All of the way back in 2018 I had a wild idea to start trying to track the distance of home runs hit by Cincinnati Reds prospects. Doing that has gotten a little bit easier each season as more broadcasters are mentioning the distances from the in-house Trackman or Hawkeye systems, two of the teams have at least some public facing data, and for the full-season teams you can now watch just about every game.
The Louisville Bats hit 148 home runs in the 2024 season. That ranked 16th in the 20 team league. The Syracuse Mets and Durham Bulls were tied for the International League lead with 203 home runs. Gwinnett was at the bottom of the league with 122 home runs.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the Top 10 list for the longest home runs hit by Louisville Bats players in the 2024 season:
| Player | Date | Distance | Measure |
| Peyton Burdick | 5/21 | 500 | Hawkeye |
| Rece Hinds | 5/2 | 494 | Trackman |
| Peyton Burdick | 5/24 | 482 | Hawkeye |
| Rece Hinds | 6/25 | 447 | Hawkeye |
| Edwin Rios | 9/10 | 445 | Hawkeye |
| Levi Jordan | 4/10 | 443 | Hawkeye |
| Nick Martini | 9/19 | 443 | Hawkeye |
| Edwin Rios | 9/22 | 440 | Hawkeye |
| Rece Hinds | 5/29 | 439 | Hawkeye |
| Edwin Rios | 9/5 | 434 | Hawkeye |
In Triple-A they have public facing pitch and hit tracking data, so there were only a few home runs that there isn’t data on because the Hawkeye system didn’t register/malfunctioned/whatever and there wasn’t sufficient video to review and use Google Maps to estimate the distance. More on that, later, though.
Nine home runs on this list top the longest home run hit in Double-A Chattanooga this past season. Generally speaking, you are more likely to find more home runs hit in Triple-A and further ones, too, because the players are simply more physically developed the higher up the ladder you go. That held true here, as all three* of the longest home runs in the farm system were hit by players in Triple-A.
Let’s take a look at some of the homers on the list, starting off with the longest home run hit in all of professional baseball in 2024 – the 500-foot home run by Peyton Burdick:
When you are talking about a 500-foot home run you don’t really need to talk too much about just how impressive it was, but I’m going to a little bit anyways. Clearing the berm in left-center/center is impressive enough. Reaching the scoreboard is crazy. Hitting the scoreboard more than halfway up at the very end that’s near dead center is insane. This is the longest home run that has been verified by Trackman or Hawkeye since I began tracking this in 2018.
Here is the 494-foot home run from Rece Hinds:
The scouting report held true for this one from Rece Hinds. 80-grade raw power as he got every last bit of this one. It was his second home run in two days after going the entire month of April without a home run. This was the second furthest home run in professional baseball in 2024.
Here is the 482-foot home run from Peyton Burdick:
It’s not often that you hit a 482-foot home run and it’s not even the longest home run you’ve hit in a series, but that’s what happened here. This was the 5th longest home run in professional baseball in 2024 and was only 3rd on the Louisville Bats list.
And here is the one of a few home runs that there wasn’t a way to get an estimated distance on for Louisville in 2024, and it sucks because it was an absolute moonshot from Hernan Perez.
There’s something we can do, though. While we can’t see where the ball landed because it’s out of frame, we can use some context clues. We can see where a fan is tracking the ball and turns to look behind him. He’s looking over the pavilion beyond the seats in left field. It’s 440 feet to clear that pavilion, but it’s also about 15 feet higher than the plate, so it’s probably closer to 450 feet in terms of how we measure home runs. We don’t know exactly how far beyond that pavilion it went, but it deserved mention and review here.
Some Fun Home Run Facts
- 60 of the 140 home runs we have data on went at least 400 feet.
- Edwin Rios was the only Bat to top 14 home runs and he hit 22 of them. 12 of them went at least 400 feet. Only one of them was under 370 feet and he averaged 402 feet on his home runs.
- Above we noted that Louisville had three of the five longest home runs in professional baseball in 2024. But they also were involved in the number six spot on the list, too, as Matt Wallner hit a 481-foot home run off of the Bats’ Brandon Leibrandt in the middle of June.
- The average distance on a Bats home run was 395 feet, which was tops among the four full-season teams in the farm system. Daytona averaged 391 feet, while Dayton was at 385 feet, and Chattanooga was at 382 feet.