 433' so there's definitely something else going into the calculation.
The air and spin on the ball (off the bat obvi not from the arm). windy day, hot day, humid day, dry day, backspin on the ball etc… these will all affect the aerodynamics of the ball’s flight
Not sure how much height of the ball from the plate matters. Ohtani hitting a ball chest high vs Altuve hitting one chest high would change the flight path of the ball.
Because all they look at is the parabolic arc of the ball and then projecting it from there. They ignore all other factors.
https://www.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/projected-home-run-distance
Well I think they track the parabolic arc with the Hawkeye cameras so that would already be baked in. Even without that the basic projectile motion equations factor in initial height which they would be able to get from statcast.
They def do. At least when I worked in Baseball Analytics they took this and several other factors into account. Park dimensions, elevation, weather conditions etc. Elevation effects being most obvious at Coors, that and atmospheric pressure heavily blunted travel distance, speed, and arc path. Lots of hard hits that would clear the stands at other stadiums which ended up being easy fly outs
We also studied effects of spin rate, but that was a newer metric that we understood a lot less. Statcast was still relatively new, but we had TrackMan data for several years prior. Something we spent years with the top brass researching extensively for both pitching and hitting side, only to come to the conclusion that there might possibly be *some* small correlation but the effects were weak and it was a bit too general of a stat to really extrapolate much data
Unless things got weird, they'd also always have the peak height and location of the peak too, which seems like nearly enough extra data to make a fairly accurate guess about how spin, wind and ball characteristics might affect the parabola.
They guesstimated. There was an old HR derby in the ~~late 90s~~ 2002, not sure exactly which one, but they had ~~McGuire~~ Sosa hitting like ~~10+~~ 7, 500' HRs. There is no way those were accurate. 500' home runs are extremely rare now, let alone ~~530'+~~ 520'+. It was fun to watch though.
\*edited because I was curious and had to look it up instead of also exaggerating.
The longest homer in the Statcast era was a Jo Adell homer in AAA that went 513 feet. In MLB the longest home run measured by Statcast was 505 feet by Nomar Mazara in Texas. So maybe if you hit a ball as hard as possible on a hot day at Coors you could get to 520 or more.
Very likely. With a caveat. Wind can play a significant role in distance. Under ideal conditions every mph of tail wind can add approximately 4’ to the flight of the ball.
The Yankees had a rainout earlier this season, but if the rain had held off it would have been played with sustained 50mph wind speeds.
Judge hit one 515’ in the dome in Miami during the HR derby. If he hit that same ball with an ideal 50mph tail wind it could have traveled up to 715’.
In the past stadiums had lower profiles and fewer surrounding buildings. It is speculated that some of the incredible home run feats have as much to do with wind aided flight as it does with inaccurate measurements.
I wouldn’t entirely discount feats of athleticism either. It’s easy to be a prisoner of the moment, but you can’t always assume that modern players possess every advantage over their predecessors.
Ruth is a great example of a physical freak. They’ve done frame by frame analysis of his swing and he was swinging a 38oz bat later in his career with the same bat speed that Pujols achieved with a 32oz bat in his prime. There’s a great video of batting practice that surfaced recently where Ruth is hitting and turns and hands his bat to Gehrig, who steps up to the plate and looks like he is swinging underwater in comparison. You could watch baseball for the next 100 years and never see anyone with the raw physical tools that Ruth possessed.
They were also often measured from where they rolled to, not just where they landed. A lot of homers would go 500+ feet if you let them roll down a street.
They’ll never strike them from the record book since we can’t really prove they didn’t happen, and with perfect wind conditions it’s technically possible they did happen
There were probably lots of old homers that were longer than 505 feet. There was almost 150 years of pro ball played before Statcast came around and Statcast has only been measuring homer distance since 2018. It's also the only truly accurate measure we have, so I don't include those earlier guesstimates because there's too many flaws in the measurement methodology.
I specify Statcast-era because before Statcast distance measurements on homers were either guesswork or complete fabrications. Some homers from the early 20th century were measured from where the ball rolled to, and homers like the Canseco one are likely over-estimated in terms of distance because it's impossible to tell off standard definition cameras what angle the ball is traveling. And you need the angle and velocity to give a definitive answer as to how far it would continue to travel.
okay yeah, it's just I have no idea what year Statcast started.
