The Seattle Mariners’ Nelson Cruz hits a lot of dingers. On the season, he’s hit 39 of them. And they usually go far. Take Friday night, for example, when Cruz hit a 454-foot homer vs the Twins at Minnesota’s Target Field:
There are moonshots, and then there’s this.
Nellie almost put it in someone’s soup. https://t.co/ivAWHzJkX9 pic.twitter.com/bCMYY7ZTFX
— Mariners (@Mariners) September 24, 2016
Chad Graff, a sports reporter for the Pioneer Press in Minnesota, said that he was at the 2014 MLB Home Run Derby at Target Field, and had never seen homers like the one Cruz hit.
I covered the home run derby at Target Field and haven’t seen homers like the 454 foot one Nelson Cruz just hit out. Twins trail 10-1. — Chad Graff (@ChadGraff) September 24, 2016
Well, Graff must be completely blown away by what happened on Saturday night at Target Field, as Cruz hit a 493-foot (!) blast:
🚨 493 feet! 🚨@ncboomstick23 crushes the 2nd-longest HR of 2016. #Statcast pic.twitter.com/VWBmbdTmyZ
— #Statcast (@statcast) September 25, 2016
That is second in the majors only to Giancarlo Stanton’s 504-foot homer this year, and Stanton’s homer took place in the thin air at Denver’s Coors Field. So, maybe we should just consider Cruz’s homer No. 1.