By Request, The Best Foul Ball
Or, at least, what you might come away thinking is the second best.
My good friend Tim Livingston, the former baseball broadcaster who first invited me out to see a Sonoma Stompers game, just sent me this:
From time to time, the single greatest at-bat I’ve ever seen comes to mind, and the first thing I think of isn’t the result of it. It might not even be the second! I’m talking about the April 16, 2004 showdown between Barry Bonds and Eric Gagné. Bonds famously fouls off a pitch from Gagné about 30-40 feet foul and into McCovey Cove, and then has the wherewithal on the next pitch to not only square up a faster pitch, but hit it out to dead-center field. So I ask: What is the best foul ball you think has ever been hit?
What you don’t know is that Tim sent this to me less than 24 hours after he became a FATHER!!! Congratulations to Tim! Now, imagine how important this question must be to Tim if during those specific hours of his life he still couldn’t get it off his mind. A question this important to somebody this important can’t be ignored, so I’ll very briefly answer it.
I will say up front that my answer can’t be “the one Bonds hit into McCovey Cove off Gagné in 2004,” even though it is, because then I would have no value to Tim. I will also say up front that my alternate answer is satisfying and definitive.
It’s not that easy to answer, though. There are few, if any, iconic foul balls, except for those that were caught or (as in the 2003 NLCS) famously not quite caught. With even the best, most majestic long foul balls, we spend about six seconds watching them and then move on. They generally don’t get replayed on the broadcast, let alone added to any highlight reels, for three reasons:
1. Many of them (and I’ve just watched several score of these) are not very photogenic. The ones that are pulled way foul run into stands before they’ve had a lot of time to travel. The ones that are pulled slightly foul often get lost in space, because the backdrops for them are muddled or the cameras aren’t in the right place. We never see the Bonds foul ball off Gagné land, because it lands in a surveillance dead-zone. When that ball is landing, this is the shot:
Cool.
2. They generally don’t get good reactions by the broadcasters or anybody in uniform. The drama immediately leaks out of them, and—because they don’t count—they’re treated as curiosities rather than accomplishments.
3. There aren’t many of them. It turns out that hitting a baseball foul is not the best way to hit it extremely far. So, while there are some long foul balls, there aren’t as many as you’d think. Only three foul balls this year have been hit more than 425 feet, for instance, and the furthest was just 450 feet. By contrast, 343 fair balls have been hit 425+ this year, and 53 have topped 450. So there are fewer to choose from.
Collectively, the superlong foul balls get no respect, less respect even than an extremely long batting practice home run will sometimes get. [Ha, five minutes after I wrote the previous sentence, the Giants’ broadcast showed a clip of Barry Bonds hitting BP bombs in Coors Field during his prime.] So, for instance, this one that Joey Gallo hits 112 mph—as soon as he hits it, he quits watching it, the pitcher quits watching it, the catcher quits watching it, even as the ball travels out of the stadium.
Every person in the crowd is watching it, so it was obviously glorious and majestic and something you couldn’t turn away from. But the players won’t credit it as an athletic achievement.
In the moments after Juan Soto hit the second-longest foul ball this season—
—the broadcast tried multiple cuts to his teammates, to catch them being awed. Instead, they got his teammates acting bored:
Last example. When Yordan Álvarez hit this ball 113 mph at a 36 degree launch angle right down the line, fair,
here is how the broadcast called it:
BROADCASTER 1: Oh My GOODNESS> ARE YOU kidding ME > THIS BALL IS UN-- > WAYYY OUT OF HERE!!! > ONE of the LONGEST HOME RUNS IN the HISTORY OF THIS BALLpark! >>>>>> I don't think a ball's EVER landed up there.
BROADCASTER 2: i’m tingly
On the other hand, when Pete Alonso hit this ball 113 mph at a 36 degree launch angle right down the line, but foul,
here is how his broadcast called it:
broadcaster 1: And he launches one
broadcaster 2, overlapping: oh-ho-ho
broadcaster 1: deep left field, right down the line, gone if it stays fair...
broadcaster 1: … and that ball is a foul ball.
broadcaster 2: oh man that was a bomb.
Throughout the Pete Alonso call, there’s concern more than awe. The ball was maybe five feet foul,
as a slow-motion replay would show. But those five feet turned it from an athletic achievement into a bummer. Even “oh man that was a bomb” was said with a tone of regret more than admiration.