I knew for sure all those 550+ ft claims from the Ruth, Ted Williams, Mays eras are all bullshit.
And obviously I don't think the Canseco one was 550, but looked like it coulda be 500 or 480+. But it might have been hit too vertically for that.
As far as I can tell the best estimates at the time were that it was in that 470-480 range. Sometimes the stadiums can make homers look more or less impressive, too. The top deck at the Skydome is relatively close to the field (horizontally) down the lines, and the wall is closer to the batters as well. That doesn't mean hitting it up there is easy, it was still a 450+ foot shot, but it looks further to the naked eye.
yeah, we will never know hahah
final couple questions -- does Statcast factor wind? and if so, do they have the real true wind numbers at the time of at-bat, or Statcast has to "estimate" the wind?
and also, do physicists/mathematicians agree that Statcast is 100% accurate nowdays, or is there still some guesswork and noticeable margin of error?
Wind and elevation are considered, along with the effects of spin on the ball. The Hawkeye system isn't perfect, it still has margins of error, but the margins of error it's working with are 3.6 millimeters within the observed path of the ball. So it might spit out the ball's trajectory as being high or low but it's much more accurate than guessing from one camera angle of a ball in flight.
The Red Seat at Fenway marks Ted Williams' 502 foot homer. Some folks have doubted the veracity of the tale and marking. However, the facts of the event seem to support it - one key factor was he appears to have been assisted by a storm front that came into the area that provided a forceful wind blowing out to right field. Ted launched the ball into that local jet stream and piggy backed it on out to the bleachers, landing it atop Joe Boucher's straw hat.
The system calculates A (the flight path of the ball) to determine C, the linear distance from home plate the ball would travel on flat ground with no obstacles.
When I used to work for the Dbacks in game ops, we did the home run distances. It was literally a chart on paper and a few of us would estimate and we’d basically just settle on a #. It was always funny to me hearing the random number we’d generated announced on Sportscenter that night. People thought there were lasers tracking this stuff. Nope. Just us nerds:)
Sounds about as accurate as I’d expect pre statcast era. Idk how you’d even attempt to measure it more accurately than that before all the crazy tech to track the ball came around
As much as it was fun and funny, it was also probably pretty accurate. I’d say 95% of home runs landed in specific rows and areas where it was easy to track. Every now and then you’d have a ball that hit the scoreboard or was still rising and then it became more of a guess.
I believe it is calculated to where the parabola would contact the ground if not obstructed.
They can probably get a pretty good estimate purely from launch angle and exit velo, but they probably have cameras that can track the ball's flight and get a much more accurate result.
Distances to the walls were known, and the distance between seats were known.
So a ball hit to the 5th row in straight away center field would be known at 420’ or so. Beyond that it would be pure estimation but it wouldn’t be too far off. Angle and height it hit the seat at would make it vary +- 30’ or so
I thought I knew once, and posted my theory on twitter. But Mike Petriello who has something to do with the technology and is a baseball personality told me that I was wrong.
The entirety of the path of the ball is recorded and a formula simulation model projects the distance to the flat ground level landing point from whatever it hits.
I thought it made more sense to just take the angle and velocity and project it, because we need to be comparing swing results not physical results. Like the more important thing to measure is the quality of the hit or hr not the air/elevation/humidity/wind/ballpark wind trends etc. But yeah they measure balls hit at Coors and factor in the elevation and humidity and make those guys have bigger home runs.
It actually makes sense to do it that way. You don’t want to have to explain to the lay fan how a home run projected to travel 398 feet when the wall it went over clearly says 400 on it.
I don't remember the exact way to do it, its been a few years since I took calc and physics, but I believe based on launch angle, and exit velocity they can create a equation for the parabola with friction due to wind factored in.
If I remember correctly, the position function is created using the double integral of the velocity, multiplied by ether cos or sin of the launch angle. the parabolic equation created can than be set to 0, and simply solved using the quadratic formula.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I did not use google lol so take it with a grain of salt.
It looks at how the ball traveled before hitting the stadium and projects how far it would have gone on flat ground. https://www.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/projected-home-run-distance Distance is home to projected landing spot.
in the context of the OP image, it's distance C
am I crazy or is C & D the same distance? Or is D accounting for arc length?
