And the answer is...451.2 FEET


by Mark Brown
Chicago Sun-Times
May 19, 2000

They can argue from here to eternity about how far Glenallen Hill's mammoth rooftop home run would have carried last week if that Waveland apartment building wasn't in the way.

And they can argue about whether Dave Kingman or Bill Nicholson hit one farther.

But take this much to the bank: Hill's homer landed 451.2 feet from home plate.

That was the measurement taken for the Sun-Times on Thursday by Gremley & Biedermann, a Chicago land surveying company whose owners also happen to be Cubs season-ticket holders.

Cubs personnel had estimated Hill's shot at 490 feet, while Hill figured it must have been closer to 700.

Using electronic data-measuring equipment that can correctly calculate distances within one-half inch, the surveying crew measured a direct line from the plate to a spot just in front of the rooftop bleachers at 1032 W. Waveland.

The measurement showed once again that estimated home-run distances are often akin to fish stories.

Despite occasional efforts to introduce uniformity, the measurement of homers in major-league baseball remains a notoriously uneven and unreliable process, with teams taking a variety of approaches. Some teams rely strictly on where the ball lands, while others project how far it would have gone if nothing got in the way.

The result is that a sport devoted to its statistics never will be able to definitively answer two of its most-asked questions: "Who hit the longest homers, and how far did they go?"

Many consider this part of the beauty of the game, extending the myths and legends that stretch from Ruth to Mantle to McGwire and Sosa while fueling after-game debates at the Cubby Bear. But others seek a mathematical or scientific method that will erase the ambiguities.

At Wrigley Field, however, they embrace those ambiguities.

Estimating the length of home runs at Cubs games is the province of public-address announcers Wayne Messmer and Paul Friedman, with help from organist Gary Pressy. They are required to announce their distance estimate by the time the runner rounds third as part of the team's "How far did it fly?" promotion.

For Hill's historic shot, Pressy said the process went something like this:

Messmer to Pressy as ball lands on roof: "How long do you think?"

Pressy eyeballs the 460-foot "foul pole" erected on the building next door to where the ball landed. "Let's add 30 more feet. It's 490."

That was that. Put it in the record books.

"Everything is by the naked eye. Everything is a guesstimate," Pressy explained. "We don't have a chart or anything."

Messmer said there used to be a chart showing the distances to all parts of the bleachers but observed, "It's like an owner's manual. Nobody ever reads it."

Instead, the announcing crew uses the foul poles and the distance markers on the outfield walls as its starting point. Every row of seats adds another three feet, Messmer said.

"If it's halfway up the green (in center field), it's probably 420," Pressy said.

The problems start when a ball is hit out of the ballpark, said Friedman, the p.a. announcer on nights and weekends.

"Once it goes out of the ballpark, it's anybody's guess," he said.

Messmer likes doing it this way.

"This is really kind of supposed to be fun," Messmer said. "I think the controversy of how far did it fly is part of the beauty of the game, and so much of the beauty of the game has been stolen. The beauty of this is that there should never be a definitive answer."

On the South Side, White Sox public-relations director Scott Reifert and his crew estimate the distance of home runs using a faded photocopy of an outfield seating chart with semicircular arcs depicting 10-foot intervals up to 460 feet.

Only five balls have been recorded as going farther than that, the longest being a 483-foot blast by Dan Pasqua for the Sox on April 27, 1991, the year the park opened. Reifert, who wasn't with the Sox at the time, is skeptical of the measurement.

"That seems a little long," he said.

Like the Cubs, the Sox base their distance estimate only on where the ball lands with no projection of how far it might have gone.

For many years, baseball ran a "Tale of the Tape" sponsorship program in most cities that called for the teams to make an estimate of where the ball would have gone if there was no obstruction.

The formula, which many clubs still use, requires knowledge of the height of the spot where the ball lands and a determination of whether the arc of the ball constitutes a line drive, a fly ball or a high fly ball. The various arcs of the ball are assigned a multiplier: 1.2 for line drives, .8 for fly balls and .6 for high fly balls.

With Hill's home run, for instance, the surveyors measured the rooftop's height at 42 feet above home plate.

If Hill's hit was judged a line drive, the teams that follow this process would multiply 42 times 1.2 and add that amount to the 451.2 feet traveled, then announce it as a 502-foot shot.

John Pastier, a Seattle architecture critic who has served as a design consultant on many of the new ballparks, believes some sort of projection is necessary.

"If you don't do that, then you're just talking about chance," said Pastier, who has gone to some lengths to study the issue. A few years back, he published an article showing through architectural diagrams that a McGwire homer off Randy Johnson at the Kingdome could have gone no farther than 468 feet, even though it was announced at 538.

Pastier is dubious, however, about the formula that has been widely used.

"God knows where this started from," Pastier said.

Don Saari, a mathematics professor at Northwestern University, has his own formula. It relies on knowing not only the distance and height measurements of where the ball landed, but also the height of the ball at an earlier point in its flight.

Using measurements provided by WGN radio, Saari estimated Hill's homer would have flown 580 to 600 feet if unimpeded. He said he would reduce that only slightly if he revised his projection based on the Sun-Times data.

Hill now has adopted Saari's 600-foot estimate as his own.

"I went out there by myself and looked at that building the day after the game, while I was waiting for the team bus," Hill said. "I looked up at that building and looked back at the fence and couldn't believe how far it was."

Robert Biedermann, who has measured distances for 23 years as a professional surveyor, knows about approximations.

Do people tend to exaggerate distances? Biedermann was asked.

"Always," he said.

None of this, of course, diminishes Hill's prodigious feat.

Plunking a ball on a Wrigley rooftop is unprecedented, whether at 451 feet or 651 feet. It just shows that people have a tendency to exaggerate these things.

Copyright The Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.