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Cal Raleigh Advanced Past Brent Rooker in Home Run Derby in Questionable Fashion

This was quite the tiebreaker.

Stephen Douglas

Cal Raleigh hit a lot of home runs on Monday night.
Cal Raleigh hit a lot of home runs on Monday night. / Brett Davis-Imagn Images
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Cal Raleigh is the current home run king of Major League Baseball. He hit 38 home runs before the All-Star break which is more than anyone else in baseball, including Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani and everyone else.

Raleigh then went out and hit 17 home runs in the first round of the Home Run Derby, which was good enough to tie for fourth place with Brent Rooker of the Athletics. Rather than go to a swing-off to determine who would move on, MLB advanced the player with the longer home run.

The only problem is that both guys hit their longest home runs 470 feet.

And the only solution was MLB claiming they knew how far all these home runs traveled down to an insanely precise decimal point.

The official determination was that Raleigh's longest home run traveled .08 feet—or 61/64ths of an inch—further than Rooker's longest dinger.

If that doesn't seem made up enough for you, check out this tweet from MLB where they claim to know the distance of the home runs down to the 10-billionth(?) place(!?). That's how exact we're supposed to believe MLB is measuring these home runs that leave the stadium or land in a mass of fans.

If you have some questions about this, well, you're not alone.

Or, to paraphrase another prodigious power hitter, do you want to know the terrifying truth, or do you want to see Cal Raleigh sock a few dingers?

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Stephen Douglas
STEPHEN DOUGLAS

Stephen Douglas is a senior writer on the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. He has worked in media since 2008 and now casts a wide net with coverage across all sports. Douglas spent more than a decade with The Big Lead and previously wrote for Uproxx and The Sporting News. He has three children, two degrees and one now unverified Twitter account.

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