Mountain West memories: Did Aaron Judge really hit a 500-foot home run as a Bulldog?

Fresno State installed Trackman at its home baseball field in 2023, a 3D radar technology program that is used to record in-game analytics including the exit speed, launch angle and distance of batted balls.

For every game, the system creates a spreadsheet with more than 100 such variables off each pitch and batted ball, and records it all in a database.

But in 2011, 2012 and 2013, when hitting phenom Aaron Judge wore a Fresno State uniform, that was almost always guesswork in games played at Pete Beiden Field at Bob Bennett Stadium. It definitely was less scientific. Judge put it to the test several times, with some booming home runs.

Those blasts, and one in particular, stand out as a prime Mountain West Conference memory for the Bulldogs as they get set to leave the league on July 1 for a rebuilding Pac-12.

They stand out, and not just because of the distance those baseballs traveled. It was just not that easy to hit a ball that far back then, in a third season after the NCAA mandated that for safety reasons bats used in the college game were to replicate the performance of wood bats.

Judge hit two in one game in his sophomore season against Stanford right-hander Mark Appel, who went on to be the No. 1 overall pick in the 2013 June amateur draft. Those shots were described with adjectives, not advanced mathematics. It’s what was available at the time. On May 17, 2013, Judge hit a towering home run against a left-hander from Nevada named Tyler Wells that cleared the scoreboard in left center field.

It was crushed. It also was measured, albeit in a most elementary way, at … 500 feet.

Judge, after the game, would joke, “I think I might have got all of that one.”

“I don’t come out of the dugout too often,” former Fresno State coach Mike Batesole said. “That one, I did.”

“I remember that one,” said Bulldogs’ coach Ryan Overland, who then was an assistant coach. “It was still going up when it got to the lights.”

That baseball clearly was hit a long way.

A home run like that was just rare, even from Judge, who in his major league career with the New York Yankees has hit 384 home runs including four that were estimated at more than 490 feet. A 2017 blast against the Toronto Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium went 496 feet, two others went 495.

Judge set the American League single-season home run record in 2022, blasting 62 and surpassing Roger Maris’ longstanding mark of 61 in 1961. He hit the record-breaker on Oct. 4, 2022, against the Texas Rangers.

Bat technology back in his Fresno State days had not caught up with the NCAA rules. Judge played all three of his seasons at Fresno State with bats that were at times described with a different adjective: Dead.

Fresno State in that 2013 season hit .265 as a team with 36 home runs and had a slugging percentage of .392 in averaging 4.7 runs per game. It had four players in that lineup that reached the major leagues with Judge, Taylor Ward, Austin Wynns and Jordan Luplow.

The Bulldogs three years earlier, prior to the changes to the bats, had hit .322 with 88 home runs and a slugging percentage of .521 in scoring 7.6 runs per game. The only position players on that roster to reach the major leagues were Danny Muno and Wynns.

“His freshman year was the first year they changed, and we saw home run numbers really down across the country at that time,” Overland said. “They’ve got back, not to what they were before that, but they’re way better than they were. Those exit velocities and some of that were getting dangerous.”

But that 500-foot estimate is legit. It was not measured by Doppler radar or calculated by an equation based on velocity and launch angle, but by feet.

How was it measured?

The ball was found between two cars parked along the fence on Cedar Avenue. From there, it was one foot after the other — 125 steps back to the fence, another 30 or so for the width of the bullpen and maybe 340 or 350 from where the ball went over the wall to home plate.

No one really knows where that baseball actually touched down, only where it came to a stop. But 500 feet definitely was within the realm of possibility.

“He hit balls harder than anyone I’ve ever been around,” Overland said. “Just throwing BP (batting practice) to him, low line drives would smack against the wall and for most guys you don’t hear them hit the wall.

“Learning to get the ball in the air and elevate a little more is where the home runs come from, but he hit the ball harder than anybody I’ve ever been around.”