Reds minor leagues longest homers: Rookie-Ball edition

This week we’re going to work our way through the longest home runs of the entire season. The last update only included home runs through July, but some teams played another 6 weeks of baseball past that point. Usually we just looked at the entire month’s worth of 400+ foot home runs in the organization. But with the season now behind us, I thought it might be fun to look through the information on a level by level basis.

There are four teams that fall in the rookie-level for the Reds system: The Dominican Summer League Reds, the Arizona League Reds, the Greeneville Reds, and the Billings Mustangs. For even smaller classification purposes we’re going to break this down into two groups: The Complex Levels of the DSL and AZL and then the advanced-rookie levels of Greeneville and Billings.

The Complex Level Longest Home Runs

In theory the guys at the complex levels should be near the bottom when it comes to the longest home runs list, at least on an average. They are the youngest group of players, which in professional athletes at least, means they are the least skilled and physically developed of the group. That’s not a knock on them – they’ll become more skilled, stronger, bigger with time, just like the guys before them. But those things do make it less likely that they – at least as a group, are going to be racking up long home runs at the same rate as the guys in Double-A and Triple-A who are 4-5-6 years older than they are. With that said, here’s the Top 20 home runs his this season between the Dominican Summer League and the Arizona Rookie League Reds.

Darlin Guzman at the top of the list really stands out. 454 feet would be longer than every home run hit by the Major League Cincinnati Reds with the except of two in the 2019 season. Josh VanMeter hit one 463 feet and Eugenio Suarez hit one 457 feet. That’s it. Guzman is 18-years-old.

Wilmer Alcantara shows up on the list several times, too. From a numbers standpoint he’s interesting. He led the DSL Reds with 8 home runs, and three of those went at least 400 feet. The 17-year-old put the ball over the fence quite a bit. But he also only had 2 doubles and 1 triple. It appears that when he made hard contact the ball left the yard.

The Advanced Rookie-Ball Home Runs

The players here, again – in theory – should be a little bit more advanced in their skillset and physicality as a whole. That means that they should have home runs that go a little bit further than the guys the level below them. With that in mind, here are the top 20 longest home runs between the Greeneville Reds and the Billings Mustangs.

It’s certainly worth noting that the ballparks throughout the Pioneer League are at elevation. The ball does go a little bit further because of that. With that said, TJ Hopkins is out there hitting moonshots. If we assume that none of those distances are errors (there are a few known issues with Trackman estimations on very specific types of batted balls – I’ve even found one where I know without a doubt it over-estimated a home run by about 90 feet because there’s video of where it landed), then the Reds 9th rounder out of South Carolina was hurting baseballs this summer in the Pionner League.

There’s not video available for the 460-foot home run for Hopkins, but I did watch video for the list 448 and 440-foot ones since they were hit in parks that have the MiLBtv feed, and in both instances the outfielders just turned and watched. They knew immediately.

Another fun thing is the two absolute blasts by Edwin Yon on August 2nd. They came on the road in Idaho Falls. And the Reds General Manager Nick Krall was in attendance. And they went a combined 897 feet.

You can see the entire series right here to check out how the top home runs went for each level within the Cincinnati Reds farm system.