Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. hit a homer with a negative-6 degree launch angle originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
When you picture a home run in your mind’s eye, there are a couple possibilities.
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There’s the majestic, towering, light tower-scraping blast. And there’s the frozen rope line drive. There might even be the one that barely ekes it’s way over the wall at all. And hey, maybe you just thought of an inside-the-park home run.
But what you almost certainly didn’t picture is a ground ball.
Kansas City Royals superstar Bobby Witt Jr. hit a home run on a grounder on Saturday.
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With all the data available to us now, we know that Witt’s homer came on a launch angle of negative-six degrees — meaning it traveled immediately at a downward angle when it was hit.
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Yet there Witt was, sliding home with an inside-the-parker, one ruled by the scorekeeper to be a home run, no errors involved.
Have a look for yourself:
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That wasn’t the prettiest outfielding by Kerry Carpenter in right field. While it’s not really an error by the statistical measure, it clearly is a mistake by Carpenter to stumble through his opportunity like that.
And then it was unfortunate for the Tigers, because Witt is one of baseball’s fastest players. When that baseball bounced away, Witt likely sniffed out the chance to score right away, and he put on all the jets.
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It’s pretty safe to say there won’t be another home run hit at an angle like this all season.
That’s part of what makes baseball special. You never know what you’re going to get, including a ground ball for a home run.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source sports.yahoo.com ’
