How far Pujols’ San Diego shot really went
TOWER GROVE — Like anybody else who saw Albert Pujols’ bolt to the fourth story of San Diego’s Western Metal Supply Co. building, Greg Rybarczyk felt it had to be a mammoth blast, one with the distance to match the reaction of the players.
But Rybarczyk knew better.
“When I saw that ball hit, I thoguht it was a huge homer, just like everyone else — something about the angle off the bat, the speed of the swing, it just looked like a real bomb,” Rybarczyk said. “But when I went to look at, surprisingly it turned out to be more of a regular fly ball than a screaming liner.”
Rybarczyk runs Hit Tracker Online, a Web site dedicated to calculating “how far it really went … “ Rybarczyk uses his own maps of the ballparks, exit speeds and gobs of other data to track each home run hit in the majors and determine the true distance — not the ballpark estimated distance — of the home run.
At many ballparks around baseball, the act of estimating distances for home runs has been more and more exact. When the new Busch Stadium opened, a couple members of the Cardinals staff went out with a yard stick to take measurements they used to create a detailed distance map for home runs hit at the ballpark. Most ballparks have three numbers for each section of the ballpark — one for each kind of home run: “screaming liner”, standard homer and high rainbow.
San Diego announced that Pujols’ first home run Monday traveled 405 feet.
It was described repeatedly, including by me, as a conservative estimate.
Those descriptions are incorrect. Rybarczyk did his calculations and found out …
The homer traveled 405 feet.
“It is a visually deceiving homer because it impacted so high up in the air - those tend to look longer for that reason,” Rybarczyk wrote me in an email explaining the measurement. “But the Western Metal Supply building is actually very close to home plate: the corner (which is also the foul “pole”) is marked at 334 feet, and the patios are actually as close as 328 feet, hanging over the field in fact. Pujols’ homer impacted about 58 feet above field level, 356 feet from home plate, after 4.28 seconds in the air. Hit Tracker projects it to 405 feet, and figures it came off the bat at just under 109 mph.”
Rybarczyk offers the following chart on his Web site:
The time it took Pujols’ homer to leave the ball is an important part of the calculation, and Rybarczyk mentions that 4.28 seconds to land “is a fairly long time.” Milwaukee’s Ryan Braun hit a blast last week at Fenway Park that took 2.78 seconds to land. He also said the new ballparks and their Crawford Boxes and Big Mac Lands and, yes, Wester Metal Supply Cos. cause a visual trick on the distance of home runs.
The longest homer hit at Petco Park was by Andruw Jones, and it went 463 feet, but because it traveled to left-center field without the fanfare, without the ballpark prop, it “did not garner nearly the attention that Pujols’ homer did,” Rybarczyk wrote.
“I suspect we all expect Pujols’ homers to be longer, also, having seen quite a few impressive shots,” he wrote in an email. ”Also, many of the newer parks have tall objects close to home plate (the WMS building in SD, the upper deck in RF at Citizens Bank Park, actually even Big Mac Land is very close to home plate laterally), so it tricks our eyes when a ball flies high and into or over one of those objects. So, don’t feel bad, I think we all are susceptible to that optical illusion, which is why it’s good to have something like Hit Tracker to objectively figure the distances out …”
There is a scatter plot of all of Pujols’ home runs this season available at his own page on Hit Tracker. And that bolt in San Diego of Justin Germano actually lowered his “true distance” average for home runs this season. The scatter plot allows you to go back a few years — which, when it comes to Pujols’ homers, obviously means going back to October 2005.
For the record, Pujols homer off Brad Lidge — you know the one — left the bat at 119.1 mph, had an apex of 113 feet and traveled a “true distance” of … 455 feet.
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Derrick Goold said he was going to Mizzou for capital-J journalism, but after growing up in the Time Zone Baseball Forgot he was really drawn to MU sitting between two major-league cities. Goold joined the Post-Dispatch in 2001 after working for The Times-Picayune and Rocky Mountain News, covering sports from LSU to NHL and every level of baseball in between. 
