Mapping home run distance for the Blue Jays’ top 2022 power hitters
We created a city-sized spray chart using MLB hitting data. For fun.
It’s officially winter in Toronto — the temperature has bottomed out, and that makes us long for baseball season.
We’re also bored.
Last month, we collected the distance travelled by every Toronto Raptor in a given NBA game, and plotted those distances on the city map to see how far each player could have gotten from Scotiabank Arena.
Sadly, in-game player-tracking data for the Toronto Blue Jays isn’t quite as readily available.
But … home run distance is.
So, we thought, what if we added up the cumulative home run ball distance for each of the Jays’ biggest power hitters, and plotted those distances on the map? Who would get the farthest from Rogers Centre, and where would each player end up?
Doing the math
To start with, we spent some serious time with Baseball Savant spray charts for the Blue Jays’ 10 leading power hitters from the 2022 season, adding up the distances for each of their home runs.
Here’s a table showing how many dingers each hit, how far those home run balls travelled in total, and the average distance per homer.
Player* | HR | HR distance (ft.) | Avg. distance/HR |
---|---|---|---|
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. | 32 | 13,027 | 407.1 |
Matt Chapman | 27 | 10,913 | 404.2 |
Teoscar Hernández | 25 | 10,239 | 409.6 |
George Springer | 25 | 9,877 | 395.1 |
Bo Bichette | 24 | 9,313 | 388 |
Danny Jansen | 15 | 6,018 | 401.2 |
Alejandro Kirk | 14 | 5,466 | 390.4 |
Raimel Tapia | 7 | 2,765 | 395.0 |
Santiago Espinal | 7 | 2,681 | 383.0 |
Cavan Biggio | 6 | 2,262 | 377.0 |
*We’re only including home runs hit for the Blue Jays in this exercise. That’s why Whit Merrifield doesn’t make the list.
As you can see, even with a step back from his lofty 2021 season, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. still reigned supreme in this regard, finishing first in total homers and home run distance.
Guerrero also finished second in average distance per homer to recently traded outfielder Teoscar Hernandez, who will now bring his 409.6 ft./home run to Seattle. (Pour one out.)
Interestingly, Cavan Biggio hit the fewest home runs of the players on this list, and had the lowest average home run distance at 377 ft. (For context, the power alleys at Rogers Centre are 375 ft.)
Mapping the distance
So where does that get us? Or, more appropriately, where does it get them?
We’ve taken the total distances above, converted them to kilometres, and overlaid them on the map using Toronto places of interest as stopping points. (Unlike with the Raptors execution mentioned before, though, we didn’t tie them to streets — instead, the paths shoot straight out from Rogers Centre to their ultimate destinations.)
Check out the visualization attached to this article to see where their home runs could have led them.
Then, once you’re done that, start dreaming of next season. The Blue Jays play their first spring training game on Feb. 25.
Baseball icon by Icons8
Code and markup by Kyle Duncan. ©Torontoverse, 2022