August 31, 2006

Something you don’t see every day…

Today, Aug. 30, 2006, at Jacobs Field, Cleveland’s Travis Hafner hit the two shortest home runs of the 27 hit in the major leagues:

376 feet in the 3rd inning off Toronto’s Shawn Marcum
360 feet in the 8th inning off Jeremy Accardo

The interesting thing is, these two homers were also the two hardest hit of the day, at 116.7 and 117.7 mph, respectively. Each was a screaming line drive into the right field bullpen, with the first getting a bit more air than the second (21.4 degrees elevation to 18.8 degrees).

Here are the flight paths of each homer, with the 3rd inning one first. Note how far apart the time markers are; these are the red circles, which show the ball location at 1 second intervals. This is what a line drive looks like, whereas a high fly ball would have the circles closely spaced, especially at the end of the path where the ball is steeply descending. The blue circles shows the landing point of the balls.