Jo Adell showed Tuesday why the Angels made him the No. 10 pick in 2017 MLB draft. He also made history.
Adell, a former consensus top-10 prospect in baseball, leads all minor leaguers with 20 home runs this season. And in the Salt Lake Bees’ game against the Sugar Land Space Cowboys on Tuesday night, Adell hit a truly colossal blast.
His game-tying three-run homer in the eighth traveling an astonishing 514 feet. That’s the longest home run ever tracked by MLB’s Statcast system, which has been in use in the majors since 2015 and at certain minor league levels since last year.
Jo Adell's 514-foot HR is the longest hit in both @MiLB and MLB this season. 😮
— MLB (@MLB) June 21, 2023
It's also longer than any MLB homer tracked by Statcast. pic.twitter.com/TdLs5jRIrm
There have only been three MLB home runs in the Statcast era with a projected distance of 500 feet or more. Giancarlo Stanton (2016) and C.J. Cron (’22) each hit one 504 feet. Nomar Mazara holds the big league record with a 505-foot blast he hit in ’19.
Stanton and Cron’s moonshots were both hit at Coors Field, which isn’t surprising. The thin air in Denver creates the perfect conditions to launch jaw-dropping blasts. Salt Lake City, where Adell hit his homer, is also at altitude (about 4,200 feet, 1,000 feet lower than Denver). The Bees, like the Rockies, have used a humidor since 2015 to limit the impact of the thin air on the flight of the ball.
Adell’s homer came on a hanging slider that Sugar Land pitcher Austin Hansen threw on a 3–0 count. Adell had taken a good pitch on a 3–0 count earlier in the game and decided he wasn’t going to let another golden opportunity pass him.
“When I came up during that at-bat, I kind of got the same sequence, it was a 3-0 count, runners were on base this time and I figured if I get something in the zone, just be ready,” he told MiLB.com after the game. “I happened to get a pitch that was over the plate, and I put probably one of my best swings ever on it.”
Adell was once regarded as one of the best prospects in baseball (Baseball Prospectus ranked him the No. 2 prospect in the game before the 2019 and ’20 seasons) but he’s struggled to hit big-league pitching in parts of four seasons. He’s only played one game in the majors this year and picked up just one hit. Not surprisingly, it was a 451-foot homer.
