I've witnessed some pretty long home runs in my lifetime. I grew up and first became a baseball fan in an era of big first basemen with big frames — Albert Pujols, Prince Fielder, Ryan Howard, David Ortiz and the like — hitting big, big home runs. The types of home runs that would quiet a crowd, home or away, in utter amazement. My favorites were the types that required so much power, so much effort, so much pure wallop, that you could see it in the transfer of energy from the player to the swing itself. A few of the dingers in the below compilation, for instance, took so much out of Prince Fielder that he left his feet, lost his balance and flung the bat due to all of the momentum.
These were gargantuan home runs from players swinging what appeared to be their absolute hardest. The same can't quite be said — at least not from their outward appearances — for some of today's longest home run hitters. The Giancarlo Stantons, the Aaron Judges, the Mike Trouts... their swings seem relatively smooth, even if the result is a 450-plus-foot jack with some insane exit velocity.
But according to Jim Edmonds, a renowned slugger in his own right, these swings might as well have been all-out efforts when lined up next to the sweet, relaxed stroke of Mark McGwire. And, yes, there are probably several reasons that this was the case — some good and some bad — but the testament of just how much power one man possessed is impressive no matter the situation.
Edmonds joined Bret Boone on "The Boone Podcast" to talk about Big Mac, among other topics.
"I'll tell you what. Stanton and those guys probably have that kind of power that Mark had, but Mark had that kind of power at about a 70 percent, 80 percent swing," Edmonds said. "We used to — when I was in Anaheim, a couple of guys knew him a little bit — and we would always get around the cage and be like, 'come on, somebody get him to swing hard one time.' Like, 'come on, Mark, swing hard. Try to hit the ball out of the stadium, one time.'
"And he would get so flustered and so mad and some of the times they'd make us walk away from the cage because he really didn't like all that attention... he really was a quiet, shy guy. When he would go to Yankee Stadium or Philadelphia or places like that, he would hit underneath. He wouldn't even go outside and hit, he'd hit in the cage, and those were the days he had his biggest games. And it was just the craziest thing I've ever seen."
Look at that! A brief, compact swing that quickly turned into a one-handed strike, and it sailed, oh, just 538 feet.
He'd hit balls so far that the outfield fences weren't the boundaries of concern. Instead, observers had to point their eyes toward the walls of the stadium as a whole to make sure that the ball stayed within the confines of the ballpark.
"I think it was 2000, we were in Colorado, and he started hitting balls over the concourse and over that hot dog stand," Edmonds said. "And there were guys from the Rockies running inside after watching it and telling the clubbies to move their cars because he was hitting it over the stadium and onto the parking lot down below where the bus comes.
"And so the next day we got to the stadium, there [were] no cars there at all. They were all parked in the regular parking areas because he hit the balls out of the stadium and they were landing on the Colorado Rockies' parking lot."
Boone had a similar memory of McGwire hitting baseballs up to the flags in the old Busch Stadium.
"People don't realize, you've got to juice one to hit one in the upper deck, let alone those flags, which is close to going out of the stadium," Boone recalled. "And I would just sit there and sometimes, like you said, it looked like he was putting no effort in. He'd swing one-handed and the ball would keep going. And you had Ronny Gant and Ray Lankford, who were big power guys hitting in the same group, [and] he looked like he was hitting with little leaguers."
To be fair, Gant (6-foot-0, 172 pounds) and Lankford (5-foot-11, 180 pounds) were significantly smaller than McGwire (6-foot-5, 215 pounds). But how would Big Mac have looked in the cages alongside Stanton (6-foot-6, 245 pounds) and Judge (6-foot-7, 282 pounds) and Trout (6-foot-2, 235 pounds), who Edmonds said looks like Brian Urlacher in a baseball uniform? How's that for a Home Run Derby?
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