Life In The Cell

Moonshots!

The thing I love about the Internet is that sometimes when you’re looking for one thing, you can find something else that’s totally different but still totally awesome. That happened to me a few days ago when I stumbled upon Hit Tracker Online. Basically the M.O. of the site is to analyze home runs and figure out how far they really went and also how far they really would have gone unimpeded. They have classifications of homers as well with “No Doubters”, “Just Enoughs”, and “Lucky Homers” with accompanying leaderboards for each category.

Anyway, Adam Dunn’s mammoth shot at Wrigley led me back to that site (which I will present) and then led me to Jim Thome’s massive shot off the C-Ring at Tropicana and the longest homer hit at the Cell. So first here’s a look at Dunn’s moon shot.

If you missed it you can watch it here, it easily cleared the stadium over the right field side. I find it hilarious that the people in the terrible seats on top of the building across the street, start reaching as though they are about to catch the ball. This thing went so far they actually thought the ball would reach them.

Here’s a schematic of the homer from the site:

Pretty damn far, huh? The true distance of this homer, meaning the distance from home had it reached the ground again unimpeded is 485 feet. That my friends is the longest homer of the season, even further than Upton’s blast the other day.

Now here’s Jim Thome’s blast against the Tampa Bay Rays:

View it here

I remember when that one was hit that I wish it would have been able to continue on it’s path so that we could all take in the glory of that bomb. Unfortunately there’s no way to recreate it so that we can watch it, but we do know that it would have traveled a whopping 441 feet.

That homer though isn’t even Big Jim’s farthest homer of the season. He blasted one at the Cell that bested his Tropicana shot by more than 20 feet. Take a looksy:

That behemoth blast’s true distance is 465 feet. (I believe the red dots on the picture are the actual flight, the blue dots are predicted flight and the green dot is the point of impact.) Jim’s shot stands as the longest by a White Sox player, the longest hit at the Cell, and the 12th longest homer in the bigs. I really can only imagine Jim or Quentin hitting one farther, if anyone, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled.