Josh Bell has hit 181 home runs in his MLB career, but he’d never hit one like this.
In fact, no player has ever hit one like this, at least in the pitch tracking era, which began in 2008.
On Monday night, Bell turned on a ninth-inning home run in San Diego batting right-handed, putting the exclamation point on a Nationals win.
The key: The pitch was 4.65 feet off the ground. According to MLB stats expert Sarah Langs, a pitch that high had never been hit for a home run since the league has had the ability to track such things.
This pitch was eye level with Josh Bell.
He CRUSHED it 😳 pic.twitter.com/l63Cy1TQPH
— MLB (@MLB) June 24, 2025
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Bell is listed at 6-foot-3, 261 pounds. He’s a big dude, which probably helps at least a little in setting this record.
It still verges on physically impossible to do what he did.
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That pitch came in at 91 miles per hour. Bell, and every other hitter, is used to a bat path that travels a lot lower, through the strike zone.
He had to get his hands through the zone at a ridiculously high point at just the right time while still smashing through just the right portion of just below the middle of the baseball to create the requisite power and back spin to launch it out of the ballpark.
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Hitting is hard. Batters aren’t even supposed to swing at a pitch like this, let alone leave the building on it.
But that’s what Bell did, and in doing so, he created his own piece of MLB history.
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