They say man is the measure of all things. That maxim doesn’t account for Aaron Judge.
During the Home Run Derby during this year’s MLB All Star Game, Judge chalked up some phenomenal numbers: 47 homers over 29 ‘outs,’ four miles of home runs, four of those at 500+ feet, 16 of those at 115 mph+, four of the longest Derby homers of the Statcast era (granted, this is the Derby), two of which are just the longest homers in the Statcast era period—the stats from his Monday night showing go on and on, and only just stay nuts.
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But you couldn’t help but feel that even those insane stats were cut short by one of Judge’s swings. The ball hit the rafters of Marlins Park. MLB ruled the hit, which grazed the roof at an insane 170 ft and 300 ft out, a live fly ball and thus an out as it bounced off the girders, based on some arcane MLB rules. But the thing is: no one was ever supposed to hit the ceiling.
Just take a look:
According to Sports Illustrated, when the engineers at Walter P. Moore were designing the roof of Marlins Park, they went to some NASA-designed equations to determine the highest humanly possible height of a ball in play. They calculated your volumetric approximations based on air density and temperature, trajectories, flight paths, wireless crapabilities, moving on. And what they came up with was a height of 210 ft above 2nd base. No human should be able to hit a ball 210 feet above second base.
Granted, Judge’s swing hit at 170 ft in an area that was not directly above second base, but this is also an area that the engineers accounted for in their algorithm that took into account “all the possible batted ball flight paths,” per SI’s unattributed quote.
But that wasn’t enough. Judge also hit the roof with a warmup blast:
Yup, it’s confirmed: Judge is superhuman, not beholden to the Earth laws of us mere mortals. Calculate that.