> Or is D accounting for arc length? Yes
>Or is D accounting for arc length? That's how I'm reading it. C represents a straight line from home plate to calculated landing spot, and D follows the path of the ball to that same landing spot. I'm glad OP asked about this -- I've always wondered how it works.
Same. Kinda always thought it was straight-line distance from home to where the ball “hit” something. Seat/fan/water/vine/jeffery maier/ etc
I think D is the length of the arc. Which would be like measuring a sky high popup to the mound at 400ft
Arc length is always accounted for with D.
This, which is answer C in your very helpful graphic.
hopefully OP can license it to MLB to use as an explainer on their affiliate websites
Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this graphic without the expressed written consent of u/EmptyBlackEmpty is prohibited.
The MLB is going to get implied verbal consent
Sorry, u/EmptyBlackEmpty is balcked out in your area.
"No Copyright intended"
I was sensing a bit of sarcasm but after looking at the graphic it is indeed legit.
That’s the issue they have in Camden yards when the balls hit eutaw street In the old days, it was measured with a simple tape measurer. Now, with the science and trajectory, you’ve got balls that are clearly in front of other past balls closer to home listed with longer distances.
By this same measure, I remain super skeptical of any home run pre-1980s where the reported distance is 480+ feet. Just doesn't even seem remotely possible given the difference in strength and conditioning between then and now. For example, I saw the other day that Willie Stargell has a 506 ft homer at Dodger Stadium in 1969. I just don't buy it. Or maybe someone can explain how that actually happened, was the pitcher grooving one and the batter was off a cocktail of illicit substances??
The Stargell home run is one of only 6 ever hit completely out of Dodger Stadium. The shortest of these was by Tatis Jr in 2021 measured at 467 feet by modern standards. It bounced off the roof of the pavilion and landed behind it. Stanton's in 2015 (475ft) also bounced off the roof. Stargell is the only player to do this *twice*, so I can believe he hit one 500 feet, particularly as contemporary accounts say it completely cleared the pavilion roof. His other homer out of the stadium did hit the roof and was measured at 470, so it lines up with the two modern examples we have.
appreciate this context and the notes on the contemporary accounts. that's incredible. thanks bawfuls
Bawfuls for mvp
google stargells homerun at olympic stadium....he was a def 500 footer guy
Maybe more than athlete conditioning is what balls they were using. MLB messes with the balls (or balls have year to year variability based on a number of factors including availability of raw inputs and the particular manufacture specifications) and that can significantly impact how far the ball travels
It's not only balls. Up to a point, heavier bats can produce more higher exit velo and thus further distances. It just helps when the pitching is slower and it's easy to use a heavier bat cause you have time to catch up. Per lb of player, bats are way lighter now than they were 60+ years ago.
Back then home run distance was reported as where the ball would stop after rolling. So may have been a 450 and then roll 50 ft and stop.
how exactly did they calculate that...
"Hey we found the ball over here" "Oh wow you're like 500 feet from home plate"
"We don't have any willie stargells over here to hit it back to you guys though"
Legend has it that Bob Montag once hit a 500 mile home run when his dinger exited the stadium and landed on a passing train car. https://blogbeckett.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/the-longest-home-run/
this is actually super funny to me. like every incentive to maybe even grease the area outside the park to juice the numbers. or some kid could kick it if the scorekeepers isn't paying attention
Just build your ballpark on the edge of a cliff to really boost those numbers. Put up nets anytime the opponent is up to bat.
my Grand Canyon expansion team is going to be historic!!
If you could hit one into a passing train we might have seen a 3 million footer.
Smh it’s like comparing yardage with your driver including the roll. Like no you did not carry 300 yards, there’s clearly a down slope.
It's like a QB throwing a 5-yard screen and getting credit for a 90-yard TD pass.
If it hits asphalt/pavement, it’ll roll a very long time
I’m now picturing Goldfingers henchman Oddjob planting a baseball somewhere so he can claim the HR record!