Great stuff,DG….
What a pro Albert really is.He handled the Chris Young Situation like a real pro. He is the greatest player in the league,yet he really respects everyone around him as well as his opponents. DG,how much of an affect will this have on Pujols? His next at-bat after the incident was the worst I’ve seen in a long while. It has to be really tough to shake off,but I think TLR can get him on track.Young is really lucky that Albert didn’t hit that ball any harder ….it might of killed Young,and it didn’t help that Young is 6′10 either…
DG -
After you mentioned Hit Tracker the other day, there was only one home run on my mind - Pujols vs Lidge October 17th 2005. I was watching that on my birthday, and I’ll never forget that one. Thanks for mentioning it. I was glad to see the site, and the amount of info he has on there is astounding. Another great article!
So, let me get this straight, the apex was about 250 ft…he’s saying the ball put on the breaks at that point??? Since when is the apex more than half way??? Did the laws of physics change when the ball started going down??? This guy needs to take some physics classes!
Chris,
Its called spin on the ball, like a curveball thrown by a pitcher.
Chris, I’m not a physicist, but it would seem logical to me that friction on a ball as it travels through air would slow it down and cause the apex of its flight to be more than half of the way along the flight path. Mike
Mike - it looks like YOU’RE the one who needs some physics classes. In “science world” you’re right - the apex of an object in flight would be at the halfway mark - if the angle at the start of flight was exactly 45 degrees. Here on Earth, with wind resistance, spin on the ball, and CHANGING winds, the apex will move a great deal, depending on trajectory leaving the bat. Thus, the speed/energy of the ball will be decreasing throughout the flight-time, thus, once it hits the apex, it will usually drop much more sharply than the angle at which it was rising.
- Paul Q, St. Louis.
Oops! Looks like I need some READING classes.
I meant to lead my last post with “Chris -” not “Mike -”. Sorry for any confusion. 
-Paul Q.
Apparently, none of you have had physics. I’m an engineer. What are your qualifications? Spin on the ball would account for a few feet, not 100 (and may actually make it go farther, see back spin). Wind resistance would be in play the whole flight of the ball, not just on the way down. Yes, it would slow the ball a little, not nearly enough to account for 80-100 feet.
Chris,
I can thank Dr. Taylor — CU’s “Mr. Wizard” — and a couple mathematical parents for any understanding of physics. That, and a quick trip to the bookshelf for Adair’s “The Physics of Baseball.” In it, Adair discusses the flight of the ball in a vacuum and he also illustrates the flight path of baseballs hit at various velocities, from 80 to 130 mph. All of the apexes are shifted to the right on the graph, not directly in the middle or even close, as you would suggest.
This is where Dr. Taylor would be proud (aside: his wife, my English teacher, first suggested I go into journalism … perhaps, come to think of it, to get me out of her class and into Mr. Tosh’s): A rule of physics is that it takes the ball (the projectile) as long to get to the apex as it does to drop the same distance from the apex. We know that the ball is traveling faster off the bat to the apex (the impulse) than it does from the apex back to the ground (gravity). Vertical distance is the same, the time has to be the same, and the propulsion (velocity) is different — so, something has to give.
And that would be the lateral distance traveled from apex to landing.
We now return to your regularly scheduled baseball discussion.
dg
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Chris, I took several physics classes at Mizzou about 30 years ago, but I certainly won’t pretend that I’m an expert on the subject. However, the issue of the flight of a baseball is addressed in detail in chapter 2 of the book, “The Physics of Baseball” by Robert K. Adair, Sterling Professor of Physics at Yale University. All of the trajectories for a batted ball depicted in the book show the apex beyond the halfway point of the ball’s flight path. In this chapter, Dr. Adair says the following: “Note that the ball falls at a rather large angle at the end of its flight; the trajectories are not symmetric.” Mike