For a night, baseball’s defining distances will no longer be 60 feet, 6 inches or 90 feet. Instead, the attention will turn to the quest for more distant reaches during Monday’s Home Run Derby, and the anticipation that maybe, just maybe, someone will launch a ball 500 feet.
It’s happened before, of course. Indeed, it’s happened at Fenway at least once — or so the single red seat in section 42, row 37, seat 21 suggests. Asked for his thoughts on whether anyone might have reached that remote location in Fenway Park, however, David Ortiz developed the first warning signs of the upper respiratory infection that sidelined him on Sunday amidst a brief spasm.
red seat?” Ortiz inquired. “Cough — bull — cough.”
The expulsion occurred twice, before Ortiz roared with laughter in the Sox dugout.
“I don’t think anyone has ever hit one there,” said Ortiz. “I went up there and sat there one time. That’s far, brother. Listen, do you see the No. 1 [Bobby Doerr’s retired uniform number on the façade above the right field grandstand]? I hit that one time. You know how far it is to that No. 1 from the plate? Very far. And you know how far that red seat is from the No. 1? It’s 25 rows up still. That’s the farthest I’ve ever hit the ball right there, and no one else has gotten to the No. 1 . . . The closest one that I have ever seen — I remember a day game, I hit a ball in that tunnel. But still — I crushed one and it wasn’t even close to that.”
Yet the historical record is fairly clear. The front page of the Boston Globe on June 10, 1946, featured a picture of Joseph Boucher holding the straw hat that Williams’s blast punctured while he sat in the famous seat.
And Ortiz is correct that he’s never come particularly close to it — particularly when factoring in the actual distance the ball would have traveled had it returned to ground level, rather than traveling “just” the roughly 502 feet from home plate (the official distance quoted by the Sox in describing the distance it traveled) before bouncing off Boucher’s head.
“If you adjust things so that the ball hits the red seat, 500 feet horizontal distance, 30 feet above ground level, then the ball would have gone about 535 feet,” said physicist Alan Nathan.
There’s no evidence that anyone at Fenway — especially in recent years — has approached the Williams blast. Other players throughout history — from Babe Ruth to Mickey Mantle to Reggie Jackson — have hit 500-footers — but they are exceptions rather than the rule.
In 2006, Greg Rybarczyk — now a member of the Red Sox front office — launched his Hit Tracker website to measure the true distance of home runs. According to his website (now run by ESPN Stats), the longest Fenway homer since 2006 was a missile in 2014 launched by David Ortiz, which would have gone an estimated 484 feet had it returned to ground level.