I'm sure Kim Jong Un has the world home run record. He hit one from Pyongyang to the 38th Parallel
Wind blowing out at 90mph
how good were they at detecting cheaters back then? corked bats or maybe even the opposite and have a heavier bat that would allow a harder hit? the ball couldve been juiced too. >the switch from Spalding to Rawlings as the supplier of major league balls in 1977 coincided with a 50 percent jump in home runs across the two leagues. how consistently were baseballs produced in the 60s?
The Stargell 500 footer at Dodger Stadium was in 1969, which was the year they lowered the mound after The Year of The Pitcher in '68.
good point
Bat drop was lower. Way more power behind the swings because of it. Now you need a lighter bat to keep up with the crazy pitching speeds. The bat’s momentum isn’t impacted as much when the bat is heavier.
I've read that balls that bounced over the walls used to be counted as home runs. The article claimed there's controversy over Babe Ruth's records because they didn't keep track of those separately. I'm not a fan, so I didn't verify any of that.
Yes, the last bounce home run was called in like 1930. But on the flip side, balls that wrapped around the foul pole and landed foul were called, well foul. So I'm sure there are some old school ones that were absolute blasts but weren't recorded cause they were fouls
How about Mickey Mantles 3 longest? 650, 656, and 734. SEVENFUCKINGHUNDRED THIRTY FOUR. 🤣
while obviously sensible to question those distances, they aren't totally outrageous when you consider the wind factor. stadiums today are in such densely developed urban areas a strong tailwind to carry a ball 550 feet doesnt exist. that wouldnt be the case back in the day where the stadiums were often the biggest buildings in the area. a strong wind would have a straight path onto the field, and all it takes is a strong breeze on the beaufort scale for a well hit ball to be carried into the upper 500s
Yes, Henderson's 2023 home run marker which is the greatest distance lies closer to home plate than several others.
To further complicate, home plate was in a different spot for the 2001 season and right & center fields were consequently a bit deeper, so home runs from that year on Eutaw Street are actually longer than they appear even before considering their trajectory. Source: https://www.mlb.com/orioles/ballpark/ground-rules
Could even have that in the same year if a moon shot lands just past a much lower trajectory.
I’m pretty sure they use the actual distance for the plaques though
Mixing historical data on home run distances with modern data is going to cause all sorts of problems. A few years ago Rowdy Tellez hit the longest home run in Fenway Park history. 3ft further than Ted Williams' famous red seat homer. Then they "recalculated" the Tellez homer to make it shorter than Ted's.
I can't believe they don't account for the curvature of the earth
HRs go farther at Coors because of the Coriolis effect.
Aw shit, that's why in Australia I kept fouling the ball back
That's because they know the flat truth.
> Distance is home to projected landing spot. LPT get extra HR distance by standing way up in the batters box
You jest, but aside from the added difficulty in actually hitting the ball and squaring it up due to reduced reaction time, standing closer would give you extra HR distance in the event you hit one. Of course, there's the difference of being a foot or two ahead, but there's also a slight difference in pitch velocity at the reduced distance as well. By the laws of physics, each reaction has an equal but opposite reaction, meaning a pitch *coming in* at a slightly increased velocity is also going to *go out* at a slightly increased velocity, resulting in a longer distance.
I believe you, but is the way everyone does it? Like, if a stadium jumbotron tells me how far the homerun was can I be reasonably confident that this was the method they used? And a follow up, when somebody hits a homerun at PNC park and it lands in the Allegheny river, are they using the spot it splashed down in as the measure? Because the river is well below the level of the playing field so that could give the ball a few extra feet of distance.
Right now, I'm pretty sure everyone just takes it from statcast, unless somebody goes out there with a tape measure. For statcast, I assume the just start projecting it once they're cameras can no longer track it, and I imagine they project it to the level of the playing field.
Please post to r/dataisbeautiful cuz God damn 🥵
This is r/collegebasketball levels of chart quality
Purdue fans taking notes
I’d say we appreciate our bar graphs the most
By “notes”, you mean pictures, right?
it's better than most of the god awful shit that's posted to that sub. it should be called /dataisshiitandsoismygraphic
/r/datacanbebeautifulbutthisisn't
I knew that data could be beautiful, but I didn’t know I would ever want to make love to data until just this moment.
My wife just started crying after she caught me looking at this post
Crying after an orgasm is perfectly normal.
That's what my wife tells me too!
Hell yah! Bleachers are always greater than graphs amirite?
