Report: Aaron Judge Hit A Ball Higher Than NASA Equations Thought Possible
Ryan Mayer
We're a little over three days removed from the ridiculous show of power that Aaron Judge put on at Marlins Park during the Home Run Derby on Monday night, and it's still a topic of conversation among many baseball insiders and fans. One of the main conversation points is the balls Judge hit so high that they ended up hitting the roof at the stadium and falling into play, not counting as a home run.
Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, told an interesting anecdote in his latest column that showed how otherworldly that was, because when building the park, the Marlins specifically tried to make it so that no player could hit the roof. From the story:
"Back when the engineers from Walter P. Moore were designing the retractable roof of Marlins Park, they set out to determine how high the roof would have to be so as not to interfere with balls in play. They studied the air density and temperatures of Miami and plugged those variables into equations from NASA. Then they wrote an algorithm "to generate a volumetric approximation of all the possible batted ball flight paths" and then applied it to their Building Information Modeling to determine the final geometry of the roof structure.
The engineers finally arrived at a height of 210 feet above the ground at its apex (above second base) to make sure no batted ball hit the roof. It tapered to a low of 128 feet above the ground in deep right-centerfield."
Verducci has more in the column on how high exactly the Marlins calculated that blast from Judge to be, head over to the column to read further. Judge didn't only hit the roof in the Derby, he apparently hit it during BP as well.
That's an impressive amount of power to say the least.
