Tale of the tape: Inside Mcmahon’s 495-foot home run
Sam Hilliard heard the ball explode off Ryan Mcmahon’s bat.
“It was much louder than a normal hit,” he said. “I mean, they talk about the crack of the bat, right? This was it.”
Then Hilliard watched the ball rocket high into the Colorado night sky, over the wall, over the visitor’s bullpen and into the second deck in rightcenter field. The home run touched down several rows above the circular sign honoring the retired No. 17 jersey number of Todd Helton.
“Right when ‘Mac’ hit it, we were like, ‘Holy cow, that went really far!’ ” Hilliard said. “We all started checking our ipads to see how far it went.”
Hilliard was the first one in the dugout to discover just how far the home run traveled.
“I was on my ipad, refreshing, refreshing, refreshing,” Hilliard said. “I was the first one to see it and I went around the dugout and said, ‘Yo, guys, that went 495!’ Everybody’s like, ‘What?!” Jaws were dropping.”
Let the record show that Mcmahon’s 495-foot, seventh-inning, two-run home run off St. Louis Cardinals reliever T.J. Mcfarland in the Rockies’ 16-5 win on Tuesday night ranks as the longest by a Rockies player in the Statcast era (since 2015) and the fourth-longest in Coors Field history. The sky-high blast fell one foot shy of this year’s longest home run by the Marlins’ Jesús Sánchez at Coors on May 30.
“I got it pretty good,” Mcmahon deadpanned. “It’s kind of cool, right? I mean, think about all of the guys on the list and all of the great players who have come through here. Plus, it will be a great bar trivia question
someday.”
Great players? How about Barry Bonds, Larry Walker, Giancarlo Stanton, Mike Piazza, Andres Galarraga and Trevor Story, all of whom have launched tape-measure moonshots at Coors Field.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, all but one of the top-10 longest homers at Coors Field were hit in the hot, dry months of August and September. The lone expectation was Sánchez’s homer earlier this season.
Once upon a time, Story’s 505-foot blast in 2018 ranked as the longest in the ballpark’s history. Until it wasn’t. More on that later.
Officially, Stanton’s 504foot homer on Aug. 6, 2016, against Rockies righthander Chad Bettis stands as the longest homer in Coors Field history.
Baseball, of course, lives and breaths statistics, now more than ever in the age of Statcast, which measures everything from the velocity of pitches to the exit velocity and launch angle of a hit, to a player’s sprint speed from home plate to first base.
For stat geeks, Mcmahon’s home run came off his bat at 110.4 mph on Mcfarland’s 1-0 changeup clocked at 82 mph. The home run ranked as only the 10th-hardest hit ball by Mcmahon this season. The third baseman’s hardest-hit ball was a 113.7 mph single on Aug. 2 at San Diego off Steven Wilson. Mcmahon’s home run had a 33-degree launch angle, reached an apex of 130 feet, and had a hang time of 6.3 seconds.
Those numbers aren’t close to major league highs, though. The longest hang time for a homer this season came off the bat of first baseman Luke Voit, the former San Diego first baseman who was traded to Washington. Voit’s homer on July 29 vs the Twins at Petco Park hung in the air for 7.1 seconds and reached a height of 178 feet.
“That was a punt,” Voit told the San Diego Uniontribune. “A little hang-time fair catch right there. Got ’em pinned at the 5-yard line.”
Mcmahon didn’t see where his Ruthian homer landed until he saw it on video after the game, but he knew that he’d done something special.
“A lot of home runs are well-hit,” he said. “But the really long homers are the pure ones. They’re the ones you catch 100%. It’s an incredible feeling when it comes off the bat.
“It’s like squaring up a golf ball on a tee shot and it just jumps off the club. You feel the ball compress, you feel the trampoline effect. That’s what it’s like. As soon as you hit it, it’s like, ‘If that’s not out, I have no juice and I can’t consider myself a power hitter.’ “
Story, now playing for the Red Sox, has incredible power and he showed it off on Sept. 5, 2018, at Coors Field. On that memorable night against San Francisco he launched three home runs that traveled a combined 1,380 feet.
The crown jewel was his second blast, coming off Giants left-hander Andrew Suarez. Statcast measured the home run at 505 feet and proclaimed it the longest in Coors Field history. When the Rockies released a Story bobblehead on June 30, 2019, the base was stamped with “505.”
Alas, Story’s homer was reviewed in 2020 and the distance was trimmed from 505 feet to 487 feet.
“The Story home run that was initially measured by Statcast at 505 feet was changed to 487 feet with the release of a new version of Statcast prior to the 2020 season,” explained Cory Little, the Rockies’ director of communications. “According to Major League Baseball, the new measurement system instituted prior to that season was more accurate, and in light of that, they went and re-examined a number of home run distances from previous seasons. Story’s home run distance was one of a few that was changed.”
Story handled his home run’s demotion with a sense of humor.
“I mean, if 505 is on the bobblehead, it has to be true, right?” he said with a laugh. “But I saw Mac’s homer the other day. That was big boy territory.”
Statcast is a tracking technology that allows for the collection and analysis of baseball data. The system was installed in all 30 major league ballparks in 2015. From 2015-19, Statcast consisted of a combination of camera and radar systems. That changed in 2020, with the arrival of Hawk-eye. A camera system previously known for powering the instant replay system in professional tennis, Hawk-eye offers increased tracking ability.
Each ballclub now has 12 Hawk-eye cameras positioned around its ballpark. Five of those focus on pitch tracking. The other seven are dedicated to tracking players and batted balls. The new system has raised the percentage of batted balls that get tracked from roughly 89% to 99%.
Following is the information tracked and gathered by Statcast:
• Arm strength: How hard, in miles per hour, a fielder throws the ball.• Base-to-base time: How much time, in seconds, it takes a runner to get from one base to another.• Distance covered: How far, in feet, a fielder or runner has traveled on a play.• Extension: How far off the mound, in feet, a pitcher releases the pitch.• Exit velocity: How fast, in miles per hour, a ball was hit by a batter.• Launch angle: How high, in degrees, a ball was hit by a batter.• Lead distance: How far, in feet, a runner is ranging off the bag at the time of a pitcher’s first movement or pitch release.• Pitch velocity: How hard, in miles per hour, a pitch is thrown.• Pop time: How quickly, in seconds, a catcher can get the ball out of his glove and to the base on a stolen base or pickoff attempt.• Spin rate: How much spin, in revolutions per minute, a pitch was thrown with.