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2 hours ago
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Chicago is certainly the Windy City, and Cubs outfielder Ian Happ could tell you all about it.
During Thursday's Opening Day, Happ absolutely clobbered a baseball. It should've been a home run. It wasn't even close.
MLB actually has the metrics that confirm this:
Happ hit a fly ball that was "pushed in" 113 feet by the wind.
MLB shares that "it's the most distance that wind has taken off a would-be home run in the Weather Applied Metrics database, which covers the entirety of the previous three seasons."
If there had been no wind, the baseball would've traveled 435 feet.
With the wind, it went 322 feet, falling into the glove of Nationals outfielder James Wood.
"You can see the effect even more clearly by looking at the circuitous route he had to take," MLB.com writes of the Nats' big outfielder. "While Wood isn’t generally considered a strong defender, this wasn’t bad route-running, either. This was tracking a ball that really did not take any sort of route a fielder would expect it to."
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The little graphic they include shows that Wood turned over his left shoulder and ran back toward the fence before hustling back inward to make the grab.
Happ hit the ball at 108.5 MPH and a 32-degree launch angle. That's a home run 97% of the time, according to MLB.
The Wrigley Field wind simply said it wasn't going to be one this time around.
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