Sanó's HR vanishes:  'I didn't see it land'

August 13th, 2020

put all the might of his 272-pound frame into a violent swing, as he always does. During his recent extended slump, baseballs would all too often miss that bat and disappear into the catcher’s mitt. This time, he made contact. Loud contact. The baseball, again, disappeared.

Sanó’s fourth homer of the season supposedly landed in the left-field upper deck at Miller Park, somewhere near the end of Bernie Brewer’s slide. Statcast projected that the baseball traveled 442 feet from home plate, securing a six-run lead over Milwaukee in the third inning on Wednesday night during the Twins' 12-2 win.

It remains unclear if anybody can confirm that with visual evidence.

“I didn’t see it land,” said Brewers television analyst Bill Schroeder. “Did it go over Bernie’s landing?”

And he, in theory, had eyes on that baseball at some point. Watching from monitors at Target Field, the Twins’ television booth was similarly perplexed.

“Is it up in the slide?” asked Twins analyst Jack Morris.

“I have no idea where that landed,” replied Twins play-by-play broadcaster Dick Bremer, simply accepting the conclusion that the baseball had, at some point, materialized over the fence.

Statcast claims that the baseball left Sanó’s bat at 113.8 mph, so it can’t simply have vanished. Somehow, it only matched the fourth-hardest homer of his career. And because of Sanó’s knack for prodigious homers, the 442-foot shot was only the 14th longest of his career.

It was about as loud of a slump-buster as it gets, anyway.

Sanó entered the game 6-for-48 with a whopping 25 strikeouts this season. He looked much better on Wednesday, when he walked in his first plate appearance in the second inning, added another free pass in the fifth and very well might have sent a baseball into orbit somewhere over the skies of eastern Wisconsin.

"I don't know if anyone's seen it land," Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. "I have no idea where it went. It might have just disappeared, for all we know. I don't know how a ball can get hit much harder and farther than that one.

"Again, probably one of those moments for Miguel, too, where he can lay on the pillow tonight and relive it a few times, because I don't know if there's many people out there that have ever hit a ball like that."