The immediacy of data is something that many people love about modern baseball, as things like Statcast can provide instant information about exit velocity and launch angle, which in turn can be turned into stats about expected batting average on each swing and more.
However, some things you don’t need numbers to show you how incredible a hit was, as you can instead just marvel at how far it went or how fast it came off of the bat — I personally think Statcast often shorts long home runs on distance and prefer to eyeball it and proclaim things went “about 500 feet” because they looked awesome. We got one such example on Wednesday night in the world of Minor League Baseball, when Gabriel Moreno of the Buffalo Bisons hit a 111 mile per hour line drive for a ground rule double.
When spelled out like that, you might think, “wow, that’s a hard hit double,” but let me tell you something, friends, those numbers don’t do justice to how cool this double was. You see, Moreno hit the ball so damn hard it cratered into the padding in the wall and got stuck, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen.
Gabriel Moreno doubles INTO the wall!
The top @BlueJays prospect rips one 111 mph off the bat for the @BuffaloBisons, and the ball finds a home in the padding. pic.twitter.com/f4FWcQN1kb
— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) August 18, 2022
Now, I’ve seen the ball get stuck in the seams of padding, on the underside of the padding, and even on top of a wall. But never have I seen a baseball that was hit hard enough to just crater into the wall itself, to the dismay of everyone. The home plate umpire was confused initially and signaled for a home run, but the left fielder had to point to it and show that, no, this baseball was just stuck in the wall.
If I were the Blue Jays, I’d call this young man up right now, if for nothing else than he is clearly too strong for Minor League ballpark infrastructure.