Caminero's longest HR may have been on other side of world

If you talk to anybody who was there on the night of Nov. 12, 2022, at Empire Ballpark -- the tiny stadium on Australia's southwest coast that houses about 1,500 people (and maybe even more snakes) -- they all have the same reaction.

Their eyes widen, like the memory of the dinger has been looping around their brains for years, just begging to bound back out into the light of day again.

"It's probably one of the farthest balls I've seen hit in my life," former Perth Heat player Jake Bowey told me over a Zoom.

"It's 400 feet to the top of the shed and then just into the dark of the night," broadcaster Paul Morgan said. "In my 10-12 years of doing Heat baseball, I've never seen a shot that deep in a game."

At barely 23 years old, Junior Caminero has already established himself as a fearsome slugger.

He's hit 78 homers in just 293 big league games entering Wednesday. He hit 45 last year. He already has 26 this season.

He's hit epic blasts in the Dominican Winter League, and he's crushed record-setting shots at Tropicana Field. He'll be in his second straight Home Run Derby next week.

You literally can't spell Junior Caminero without the letters j-o-n-r-ó-n, the Spanish word for "home run."

But his longest, most prodigious dinger may not have come stateside or down in the Dominican Republic. It may not have even happened in this hemisphere.

Four years ago, across an ocean, multiple countries and about 13 time zones, the then-19-year-old hit one deep into a breezy Australian night that still hasn't been found. And it still, within the small Aussie Baseball League community, can't be talked about enough.

After getting traded from the Guardians to the Rays in 2021 and putting up some big numbers in the Minors, Tampa Bay decided to send a teenaged Junior Caminero to play in the Australian Baseball League for the 2022-23 winter season.

The prized prospect joined the Perth Heat, a team the Rays have had a great relationship with over the years. More than 11,000 miles from home with kangaroos hopping around, cricket-grounds-turned-baseball-diamonds and players getting recruited off SnapChat, you might think Caminero could lose a bit of his focus.

Junior Caminero? Lose focus?

Caminero hit 14 homers in just 155 at-bats, good for second best in the entire league. He had 37 RBIs and slashed at a .303/.368/.613 rate.

"For a lot of teams, there's a lot of prospects that have come down, but Caminero was clearly a guy, like, this guy's going to The Show," Morgan said. "He was head and shoulders above any prospect. He was box office."

"I remember watching one of his BP rounds and he took about 15 swings and he hit 14 home runs, all on an absolute line drive," Bowey said. "And the one that he didn't hit a home run hit the top of the fence. And it didn't get above 10 feet off the ground."

And on the night of Nov. 12, against the Adelaide Giants, he wowed an entirely new continent with his generational power.

On an 0-1 count, Caminero unloaded off of Jordy Grose over the left-center field wall. Over the camera-stand. Over the giant shed in center. Over everything in sight.

Hitting the Empire Ballpark shed was fairly common in batting practice, but hitting balls over it was not. And it definitely didn't happen during real, live games.

"Yeah, to kind of clear the shed entirely is a whole different beast," Morgan told me.

"The bottom of the shed is 400 feet on the dot," Bowey said. "And then it's, give or take, 80 feet high."

Bowey says the shed then goes back another 60 to 70 feet. So yes, traveling completely over the shed would mean Caminero's shot went 450-feet plus.

"It would've had to be between 450 and 480," Morgan said. "450, easy."

And as the Heat broadcaster notes, Empire Ballpark isn't an easy place to hit a homer, period. Especially one of that distance. Mostly because of the field's proximity to Australia's coast.

"You're fighting, what they call, the Fremantle Doctor -- the breeze that flows off the Indian Ocean," he told me. "The wind gets pretty gnarly, so to do that is phenomenal."

Bowey said the Perth dugout "went crazy" after the homer (although they would get used to that sort of power from Caminero as the season wore on). Caminero, as you might imagine, also went pretty crazy.

"You know, I've been lucky enough to see some balls go a long way," Bowey said. "I've played against guys like Delmon Young. When I was in the States, I played against guys like Jon Singleton. Some of these guys can hit a ball a long way. So, for Junior to hit that ball, you know it's far."

Morgan isn't sure if anybody ever picked up Caminero's souvenir, because after the shed, it's basically nothingness. And not many people would want to go looking for it.

"There are snakes everywhere out there in that field," the broadcaster told me. "You're taking a risk to get that home-run ball."

He says the head groundskeeper has to sometimes chase off the slithery reptiles before fans start filing through the gates.

Oh, and forget 480 feet. There's also a grain train railway that runs along that end of the park where Caminero's dinger flew.

The ball might have left the Land Down Under all together.

"It probably got exported to Asia," Morgan smiled.