Not sure why we need to criticize what is a very good visual depiction of the question. It’s not like this is published data. Oh I forgot, this is the internet where we bully and belittle people just because they are not perfect.
Woah hey we also bully people for being perfect.
Jeez lighten up
C
Si
People are clowning on the chart but I feel like it perfectly represents what question you’re trying to ask.
Also I’ve literally always wondered this and never thought to look it up.
Same I always just thought "wow 450 big number cool" without understanding what it actually measured lmaooo
People are stupid. This is a perfectly fine question and a great way to ask it.
yeah lol, the question and graphic make perfect sense
I feel enlightened, honestly. It was a question I hadn’t even asked myself, let alone wonder about the answer. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. The way OP asked it, along with the graph,shoot…it makes perfect sense to wonder that. So I’m thankful that OP asked that.
It’s one of those things where you lick your finger then extend your arm out with your thumb up and close one eye and have a gander.
Reject Statcast, embrace taking a gander out yonder
propaganda? nah, proper gander 😎
Your thumb or my thumb?
Exit velocity and launch angle are used to approximate the distance that would be traveled if there were no obstacles other than the impact with the ground.
Statcast does not simply use exit velo and launch angle to predict hit distance, it uses the Hawkeye Camera system to recreate the exact parabolic arc for the ball and extend that arc to obtain the estimated distance it would hit the ground at edit: so technically in this goofy picture A is the correct answer and the system extrapolates that arc to achieve horizontal distance C. Exit velo and angle are the two most significant variables of the ball’s arc, but they are not what determines HR distance projection and havent been for years now. That is why you can type in “105 mph at 25 degrees” on statcast and see a bunch of different hit distances
Statcast also does not simply find it's way into Mordor.
Statcast would tell you Eagles are fastest way to get there
Ugh, typical Statcast nerds, only focused on the analytics while losing sight of the bigger picture. Are the eagles the *fastest* way there? Sure, but the whole point of the mission was *stealth*. You think Sauron wasn't going to think something was up when he saw 10 fucking eagles flying straight towards Mount Doom? Plus, it's not like the eagles are unstoppable just because they're flying at top speed. The Nazgul have their fell beasts, which would throw a wrench into the whole calculation. Call me old fashioned, but if the statisticians were in charge, Middle Earth would be firmly under Sauron's control right now.
You’ve hit the most important points for sure. But I also like to throw out there that the eagles are not impervious to the temptation of the ring themselves
I wanna see the version where an eagle becomes an even more evil villain than Sauron now
And my axe!
https://youtu.be/1-Uz0LMbWpI?si=EHjIdew1cSqE57aL
Isn’t the Hawkeye camera system fundamentally based on the kinematics equations though
there’s calculations it does to determine spin rate, axis, launch angle and whatever other metrics based on the images it takes, but from how it was explained to me by someone familiar with the system, i believe the hit distance is just a simple recreation of the flight path from the images alone. I could be misinterpreting how it was explained to me, but i’m pretty sure the homer distance is a straightforward extrapolation of ball position over time tracking, independent of the metrics that are calculated for it, which would explain different distances for balls hit with the same metrics, which could be affected by elevation or wind or the ball itself etc. I’m not 100% confident this is correct but at least on MLB’s website it says homer distance is calculated based on the parabolic arc, which means analyzing ball position throughout the flight makes the most sense to obtain the most accurate estimate
Why not radar ?
What do you mean by radar?
Like trackman and some of the golf stuff
I think that's basically what MLB does with Statcast. You can't track a full ball flight in baseball like you can in golf so the projected home run distance is like using an indoor golf simulator. It takes pictures of your hit, figures out the angle and all that then gives you a projected flight path. It's probably a similar margin of error between an indoor golf simulator and the home run distance projection.
Bravo. Thanks for these answers!
It's not exactly perfectly accurate, I've seen a handful of home runs that get listed as shorter than the distance to the fence and ones that are clearly off. Last season there was a fly ball down the line in right in Yankee Stadium that was about 10 rows back and statcast said 317 feet. It's not very accurate with wind.
i think i saw that sometimes at a very low rate the cameras dont accurately pick up the ball’s location which would occasionally lead to inaccurate arcs. i’ve definitely seen one or two that didnt make sense. maybe i’m not correctly remembering how it was explained to me and it actually does rely more on metrics, with things like elevation and wind being more significant than i explained
> : so technically in this goofy picture A is the correct answer and the system extrapolates that arc to achieve horizontal distance C OP asked what was reported, not what was measured. C is still the correct answer, A is how they get there.
