Sunday, July 21, 2024, was truly a momentous day. A historic day! It was commanded by the mysterious wisdom of the cosmos that you and I should bear witness; set aside your partisan interests today and allow yourself to be humbled by that honor. You—you—were trusted by the very tides of history to record with your eyes and ears these world-shaping events, to protect the truth of them inside of you and to recollect it faithfully for future generations, for whom any true reckoning of the before times will remain inaccessible, forever. And by "you" I of course mean fans of the Cincinnati Reds, and by "world-shaping events" I am obviously referring to this whammo of an opposite-field homer off the bat of Nationals rookie sensation James Wood. A game-winner!
Much as I would like to spend the remainder of this blog gushing about Wood's incredible feats of strength—Wood blasted a 107-mph liner off the buttcheek of Cincinnati's starting pitcher Sunday; he put the ball in play at over 106 mph three times, and the one time he did not the ball traveled to the wall in dead center; his hard hit percentage would rank third in all of baseball today, just behind Shohei Ohtani and just ahead of Juan Soto, if he had enough at-bats on the season—Sunday was about so much more than something that happened in a Nationals game. History does not turn on sockdolagers in afternoon games between fringe contenders for the National League wild card! Obviously Sunday was also about a titanic blast off the bat of Eugenio Suárez, who with one swing accounted for his team's lone run in a loss to the Chicago Cubs. This sucker left the stadium!
Even this majestic blast was a mere distraction, for those in need of one. Say, for example, fans of the Atlanta Braves, who saw Alec Burleson of the visiting St. Louis Cardinals crush a ball onto the roof of the Chop House above their stadium's right-field seats, a whopping 435 feet away. That is a big goddamn dinger right there.
We are just getting warmed up! Have a gander at this stupendous rocket off the bat of Aaron Judge, a 444-foot blast that disappeared from view so quickly and thoroughly that it befuddled the game's camera operator:
Yordan Álvarez of the Houston Astros hit for his first career cycle Sunday, in a loss to the Mariners. The triple was sort of bullcrap—Álvarez thought it was a dinger and stood in the box admiring it before it was caught and then dropped in center field, and poor flailing Julio Rodríguez was injured on the play—but the homer extremely was not. Statcast says this dinger traveled only 429 feet, but I sincerely do not see how that can be possible. Look at where it makes impact! I submit that this ball was ticketed for the Kuiper belt.
Hard as it may be to believe, even this soaring home run was not the biggest news event of the day. Not even close! For one thing, there was this shot from the mighty bat of Shohei Ohtani, another ball that entirely escaped the stadium in which it was clobbered. 473 feet on this monster! Look at the shock on the faces of Ohtani's own teammates, who like the rest of us mere mortals are left to understand the slugger only by his unbelievable heroics:
But more significant even than that was this: Jorge Soler of the San Francisco Giants hit a mammoth 478-foot shot to straightaway center in Colorado. The homer may lack the majestic arc of Ohtani's blast, and is certainly done no favors in terms of a landing zone by the silly batter's eye forest of the Rockies' stadium, but by God it was a big one. The biggest of the season to date!
Adjusting the distance on Soler's big honkin' donger to account for the dead ball of 2024—by this point in last season there had already been five home runs of at least 479 feet—tells us that this ball was well and truly kerpowed to hell. The ball that Soler thwacked Sunday was basically a beanbag even before he ruined it with his blessed lumber. A ball hit this hard back in 2019 would almost certainly have left a smoldering hole in reality itself.
Whew! What a whirlwind it's been, and with all that's already transpired it can be overwhelming to remember that we've got months more of this ahead of us. Sunday was, in some ways, only a beginning: Races and temperatures alike are heating up, contenders are being sorted, and the stakes will only rise from here. I for one can't wait to see what happens next!
