Oneil Cruz hit a home run off the top of the foul pole: ‘Moon landing is probably easier’

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Which is more durable — landing a human on the moon or hitting a home run that dents the top of a foul pole in a major-league recreation?

You might discover that query amusing. Little are you aware that is a query I requested a present physicist this week.

Yes, that is how we roll right here at the Weird and Wild column’s spacious company places of work (which can or might probably not exist). We ask the questions you want requested. We look at the urgent baseball points you want examined. And the undeniable fact that you do not know you want them requested or examined doesn’t cease us.

This vital quest started two weeks in the past, when the Pirates’ Oneil Cruz one way or the other hit a baseball the place regular individuals do not typically hit baseballs, in an April 22 recreation towards the Rangers.

ONEIL CRUZ OFF THE TOP OF THE FOUL POLE 😳

(by way of @Pirates) pic.twitter.com/a4jTiH4CxJ

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) April 23, 2026

This man (critically) did that. He hit a ball that left his bat at a ridiculous 116.9 mph. It soared greater than 100 ft up into the Texas sky, then plunked down on top of the right-field foul pole.

Just so you already know, that foul pole is 92 ft excessive. And it is situated atop a fence that sits 326 ft from the batter’s field. Hat tip to John Blake of the Rangers for that invaluable information.

Want to see how excessive up that is, how removed from home plate that is and what the top of that foul pole appeared like as soon as Cruz had completed assaulting it? Fortunately, the ever-inventive Hannah Mears, the Pirates’ TV sideline reporter, trekked all the method up there to search out out.

You can see the place the ball left a divot! https://t.co/9zeJbF7dAE pic.twitter.com/zOy9Y9d5cg

—Hannah Mears (@mearshannah_) April 23, 2026

That appeared arduous — however how arduous was it?

So this is how most of the world thinks after one thing like that: That’s inconceivable.

Now this is how we Weird and Wild investigators suppose: Wait, how attainable is it?

My subsequent thought was: That looks like one thing AI might reply. But after my unfortunate experience last month with ChatGPTwhich simply made stuff up it thought I’d need to hear, I went a completely different route this time: with Perplexity, an AI search engine. Here was my primary little fun-filled query:

How would I calculate the odds of hitting a home run that hits the top of the foul pole?

Hoo boy. I had no concept what I’d gotten myself into.

This, Perplexity advised me, was a “simple calculation,” that a “practical” scientific particular person (like me?) ought to deal with as a “conditional probability problem.” Should I’ve advised Perplexity that my concept of ​​a “conditional probability problem” is: What ought to I put on at the moment if it is going to be 53 levels and raining? I did not try this. So let’s transfer alongside.

Perplexity then provided me a “simple calculation” it apparently thought I might do at home:

P (top of foul pole HR) = P (ball reaches pole space) x P (hits top/very top of pole/pole-area ball).

OK, nice. Or it additionally provided me another, extra detailed choice:

P = P (pulled to the line) x P (truthful aspect trajectory) x P (sufficient distance) x P (contacts pole top)

After studying all that, I had a thought that I’m guessing most of us share just about day by day: Shoot, I forgot to get my grasp’s diploma in physics from MIT once more this week.

In different phrases, even with the assist of AI’s deepest thinkers, I used to be method out of my league on performing this “simple” calculation. Perplexity not less than plugged some completely imaginary numbers into its formulation and gave it a guess, speculating that…

The probability of hitting the top of that foul pole labored out to at least one in each one million balls hit.

Awesome. Except for one factor:

Even the AI ​​genius inside Perplexity’s mind principally admitted that it wasn’t actually a guess. It was extra like a wild guess.

Whaaaat? AI might be so disappointing. But Perplexity alibied by telling me that a “simple” calculation wasn’t the strategy to go anyway. Lots extra information wanted to be inputted. And I used to be fairly certain that the least certified particular person I knew to enter it was me. So…

Anyone know a physicist?

What are you aware? I did! So I turned to an astrophysicist with experience in baseball — Dr. Meredith Wills, a senior information scientist at SportsMEDIA Technology Corp.

She’s extra well-known for her years of fascinating reporting on how full of life or not full of life the baseballs is likely to be in any given season. But as soon as she made it into my contacts underneath the label, “baseball physicist,” she moved shortly to the top of my record.

I texted her, just about begging for assist in making an attempt to determine the odds of Cruz hitting a home run that landed on top of the foul pole.

“I’m not even sure where to start,” she replied. “You need one of the NASA engineers who’s landing people on the moon. And the moon landing is probably easier.”

