Tuesday night, Gordon provided yet another piece of evidence why. In the second inning against the Giants, Gordon laced a line-drive deep into the gap between right field and center field. Gordon was racing out of the box from the moment the ball hit the bat. After a bit of fancy fielding didn’t pay dividends for San Francisco’s Angel Pagan, there was no turning back. Gordon had his first official inside-the-park home run.
The official trot time for this marvel was a bit hard to gauge. Neither the Marlins’ nor the Giants’ feeds showed Gordon at the precise moment he touched home plate in the live broadcast. After watching as many angles of the trot as I could, I resorted to clocking Gordon’s home-to-third trot time from one angle and his third-to-home trot time from another. This provides the best trot time I could manage, giving us an official trot time of 13.95 seconds.
Last June, Gordon legged out a triple-plus-error in only 13.89 seconds. That’s still the fastest a big leaguer has circled the bases since the start of the Tater Trot Tracker in 2010, but – technically – it wasn’t a home run trot. Likewise, when Billy Hamilton raced around the bases in 13.8 seconds as a minor leaguer in 2012, that was the single quickest trot I’ve seen, but it wasn’t a major league trot. (For the full list of speediest inside-the-park home runs of the Tater Trot Tracker era, click here.)
This trot by Dee Gordon, therefore, qualifies as the quickest official big league home run trot of the Tater Trot Tracker era. Now let’s see when he can beat it!