Big Fly

Cracked Bats did not have its regular appearance in the rotating media wall on MILB.com, so I missed this story until I started looking around the site last night.

It kept going and going and going
Kurpiel's 1972 blast may have traveled 670 feet

Moana Stadium in Reno sits some 4,500 feet above sea level and let's just say at that altitude, baseballs have a tendency to travel a bit. Ed Kurpiel can tell you.

After all, "Fast Eddy" connected for one of the longest home runs ever hit in Reno. In fact, Kurpiel's shot on May 31, 1972 could be one of the longest homers hit anywhere, depending on what you believe.
The line between myth and fact can sometimes be blurred when talking about such monumental blasts, but a few things are certain about what Kurpiel did that evening.

The former first-round draft pick of the Cardinals (1971) was playing for the Modesto Reds in the Class A California League. The Reds topped the Reno Silver Sox, 11-5, in the game in question and Kurpiel hit a pair of homers off starter and loser Richard Kavanaugh.

The debate, however, begins when discussing his first-inning homer -- a three-run blast that hugged the right-field line before taking off into the night. Steve Sneddon was covering the game for The Reno Gazette-Journal and reported in his game story the following day that the ball traveled about 450 feet in the air, finally coming to rest approximately 500 feet from home plate.

But Sneddon arrived at that figure without measuring the blast himself. It wasn't until years later that he and another writer decided to actually measure how far the ball traveled. Using a 200-foot fiberglass tape measure, the pair determined that the ball traveled 738 feet from home plate before coming to a stop.

You know, I hit a long home run in high school once. It was estimated to go a full 335 feet. But, the next time that I'm home, I'm going to take a 25-foot tape measure and remeasure. I'll bet it went twice as far...in my head

Although there is a landmark in Reno to help:

There was -- and still is -- a large swimming pool beyond where the right-field fence stood. Sneddon said there were other balls that came close to matching the one Kurpiel hit, but they couldn't be measured because they landed on the roof above the pool. Kurpiel's blast cleared the roof.

"That ball went a long, long way," Sneddon said. "There was a kid riding a bicycle out on the street and the ball landed in front of him. He almost lost control of his bike. That was a monster."

A home run that scared a child. That's memorable.