So, okay, for various reasons foul balls don’t do it for anybody. There are few great foul balls. But here is the best foul ball:
Reason 1. Most deep fouls produce disappointment; why couldn’t they have been fair! But in this case, Stanton has swung at a two-strike back-foot slider that’s not in the strike zone. He’s on his back knee when he makes contact. He’s supposed to have struck out on that pitch. So besides hitting the hardest baseball you’ve ever seen, he has stayed alive in the at-bat—a baseball achievement!
Reason 2: He makes the pitcher do a dance. Stanton hits it so hard that the pitcher briefly reverts to a middle schooler, and does the sort of awkward dance step he did during the eighth-grade promotion dance.
Reason 3: This ball is obviously hit VERY hard, but there is some sort of optical illusion going on here that makes it look like it’s hit even harder—that makes it look like it gets a sudden burst of elevation halfway out. It’s probably easier to see on the full video than on a GIF, so click on the full video if you will. The illusion—at least, for me, comes at this point, when the ball passes these light reflections way out in left field.
I think the eyes briefly lose track of the ball and think one of those light reflections is the ball, and then when the eyes pick up the ball again… it’s not important. The ball jumps!
Reason 4: The ball disappears down a hallway. Stanton sent this ball out of one dimension and into the hallway dimension, a quiet and sterile place where somebody might go to make an important phone call. As Tim said when I brought him this foul ball, he said: “Imagine coming out of the bathroom in that hallway and having that ball bouncing at you.” Yes, exactly! A hallway implies many things, one of which is endless bouncing.
Reason 5: He hits it past the last fans, and they take off running (down the hallway) after it.
Or, alternately, maybe they take off running (down the hallway) away from Giancarlo Stanton, the way that in movies crowds of people turn and run away when the spaceship starts firing death lasers.
Reason 6: Foul balls often make baseballs look less photogenic. This one, speeding past ballpark landmarks as it does, and very clearly visible almost the whole way, puts the sizzle in better perspective than if it has been a fair ball. This Giancarlo Stanton home run was hit fair, at the same launch angle and exit velo as the foul ball. Which is more visually arresting? Seems obviously to be the foul ball, to me.
**
I won’t say that we should treat long foul balls as important, or as highlights on par with long home runs. They don’t count, I get it.
But consider the Bonds/Gagné matchup, which produced (as Tim says, and as many people including myself agree) one of the greatest baseball matchups of all-time. With a three-run lead and one runner on, Gagné had no incentive to walk Bonds, so he went right after him with fastball after fastball, in an extraordinary 1v1 matchup of power on power during an era when everybody else was just automatically walking Bonds. Gagné almost won the at-bat; then Bonds hit the foul ball; then Bonds hit the home run.
But both of the participants have since spoken at length about that matchup. There’s a backstory: Gagné had promised Bonds, a couple years earlier during a players’ tour of Japan, that if they were ever in a situation in which Bonds was less than the tying run, Gagné would go after him with nothing but fastballs. Well, Gagné says the deal is that he was allowed to throw one off-speed pitch, while Bonds says the deal was all fastballs. Either way, after Gagné threw his one off-speed pitch, he stuck to the deal and threw fastball after fastball right at Bonds. It wasn’t strategy that caused him to go right at Bonds like that; it was curiosity, competitiveness and exhibition. It wasn’t entirely… real. But that makes it cooler, not less cool.
Foul balls aren’t the same thing, I’m not saying they are, but there’s some connection between “foul balls don’t actually count” and “Bonds/Gagné wasn’t actually real” that my brain is grasping for. Something about appreciating things on their own terms. Some foul balls really travel. I enjoyed watching them do so. Thanks for the question and everything else, Tim.
Only Sam Miller can bring out the magic in foul balls.
So, I've never really used baseball savant (besides clicking on links you and others post). But, I was trying to find a Schwarber foul from last year's postseaon. He hit 6 HRs last year in the playoffs, and it was during one of those at bats where he crushed a ball foul. I don't think it was his monster 488 ft HR in game 1 of the NLCS, so one of the other 5.
Anyway, after he crushed the foul ball, I just had a feeling he was on to that pitcher. And a pitch or two later he crushes one (to right center I believe).
That's one that I immediately thought of. Felt like the HR was inevitable.