Cool. I was also thinking it was mostly launch angle and exit velo, but that wouldn't take into account air resistance or spin or curve. Using the actual parabolic arc would do so. It's impressive how ubiquitous these tools are across MLB now.
Are those really the only factors? Isn’t there wide discrepancy between balls hit at the same exit velo with same launch angle depending on spin, wind, individual ball, etc. Not challenging you, just calling in to question the method
I did a quick statcast search for all home runs hit at exactly 105 mph and 25 degrees in 2023. There were 8 of them ranging in distance from 387' to 433' so there's definitely something else going into the calculation.
The air and spin on the ball (off the bat obvi not from the arm). windy day, hot day, humid day, dry day, backspin on the ball etc… these will all affect the aerodynamics of the ball’s flight
Is it rounding those variables? There's a difference between 25.3 and 24.6.
Nope 115.0 and 25.0. Thats why there was only 8 out over 5800 total HRs last season.
Not sure how much height of the ball from the plate matters. Ohtani hitting a ball chest high vs Altuve hitting one chest high would change the flight path of the ball. Because all they look at is the parabolic arc of the ball and then projecting it from there. They ignore all other factors. https://www.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/projected-home-run-distance
Well I think they track the parabolic arc with the Hawkeye cameras so that would already be baked in. Even without that the basic projectile motion equations factor in initial height which they would be able to get from statcast.
I can't recall where I saw it, but I believe they also take elevation into account.
They def do. At least when I worked in Baseball Analytics they took this and several other factors into account. Park dimensions, elevation, weather conditions etc. Elevation effects being most obvious at Coors, that and atmospheric pressure heavily blunted travel distance, speed, and arc path. Lots of hard hits that would clear the stands at other stadiums which ended up being easy fly outs We also studied effects of spin rate, but that was a newer metric that we understood a lot less. Statcast was still relatively new, but we had TrackMan data for several years prior. Something we spent years with the top brass researching extensively for both pitching and hitting side, only to come to the conclusion that there might possibly be *some* small correlation but the effects were weak and it was a bit too general of a stat to really extrapolate much data
Unless things got weird, they'd also always have the peak height and location of the peak too, which seems like nearly enough extra data to make a fairly accurate guess about how spin, wind and ball characteristics might affect the parabola.
Sometimes they include "oomph"
So the answer is C? Based on your answer it seems that way although D still fits that description.
It's C. Hit distance is always horizontal, otherwise we'd have lazy fly balls measuring over 400 ft
How’d they do it in ye olden days before exit velocity and launch angle?
They guesstimated. There was an old HR derby in the ~~late 90s~~ 2002, not sure exactly which one, but they had ~~McGuire~~ Sosa hitting like ~~10+~~ 7, 500' HRs. There is no way those were accurate. 500' home runs are extremely rare now, let alone ~~530'+~~ 520'+. It was fun to watch though. \*edited because I was curious and had to look it up instead of also exaggerating.
I have 1 theory for how they were able to hit a ball that far.
A balanced breakfast?
If my youth taught me anything, I'd wager they just crushed cans of spinach before going to bat
Push-ups, Situps, and plenty of juice.
Beer and hot dogs.
My sugary processed corn stocks mooning.
They just wanted it really bad?
Something, something, something, boot straps...
Pretty sure I hit a 503' home run in Ken Griffey, Jr.'s Winning Run.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they juiced the shit out of derby balls to make it more of a spectacle
What is the maximum distance the worlds strongest documented batter could hit a baseball if they hit the optimum launch angle?
The longest homer in the Statcast era was a Jo Adell homer in AAA that went 513 feet. In MLB the longest home run measured by Statcast was 505 feet by Nomar Mazara in Texas. So maybe if you hit a ball as hard as possible on a hot day at Coors you could get to 520 or more.
That’s lower than I would have thought… is it safe to assume all those micky mantle / babe ruth / Josh Gibson stories were exaggerated?
