ATLANTA — We should all hope to be as lucky in our lives as Jonathan McCright, an Atlanta Braves fan from Lilburn, Georgia, was on Monday at the MLB Home Run Derby. McCright and his son, George, were walking in the concourse out past right field — way, way out past right, without even a view of the field — when the crowd around them jolted to attention.
Seattle’s Cal Raleigh was swinging in the Derby, you see, and the Big Dumper had just sent a massive jack deep into the Georgia night … right in the general direction of Jonathan and George.
The ball caromed off the top of the Chop House, Truist Park’s exclusive-admission hangout, and shot straight down toward Jonathan. He stuck a hand out, snared it out of the air and began celebrating like he’d just snagged the final out of the World Series.
“I just stuck up my hand,” Jonathan said a few minutes later, as other fans gathered around the ball, “and there it was.”
Not bad for a guy who said he never played baseball.
It was that kind of night at the Derby. The action was at the plate. But the real drama was in the stands.
Even though Jonathan and those around him stood something like 540 feet from home plate, they all probably should’ve been watching for baseballs exiting the park at high velocity. Heck, everyone between home plate and the Florida border probably should’ve had their heads on a swivel.
Derby champ Raleigh, runner-up Junior Caminero of Tampa Bay and six more of baseball’s finest dinger-smackers sent a total of 210 home runs over the Truist Park fences, and the vast majority of them ended up in the hands of lucky fans such as Jonathan and George … though rarely without a fight.
Far beyond the right-field stands, Kayla Reese stood behind the cash register at the All-Star Grill and recounted how an Oneil Cruz fly ball nearly hit her stand. “It scared me!” she said with a laugh. “I didn’t think they could hit it this far!”
Most humans can’t. It takes a special player and a special swing to jack a ball more than 500 feet, the way Cruz did with his massive blast that cleared the entire right-field stands.
The Pirates’ outfielder wasn’t able to ride that massive swing into the finals — Raleigh defeated him in the second round — but his 513-foot moon shot flew farther than any regular-season or playoff homer ever has at Truist Park. (Ronald Acuña Jr. holds that record, at 495 feet.)
The hail of dingers created scenes of madness in the stands.
There are basically two overarching strategies when you’re trying to catch a home run ball: grab it on the fly or catch it on the rebound. Your odds of success also go way up if you’re in the stands, rather than standing behind them.
For instance, Section 155 in right field saw literal dozens of homers fall into the gloves — and hands and probably faces, too — of its fans. Fans in the nearby standing-room-only section booed whenever a ball landed in the stands in front of the Chop House rather than reaching them.
Over in left field, Jake and Aidan, two brothers from Roswell, Georgia, who declined to give their last name for reasons that will immediately become obvious, recounted how they’d been kicked out of three different sets of reserved seats when the actual owners arrived.
“They were nice about it,” Aidan said. “They said they would have done the same thing if they were in our place.”
And so the brothers stood in left field with hundreds of others, hoping for taters to come their way.
“You’ve got to play the bounce,” Juan Mena of Lawrenceville, Georgia, said before the Derby began. He sported a vintage Mets Tom Seaver jersey and a massive Mizuno glove he’d bought for $20. “I’m going to stay back and watch for the rebound, like Dennis Rodman.”
“You’ve got to be on the edges. You can’t get blocked in,” said Jasper Hankin of Los Angeles, who posted up in left field with his cousin Chase.
Unfortunately for them and the rest of the left-field fans, the majority of the action was in right field, given that the Derby’s true power hitters were lefties.
Well, most of them. As I was finishing this article, Caminero rocketed not one, but two shots deep into the left-field section of stands serving as an auxiliary media center. Both landed just a few feet from me, careening off tables, chairs and even laptops.
Nowhere was safe!
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