SI:AM | These Are Two of the Weirdest Home Run Swings You’ll Ever See

Of course one of them was by Giancarlo Stanton.

Toronto's Ernie Clement somehow turned this eye-level pitch into a home run. / Sportsnet

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. A 60-homer season is starting to seem more and more likely for Aaron Judge. 

In today’s SI:AM: 

🏆 Super Bowl three-peat?
👏 History-making Paralympian
🏅 What the NCAA needs to do before 2028

You don’t see this every day

There are few things in sports more satisfying to watch than a batter squaring up a pitch and launching it several hundred feet the other way for a home run. Toronto Blue Jays slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. had a perfect example on Monday night, taking a belt-high curveball that Cincinnati Reds starter Julian Aguiar hung over the heart of the plate and pulling it 430 feet to straightaway left. 

It was the platonic ideal of a home run—a vicious but controlled swing, a blazing exit velocity and towering launch angle. Aguiar was making his MLB debut, but at least the first home run he gave up as a big leaguer was a thing of beauty. 

Another beautiful thing about baseball, though, is that there are a million ways to hit a home run, and on Thursday we had two of the most unusual home run swings you could ever imagine. 

One of them was by Guerrero’s teammate, infielder Ernie Clement, who clubbed a homer that would make Guerrero’s famously free-swinging father proud. In the second inning of Toronto’s game against the Los Angeles Angels, Clement pulled the trigger on a fastball thrown at eye level and somehow managed to hit it for a home run. 

This pitch was at Ernie Clement's eyes.

He hit it 380 feet for a HR. 🤯 pic.twitter.com/0QJud9z18y

— MLB (@MLB) August 22, 2024

The pitch was 4.60 feet off the ground, the second-highest pitch hit for a home run in the pitch-tracking era (since 2008). The top spot belongs to Kyle Higashioka, who homered on a 35.1 mph eephus pitch from position player Frank Schwindel that was 4.61 feet off the ground in ’22. 

“I probably shouldn’t be swinging at pitches like that one,” Clement admitted after the game. “I’ve struck out on that pitch a couple of times this year. I just try to get the barrel to the ball with two strikes.”

Statcast divides pitches into four different attack zones: heart (the center of the strike zone), shadow (the periphery of the strike zone), chase (outside the strike zone) and waste (nowhere near the strike zone). Pitches in the waste zone are swung at just 5% of the time. Since pitch tracking began in 2008, there have been only seven home runs hit on pitches thrown in the upper portion of the waste zone. Clement’s and Higashioka’s are the only ones since ’15. 

Clement wasn’t the only player to hit a weird home run on Thursday. There was also this blast by New York Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton. 

G-Unit 🔥 pic.twitter.com/8xVAivgCiG

— New York Yankees (@Yankees) August 22, 2024

Stanton is no stranger to baffling displays of power, but his homer off of the Cleveland Guardians’ Nick Sandlin was remarkable even by his standards. Sandlin, a righty, threw a slider at Stanton’s knees that tailed away from him and broke off the plate. And yet Stanton was able to reach down and not only make solid contact, he smacked it 105.1 mph and hit it 417 feet to dead center. 

It isn’t terribly unusual for a hitter to take a tough pitch like that and hit it for a home run, but for Stanton to be able to take a pitch that low and that far outside, breaking away from him, and not just slice it the other way is outrageous. He was just protecting the plate in a full count but he’s strong enough to be able to get around on the ball and send it out to center. 

Stanton and Clement are very different hitters. Clement now has 14 career home runs after hitting his 10th of the season on Thursday, while Stanton is up to 423 career dingers. The one thing they have in common is that they’re both prone to chasing pitches outside the zone. As they showed on Thursday, though, that isn’t always a bad thing—although their coaches still surely hope they’ll show more discipline in the box. 

The best of Sports Illustrated

• Today’s Digital Cover is Matt Verderame’s story on why a Super Bowl three-peat probably isn’t in the cards for the Chiefs.

• Pat Forde argues that the NCAA needs to promote Olympic sports better before the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. 

• Lauren Green has the story of Ezra Frech, a Paralympic high jumper who became the first above-the-knee amputee to commit to a Division I track and field program. 

• Albert Breer’s NFL mailbag leads with an exploration of why Matt LaFleur has been a great hire for the Packers. 

• Kyle Koster spoke with Craig Carton about his new show on FS1. 

• Tom Verducci explained what made Joey Votto a Hall of Fame–worthy hitter. 

• Votto also explained at length why he decided to retire.

The top five…

… things I saw yesterday: 

5. Satou Sabally’s coast-to-coast bucket. 
4. Bryson Stott’s diving stop to start an inning-ending double play. 
3. A nice display of sportsmanship after Venezuela’s win over Japan in the Little League World Series. 
2. 15-year-old skateboarder Gui Khury’s kickflip body varial 900. He’s the first skater in history to land the trick. 
1. The missed field goal that won the game for the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts. In Canadian football, if a missed field goal goes out the back of the end zone, the kicking team gets one point. So in the final seconds of a tie game, Toronto kicker Lirim Hajrullahu didn’t even need to make his 40-yard field goal attempt. Just kicking it out of the back of the end zone was enough to give the Argos a 20–19 win.