Yes, but that’s also blasphemous.
Very likely. With a caveat. Wind can play a significant role in distance. Under ideal conditions every mph of tail wind can add approximately 4’ to the flight of the ball. The Yankees had a rainout earlier this season, but if the rain had held off it would have been played with sustained 50mph wind speeds. Judge hit one 515’ in the dome in Miami during the HR derby. If he hit that same ball with an ideal 50mph tail wind it could have traveled up to 715’. In the past stadiums had lower profiles and fewer surrounding buildings. It is speculated that some of the incredible home run feats have as much to do with wind aided flight as it does with inaccurate measurements.
Makes sense. Either way then I wouldn’t attribute it to their incredible feats of athleticism, but to outside factors or exaggerations.
I wouldn’t entirely discount feats of athleticism either. It’s easy to be a prisoner of the moment, but you can’t always assume that modern players possess every advantage over their predecessors. Ruth is a great example of a physical freak. They’ve done frame by frame analysis of his swing and he was swinging a 38oz bat later in his career with the same bat speed that Pujols achieved with a 32oz bat in his prime. There’s a great video of batting practice that surfaced recently where Ruth is hitting and turns and hands his bat to Gehrig, who steps up to the plate and looks like he is swinging underwater in comparison. You could watch baseball for the next 100 years and never see anyone with the raw physical tools that Ruth possessed.
They were also often measured from where they rolled to, not just where they landed. A lot of homers would go 500+ feet if you let them roll down a street.
Maybe not intentionally, but yeah
100%. People would be upset but those should pretty much all be stricken from the record books given what we know now
They’ll never strike them from the record book since we can’t really prove they didn’t happen, and with perfect wind conditions it’s technically possible they did happen
I have a hard time believing the Mazara one is longer than this: https://youtu.be/stUolWxG3wo?si=ZTU4xHcPg8W3Z4Vo
Mark got a great "My Oh My" with that one
There were probably lots of old homers that were longer than 505 feet. There was almost 150 years of pro ball played before Statcast came around and Statcast has only been measuring homer distance since 2018. It's also the only truly accurate measure we have, so I don't include those earlier guesstimates because there's too many flaws in the measurement methodology.
was that Jose Canseco home run into the upper left field deck not even 500-ft? or was that not measurable back then?
I specify Statcast-era because before Statcast distance measurements on homers were either guesswork or complete fabrications. Some homers from the early 20th century were measured from where the ball rolled to, and homers like the Canseco one are likely over-estimated in terms of distance because it's impossible to tell off standard definition cameras what angle the ball is traveling. And you need the angle and velocity to give a definitive answer as to how far it would continue to travel.
okay yeah, it's just I have no idea what year Statcast started. I knew for sure all those 550+ ft claims from the Ruth, Ted Williams, Mays eras are all bullshit. And obviously I don't think the Canseco one was 550, but looked like it coulda be 500 or 480+. But it might have been hit too vertically for that.
As far as I can tell the best estimates at the time were that it was in that 470-480 range. Sometimes the stadiums can make homers look more or less impressive, too. The top deck at the Skydome is relatively close to the field (horizontally) down the lines, and the wall is closer to the batters as well. That doesn't mean hitting it up there is easy, it was still a 450+ foot shot, but it looks further to the naked eye.
yeah, we will never know hahah final couple questions -- does Statcast factor wind? and if so, do they have the real true wind numbers at the time of at-bat, or Statcast has to "estimate" the wind? and also, do physicists/mathematicians agree that Statcast is 100% accurate nowdays, or is there still some guesswork and noticeable margin of error?
Wind and elevation are considered, along with the effects of spin on the ball. The Hawkeye system isn't perfect, it still has margins of error, but the margins of error it's working with are 3.6 millimeters within the observed path of the ball. So it might spit out the ball's trajectory as being high or low but it's much more accurate than guessing from one camera angle of a ball in flight.
The Red Seat at Fenway marks Ted Williams' 502 foot homer. Some folks have doubted the veracity of the tale and marking. However, the facts of the event seem to support it - one key factor was he appears to have been assisted by a storm front that came into the area that provided a forceful wind blowing out to right field. Ted launched the ball into that local jet stream and piggy backed it on out to the bleachers, landing it atop Joe Boucher's straw hat.
