Arizona Diamondbacks ace Zac Gallen has been lights out—his Fangraphs WAR (3.0) leads all major-league pitchers this season—though he got away with one Sunday, playing with fire by leaving a fastball down the middle to Atlanta Braves slugger Marcell Ozuna. Like a shark tasting blood in the water, Ozuna pounced on Gallen’s mistake, narrowly missing what would have been his 12th homer of 2023.
Ozuna was slow out of the box, assuming the ball had safely cleared the outfield wall like all of us. Of course, he was wrong, ultimately settling for an obscenely long, 415-foot single.
This is a great sport because sometimes you can see someone mash a ball 415 feet (a HR in 26 of the 30 parks) and still only end up with a single out of it. pic.twitter.com/P4H8QtPNHR
— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) June 4, 2023
Ozuna isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last player to commit the cardinal sin of pimping a would-be home run, inviting scorn from purists for desecrating baseball’s “unwritten rules.” Still, his showmanship arguably cost the Braves a run, one they desperately needed on an afternoon when Mike Soroka didn’t have his best stuff (3 2/3 IP, 7 H, 5 ER).
One of baseball’s quirky charms is that every stadium has different dimensions and ground rules varying from park to park. According to Mike Petriello of MLB.com, Ozuna’s blast would have exited 26 of 30 ballparks. Unfortunately for the 32-year-old, Chase Field wasn’t one of them.
How’s this for irony? None of the three home runs in Sunday’s game traveled as far as Ozuna’s single. One of the first lessons we learn in sports is to play until the whistle, yet even athletes like Ozuna get caught up in the moment, succumbing to regrettable lapses like the one we saw Sunday in Arizona.
