Today we start one of my favorite series of the offseason. If Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux have taught us anything it’s that everyone loves the long ball. Ok, maybe that wasn’t the exact takeaway from those two guys, but long home runs have been something people have talked about for over a hundred years. Only in the last decade or so, though, have we truly been able to measure their distance with *some* accuracy. Thanks to ball tracking in the big leagues we can compare 1-to-1 how far a baseball went. Every week for the next few months we’re going to be counting down the 10 longest home runs hit by the Cincinnati Reds in the 2024 season.
The 10th longest home run of the season in 2024 by a Red was on May 16th by Will Benson. The home run came in the 1st inning when Benson clobbered a fastball from Tyler Glasnow of the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium.
The Video
The Metrics Behind The Blast
Will Benson was just getting the game started. He had battled with Tyler Glasnow for five pitches already, but the 6th pitch of the game caught too much of the sweet part of the plate and the Reds outfielder got all of it as he gave some fan a nice souvenir in the right field bleachers roughly 439 feet from home plate.
Distance Metrics
Distance: 439 Feet
Reds Ranks: 10th
Major League Baseball Rank: 243rd (tie)
Will Benson Rank: 1
Other Metrics
Launch Angle: 31°
Exit Velocity: 107.5 MPH
Reds Exit Velocity Rank (home runs only): 30th (out of 174)
MLB Exit Velocity Rank (home runs only): 1209th (out of 5445)
The Story Behind The Blast
Will Benson had been in a slump entering the game. He was hitting just .139 in May entering the day, and he was slugging just .250 on the month. His only home run of May had come two days earlier in Arizona. For much of the month he had been hitting 8th or 9th, but this was the third straight day he was in the leadoff spot.
Tyler Glasnow had started Benson out with three fastballs in a row, with Benson fouling off the third on to make it a 2-1 count. He followed up with two straight sliders and Benson fouled both of them off, too. Glasnow probably should have gone with another slider, or his catcher should have called for a target not dead-red middle of the plate. The 96 MPH fastball was pretty close to the target and that’s not a good thing when the glove is centered like that.
Benson’s 6th home run of the year put the Reds up 1-0 and they never looked back as they were up 7-0 until the Dodgers finally got on the board in the bottom of the 9th before Cincinnati sealed a 7-2 win to open up the series. Los Angeles would win the next three games to earn the series win.
You can follow along the entire series here
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