I assume they also factor in wind, spin, altitude?
It’s just a drunk dude in NY that exclusively watches dingers and guesses how far they went.
Hi, it's me.
you’re the problem?
JUDGE ha- slu- hiiiit that one, g-give it 480!
Woah. Juan Pierre. I don see this guy offen…ohh inside da Parker! 89 feet!
That’s how Mickey Mantle hit one 565ft
And the Red seat in Fenway. You cannot convince me either of those things happened.
Pretty sure the Hawkeye system can capture spin as well. A lot of difference between a backspun ball and one hit with top spin
The system calculates A (the flight path of the ball) to determine C, the linear distance from home plate the ball would travel on flat ground with no obstacles.
Upvote for the beautiful OC. The answer is C.
When I used to work for the Dbacks in game ops, we did the home run distances. It was literally a chart on paper and a few of us would estimate and we’d basically just settle on a #. It was always funny to me hearing the random number we’d generated announced on Sportscenter that night. People thought there were lasers tracking this stuff. Nope. Just us nerds:)
That's funny, how long ago was that?
Late 90s to mid 2000s.
Sounds about as accurate as I’d expect pre statcast era. Idk how you’d even attempt to measure it more accurately than that before all the crazy tech to track the ball came around
As much as it was fun and funny, it was also probably pretty accurate. I’d say 95% of home runs landed in specific rows and areas where it was easy to track. Every now and then you’d have a ball that hit the scoreboard or was still rising and then it became more of a guess.
They do that nowadays, they recreate the parabolic arc using exit velo, launch angle, and hawkeye cameras. But pre statcast it was just guessing haha
I believe it is calculated to where the parabola would contact the ground if not obstructed. They can probably get a pretty good estimate purely from launch angle and exit velo, but they probably have cameras that can track the ball's flight and get a much more accurate result.
This reminds me of my college physics homework
Dude this is grade 11 physics not undergrad physics. Source: me, who wishes my physics degree was shit like this lmao
Followup question: how did they do it before technology could track exit velo, launch angle, etc? A chart and a ruler?
Distances to the walls were known, and the distance between seats were known. So a ball hit to the 5th row in straight away center field would be known at 420’ or so. Beyond that it would be pure estimation but it wouldn’t be too far off. Angle and height it hit the seat at would make it vary +- 30’ or so
IDK but I love your drawing
C, first impact. Assumes flat ground, no wall, and that ball stops dead and does not roll.
Ah, so the Magnet Ball in Super Monkey Ball minigame Monkey Target, got it.
shohei going to make the flat ground assumption problematic if he keeps hitting balls 900ft
C
Flat ground
MS Paint was the shit
They're reported in a way to make MLB look good
I just want to say I love this diagram
You still have time to turn back before you learn the terrible truth.
Should be like golf drive is "280 yards"... including helping wind and 50 yard roll in mid summer
I thought I knew once, and posted my theory on twitter. But Mike Petriello who has something to do with the technology and is a baseball personality told me that I was wrong. The entirety of the path of the ball is recorded and a formula simulation model projects the distance to the flat ground level landing point from whatever it hits. I thought it made more sense to just take the angle and velocity and project it, because we need to be comparing swing results not physical results. Like the more important thing to measure is the quality of the hit or hr not the air/elevation/humidity/wind/ballpark wind trends etc. But yeah they measure balls hit at Coors and factor in the elevation and humidity and make those guys have bigger home runs.
It actually makes sense to do it that way. You don’t want to have to explain to the lay fan how a home run projected to travel 398 feet when the wall it went over clearly says 400 on it.
Initial velocity and launch angle. Quick kinematics and then you’ve got your distance
I don't remember the exact way to do it, its been a few years since I took calc and physics, but I believe based on launch angle, and exit velocity they can create a equation for the parabola with friction due to wind factored in. If I remember correctly, the position function is created using the double integral of the velocity, multiplied by ether cos or sin of the launch angle. the parabolic equation created can than be set to 0, and simply solved using the quadratic formula. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I did not use google lol so take it with a grain of salt.
Thought this was a good question til I saw the diagram, now my eyes are broken.
How is the wind taken into account. Is only the “end” of the route estimated?
Baseball is why we have math class.
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