Cruz Missile: The Hardest-Hit Homer Ever

My buddy Joshua Jay sent me the above photograph — he was there today in Pittsburgh for the Brewers-Pirates game, and he watched Oneil Cruz hit a 122.9 mph laser, the hardest hit home run of the Statcast Era.

“Man,” Josh said to his friend after the shot, “that thing was hit hard. Almost no arc.”

And then it blared on the scoreboard: “HARDEST HIT HOME RUN EVER!”

I mean, that might have been a slight overreaction. They haven’t been tracking the speed of the ball off the bat for THAT long. We’re only talking about the last 10 years.

But … yeah. Realistically, it is probably the hardest hit home run ever.

It’s fun to think about what the exit velocity was on, say, Babe Ruth’s legendary 575-foot homer … or the ball Josh Gibson hit out of Yankee Stadium … or Mickey Mantle’s 565-foot blast that gave us the first tape-measure home run … or Reggie Jackson’s blast to the moon in the 1971 All-Star Game at Tiger Stadium.

We can’t know, obviously. But we can guess. There have been three 500-foot home runs hit during the Statcast Era:

• Nomar Mazara’s 505-foot home run in Texas in 2019. It’s still the longest tracked by Statcast. It was a warm night with a 15-20 mph wind blowing out to right. His exit velocity was “only” 109.7 mph, and a number of physicists have questioned whether the ball hit at that speed could really have gone that far, even with the wind.

• Giancarlo Stanton’s savage 504-foot home run at Coors Field in 2016. He hit it at 115.8 mph … and, yes, he did hit it in the light air of Denver. “Oh boy,” the announcer said.

• C.J. Cron’s 504-mph home run at Coors Field in 2022 had a whole different arc than Stanton’s — he hit it high, and it sailed out of sight. It’s modern equivalent of Josh Gibson’s mythical home run that never landed. Cron bashed it 110 mph.

So … how hard would Ruth have had to hit a ball in Detroit to make it go 575 feet? And how strong would he have had to be to generate that much bat speed with a 44-ounce bat? Then, that one is probably more legend than fact.

But Mickey Mantle hit his tape-measure home run in front of everybody. He hit it in Washington in 1953 … it was an extremely windy day, but as Nationals owner Clark Griffith said:

I mean, to hit a ball 560-feet even with that wind, I would guess that had to be a 120-mph exit velocity.

But we’re just guessing.

That’s what’s fun about baseball, right? Oneil Cruz does something incredible in a barely meaningful game in Pittsburgh on a Sunday in late May and it conjures up visions of Mantle and Gibson and Reggie and the rest.

My buddy Josh will never forget being in the ballpark for what may very well have been the hardest home run ever hit. The estimated distance on Cruz’s shot was a comparatively modest 432 feet, but that’s because he hit it on a line at a 23-degree launch angle.

If he’d hit that same ball at 28 degrees, it probably goes 510-515 feet.

If he’d hit that ball at 28 degrees at Coors Field, it might have gone 540 or 550.

Oneil Cruz is not quite a great player. He strikes out too much, and he’s still figuring out his way as a defensive outfielder. And he plays on a going-nowhere Pirates team.

But at any moment, on any night, Cruz can take your breath away. He leads the league in stolen bases. He has six of the top 10 highest velocity hits of 2025. And he has that swing, one of the most remarkable swings in the history of baseball, and we’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

📓 This is Joe’s Notebook.
Riffs, jokes, instant reactions, and nonsense in real time.
→ Sign up to get the JoeBlogs newsletter.
→ Upgrade for access to all of JoeBlogs — and the friendliest community on the internet.
→ Share this post with a friend who loves baseball.