Baseball's Ultimate Power: Ranking The All-Time Greatest Distance Home Run Hitters

by Bill Jenkinson

The “tape-measure home run” is the greatest single act of power in the game of baseball, and the tales of these homers are the most cherished legacies players and fans hand down through the generations. Each long-distance shot has become fable; they are baseball's versions of the feats of Paul Bunyon, Hercules, and Samson. No one but Bill Jenkinson could separate myth from fact and actually study, rank, and describe in riveting detail baseball's strongest long-ball hitters. Fully illustrated with player photos and aerial ballpark photos showing the landing spots of each stadium's longest home runs, Baseball's Ultimate Power is the definitive book on the tape-measure home run and its practitioners. Jenkinson travels through the decades to give us the distances, descriptions, and comparisons of the forty longest hitters in major league history, the ten longest-hitting active players, the five mightiest from the nineteenth century, and the five best tape-measure batsmen from the Negro League era.

352 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2010

Reviews

[Gary Geiger · Rating 2 out of 5]

A questionably accurate phonebook of long home runs. I give Jenkinson credit for his effort, but estimating the distance of old home runs is more metaphysics than physics.

[Marty Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The rankings are interesting, the repetition of tape-measure homers, less so. Not as interesting as his "The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs."