Statcast Pod: Rosales' lightning-fast HR trot

April 25th, 2017

The following is a transcript of a segment from this week's episode of the Statcast™ Podcast. To hear more from Statcast™ expert and columnist Mike Petriello and MLB.com director of content Matt Meyers, subscribe by clicking here.
Petriello: We are going to end on, not , but . If a lot of people don't know who that is, he's actually been kicking around for like eight years in the big leagues, maybe a little longer, with the Reds. He went back and forth with the Rangers and the A's and a bunch of times with the Padres last year. Now he's playing a lot of shortstop with the A's because is injured. And if you know one thing about Adam Rosales -- it's just the weirdest thing in the world. Matt, would you like to explain while we're talking about Adam Rosales?
Meyers: Adam Rosales has the fastest home run trot in baseball, and it's like not close.
Petriello: We're not talking about inside-the-parkers. We're talking about over the wall and where everyone else just kind of does a trot like, "Look at me, I'm cool," he goes full speed around the bases. It's like the coolest thing.
Meyers: And on Saturday, he had the fastest over-the-wall home run trot time in the Statcast™ Era.

Petriello: 15.9 seconds. Now, we looked at this last year and he owned 10 of the 11 fastest -- I think he hit 13 home runs last year -- he had 10 of the 11 fastest home-to-home times last year on over-the-wall home runs. He now owns eight of the 10 fastest ever. Who are the other two? . It's always Billy Hamilton. His sprint speed, I thought this was interesting -- 27.1 feet per second. I know that sounds league average, but that's for outfielders. We haven't actually done this on the bases yet. I assume it's probably a little slower because you have to actually (hit the) corner.
Meyers: Exactly.
Petriello: So that might be above average. I truly don't know yet. Here's my favorite thing in the world about this: he actually ran faster on his 15.9-second trip around the bases than seven inside-the-park home runs in the Statcast™ Era. Now if you think about that, you're thinking, "How is that possible? Who can manage to get an inside-the-park home run running slower than that?" And I will tell you this: I love a lot of things about my job, but one of them is I got to watch all seven of them this morning. They are fantastic. Because there's only like one that's legit. Two of these, and , both got slower inside-the-parkers because the outfielders slammed into each other. One of them when did it a couple of years ago, it was the play where like ripped his groin off his bone and was just face-first in the outfield. did it slower than Rosales. It was in New York where , who was with the Phillies at the time, somersaulted over the right-field short wall and basically just landed on the seats and there was no one in right field.

Meyers: The ball just dribbled into the right-field corner.
Petriello: Right. Phil Gosselin did it a couple of years ago where the ball hit like just at the top of the wall and kind of laid there because there was uncertainty about whether there was fan interference or not. You can measure these things and they're all right, but baseball is such a weird, great, dumb sport sometimes that these outlier things pop up. There were only two that I think were actually legit. did it in 16.7 seconds last year, and it was just bad defense. They were slow to get to the ball, they were slow to throw it in and the throw was off-line, so he didn't have to be going nuts to get there. And then did it in 2015 in Minnesota where there was a really weird bounce off the center-field wall where it went like right past the right fielder and he had to go all the way back to get it. So I don't know, that's not really anything that's analytical so much as, "How did he do it faster than seven inside-the-parkers?" Well, five times really weird stuff happened. But Adam Rosales, right? Are we calling him a Hall of Famer, Statcast™ Hall of Famer?
Meyers: Yeah, we are going to start a weekly segment. Every week at the end of the show, we're going to be inducting a play or a moment into the Statcast™ Hall of Fame and what better way to launch the Statcast™ Hall of Fame than Adam Rosales' record-setting home run trot? Just watch next week. He's going to do like 15.8 and maybe we'll have to put him in again.
Petriello: I'm so excited. Sometimes we can use this data for fun and not just crazy analytical stuff.