One of the beautiful things about baseball is that sometimes, the difference between a run and an out is simply the field you’re playing on. Riley Greene only hit two balls all season farther than this one, but such is one of the many misfortunes of playing for the Detroit Tigers.
That’s what was on my mind when Steven Kwan opened up the ALDS scoring with an unremarkable dinger that, according to Statcast (which admittedly doesn’t take batted ball direction into account), had just a 19% chance of being a hit based on exit velocity and launch angle.