Today we are moving forward in this series and are up to the 8th longest home run hit by a Cincinnati Reds player in the 2024 season.
If Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux have taught us anything it’s that everyone loves the long ball. Ok, perhaps that wasn’t exactly the 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 Monday 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.
Elly De La Cruz is making his first appearance on this list, but it won’t be his final appearance. This home run came early in the season against Matt Waldron in San Diego against the Padres.
Matt Waldron was ahead of De La Cruz 0-2 after back-to-back knuckleballs to begin the at-bat. The Reds shortstop swung and missed the first one and then fouled off the second one. Waldron opted to try something different for the third pitch. Maybe he shouldn’t have because his 91.4 MPH sinker didn’t work out as he had hoped as it caught the middle of the zone and the fat part of the bat and landed 443 feet beyond the plate in center.
This was the first game of a road series in San Diego, and in this game Elly De La Cruz was the second hitter of the day. Matt Waldron struck out Will Benson on three pitches and had followed up by throwing two strikes to De La Cruz to start his at-bat, too. It was that third pitch that was a mistake as Waldron’s sinker did not sink and he paid the price for it.
The solo home run put the Reds in the lead, but the Padres grabbed a run of their own on a Jurickson Profar home run. Cincinnati would score two more runs in the top of the 2nd and never look back as they went on to win 5-2. The win would be the final of the series as the team went on an 8-game losing streak starting the next day.
Leave a Reply