So might or not it’s true that not even somebody labeled in my contacts as a “baseball physicist” views calculating the aeronautical odds of weird homers as their areas of experience? It might. But did that imply Dr. Wills wasn’t extremely intrigued by all this? Turns out it did not.

“Wait,” she then texted. “He actually hit a HR that landed on top of the foul pole?!?!”

The flight path of Oneil Cruz’s “one in a million” home run. (David Adler/Statcast/MLB)

Our official aeronautical odds analysis mission was off and working. Next, we had an fulfilling telephone dialog very like people who all the nice scientific minds of baseball have usually.

I questioned: Was this actually as inconceivable because it appeared? You simply should land a spherical baseball on top of a actually excessive pole and pull it straight down the line. What’s so arduous about that?

When she’d completed laughing, she conceded that hitting a foul pole in proper discipline was “easier than if you had the equivalent of a foul pole in dead center field.” Good level!

But then she advised me all the information factors that will have to be thought of to precisely calculate these odds: launch angle … trajectory … meteorological circumstances … drag on the baseball … angle of flight because it approached the foul pole … and so forth. Yikes! I used to be not the particular person to provide all of that.

“I just want to at least describe to people the degree of difficulty,” I advised her. “I’m thinking, if we can fly a plane from Stockholm to LaGuardia and it lands on the actual runway on time, why can’t someone hit a baseball on top of an actual foul pole?”

Not surprisingly, she wasn’t in settlement that this was a excellent analogy — and never just because that airplane would land at JFK as a substitute of LaGuardia.

When a airplane lands at LaGuardia, she jogged my memory, it is working with slight benefits like “pilots and engines.” Not to say a steering wheel. Did Cruz work with both of these? Let’s go along with no.

“Once that ball is hit and launched off the bat,” she requested, “what are the odds of it getting to the foul pole without any other interference on our part to steer it and make sure it gets there?”

Once once more, you have bought me. But why did I infer she was making an attempt to inform me these odds weren’t good?

“Frankly,” she mentioned, “it’s like comparing it to us sending a spacecraft up and having it land on, like, an asteroid or something.”

My thoughts raced. Up subsequent for Oneil Cruz: Hits dramatic home run that plunks an asteroid! But as a substitute, I requested:

“Do you really think it would be easier to land on the moon than to do what he just did?”

“Well, let’s put it this way,” Wills defined. “I actually think they’re of the same order of difficulty. If he was trying to do it intentionally, then, yeah, it’s a hell of a lot harder to do with a baseball than planting something on the moon.”

She’d given me tons to consider. What she hadn’t given me was the precise odds, all the way down to the forty third percentile level. So the subsequent day, I circled again another time, to find out…

Was it more durable to calculate the odds than hitting that homer?

Was there any shot at answering this query, I requested Dr. Wills. Obviously, America wanted to know — by which I meant: Obviously, I wanted to know.

She reviewed the formulation Perplexity had proposed. The time period, “fuzzy math,” got here up. She then took a shot at devising her personal formulation. I will not lay it out for you right here. Suffice to say, it had tons of entries and included phrases like “arc” and “apex.”

Alas, all the information we would wish to compute that does not appear to be publicly out there.

“I feel bad that I don’t have a number for you,” she mentioned — however then fired off another query:

“Do you know the Drake Equation?”

Um, I do know Drake Baldwin. And I might probably provide you with an equation for him. But that wasn’t the place she was going with this.

“It’s the standard equation used to calculate the probability of us finding life elsewhere in the universe,” she mentioned.

Wow. Alas, that is a calculation that will take thousands and thousands of years, she mentioned — and even longer than this elusive Oneil Cruz calculation was taking us.

Oneil Cruz’s shot off the top of the foul-pole despatched W&W down one other rabbit gap. (Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)

So this is a little window into the investigative work we dogged baseball investigators generally embark on. Sometimes you discover your reply in 30 seconds on Baseball Reference. Sometimes you wind up two days later calculating whether or not there is clever life past Pluto however no nearer to answering the query you began out with. I attempted to convey that to Dr. Wills.

THE ATHLETIC: “This is very cool. But there has to be a higher probability of hitting a home run off a foul pole than finding life elsewhere in the universe. Right?”

WILLS: “Definitely.”

TA: “OK, here’s the real question. If we ever do find intelligent life in the universe, will they be intelligent enough to have foul poles?”

WILLS: “More importantly, would they be dumb enough to call them ‘foul poles’ when balls that hit them are actually fair?”

We had arrived, at that time, at a place far deeper than the foul-pole query that had launched this investigative journey. But talking for you, our loyal readers, I used to be grateful we would landed there.

“That,” I replied, “would be the test of how intelligent they really are out there!”