Earlier this week over at Red Reporter, Wick Terrell did the math on Joey Votto’s walks over the last decade. He figured out that Votto’s 1046 walks would get him from Great American Ballpark to the Greater Cincinnati Airport with a few miles to spare. The article got me to thinking, though: How far could we get on the distance for home runs hit by the Cincinnati Reds in 2019? And which individual player could get the furthest on his own home run totals?
If there was ever a time to dive into something so pointless and silly, it’s when there’s no baseball going on, I can’t leave my house for health reasons, and I’ve got plenty of time to do stupid things, right? RIGHT!
In 2019 the Reds hit a total of 227 home runs. Unfortunately, Trackman doesn’t always pick up the ball – giving us distance on just 216 of them. For the sake of the math, we’re just going to give the 11 we don’t have any data for the average distance for Cincinnati home runs of 396 feet.
With that out of the way, let’s to some math of our own! The 227 home runs hit by the Cincinnati Reds in 2019 was good for a distance of 89,774 feet. That’s 17 miles and 14 feet. Assuming that we were capable of going in a perfectly straight line from home plate at Great American Ballpark here’s all of the places you would be able to reach all of the areas in the circle below:
That’s a pretty big area. You could certainly get to my residence, and then about five miles back towards home plate. Given the proximity of Great American Ballpark to the river, it’s easy to accept that the circle would span two states – but it also, barely, reaches into Indiana as well.
Eugenio Suarez hit a team best 49 home runs during the 2019 season. It set a record for most home runs in a single season by a Venezuelan-born player in Major League history. His home runs went a combined 19,590 feet. That’s 3 miles and 3750 feet. Here’s what the area for Suarez would cover from home plate at Great American Ballpark:
That doesn’t get us quite as far out as the entire team, obviously. But it does get us to some fun places. We could visit Nipper Stadium, the Cincinnati Zoo, Rhinegeist Brewery, four different Gold Star Chili restaurants, and four different LaRosa’s Pizzerias. And hey, maybe we could see the American Sign Museum, but not actually enter the building.
Speaking of home runs and distances, did you miss our series that we ran over the winter on the longest home runs of the year by the Reds players? Each week we broke down one of the 10 longest home runs of the 2019 season – culminating with Josh VanMeter’s team best 463-foot home run in Milwaukee. Check out the entire series here.