An A's fan went home with Chad Pinder's 460-foot home run ball as a nice surprise birthday gift
The A's beat the Red Sox on Saturday, 8-3, in large part due to a fifth-inning barrage of home runs hit by
But it was the rookie Pinder's homer that was the most attention-grabbing of the three, considering it was an absolute moonshot sent a Statcast-estimated 460 feet from home plate. Here's where it landed:
And here's the homer itself:
460 feet.
— #Statcast (@statcast) May 20, 2017
Chad Pinder’s moonshot puts him atop the @Athletics leaderboard for longest HR of 2017. https://t.co/2Xu6Q7ijuz #Statcast pic.twitter.com/24Bu3ObO5i
Home runs just don't generally go up there at the Coliseum (in fact, there are only three known instances of this, per the A's). The Plaza Reserve level is located above the bleachers, and it takes a lot for a ball to go there. Pinder's homer qualifies as "a lot":
Woah. pic.twitter.com/YNvvEe3sZj
— Jane Lee (@JaneMLB) May 20, 2017
An unexpectedly prodigious blast such as Pinder's probably surprised some folks up in the Plaza Reserve, right? MLB.com Real-Time Correspondent Elizabeth Staub did some investigating and yes, that's exactly what happened.
A young man named Zach Kuykendall of Merced, Calif., wound up with the baseball after attending the game as a birthday present from his parents. As he explained in the clip atop this post, there was no way he expected to leave the ballpark with a souvenir like that, considering where he spent the afternoon.
But he did, as baseball's wonderful unpredictability always finds a way to do things like this.
