Editor’s note: This is a bonus Weird and Wild. To read this week’s main W&W column, click or tap here.
Which is harder — landing a human on the moon or hitting a home run that dents the top of a foul pole in a major-league game?
You may find that question amusing. Little do you know that is a question I asked an actual physicist this week.
Yes, that’s how we roll here at the Weird and Wild column’s spacious corporate offices (which may or may not really exist). We ask the questions you need asked. We examine the pressing baseball issues you need examined. And the fact that you don’t know you need them asked or examined does not stop us.
This important quest began two weeks ago, when the Pirates’ Oneil Cruz somehow hit a baseball where normal people don’t customarily hit baseballs, in an April 22 game against the Rangers.
ONEIL CRUZ OFF THE TOP OF THE FOUL POLE 😳
(via @Pirates) pic.twitter.com/a4jTiH4CxJ
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) April 23, 2026
This man (seriously) did that. He hit a ball that left his bat at a ridiculous 116.9 mph. It soared more than 100 feet up into the Texas sky, then plunked down on top of the right-field foul pole.
Oneil Cruz’s April 22 homer against the Rangers, by the numbers. (David Adler / Statcast / MLB)
Just so you know, that foul pole is 92 feet high. And it’s located atop a fence that sits 326 feet from the batter’s box. Hat tip to John Blake of the Rangers for that invaluable info.
Want to see how high up that is, how far from home plate that is and what the top of that foul pole looked like once Cruz had finished assaulting it? Fortunately, the ever-inventive Hannah Mears, the Pirates’ TV sideline reporter, trekked all the way up there to find out.
You can see where the ball left a divot! https://t.co/9zeJbF7dAE pic.twitter.com/zOy9Y9d5cg
— Hannah Mears (@mearshannah_) April 23, 2026
That seemed hard — but how hard was it?
So here’s how most of the world thinks after something like that: That’s impossible.
Now here’s how us Weird and Wild investigators think: Wait, how possible is it?
My next thought was: That seems like something AI could answer. But after my unfortunate experience last month with ChatGPT, which just made stuff up it thought I’d want to hear, I went a different route this time: with Perplexity, an AI search engine. Here was my basic little fun-filled question:
How would I calculate the odds of hitting a home run that hit the top of the foul pole?
Hoo boy. I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into.
This, Perplexity told me, was a “simple calculation,” that a “practical” scientific person (like me?) should treat as a “conditional probability problem.” Should I have told Perplexity that my idea of a “conditional probability problem” is: What should I wear today if it’s going to be 53 degrees and raining? I did not do that. So let’s move along.
Perplexity then offered me a “simple calculation” it apparently thought I could do at home:
P (top of foul pole HR) = P (ball reaches pole area) x P (hits top/very top of pole/pole-area ball).
OK, great. Or it also offered me an alternative, more detailed option:
P = P (pulled to the line) x P (fair side trajectory) x P (enough distance) x P (contacts pole top)
After reading all that, I had a thought that I’m guessing most of us share pretty much daily: Shoot, I forgot to get my master’s degree in physics from M.I.T. again this week.
In other words, even with the help of AI’s deepest thinkers, I was way out of my league on performing this “simple” calculation. Perplexity at least plugged some totally imaginary numbers into its formula and gave it a guess, speculating that …
The likelihood of hitting the top of that foul pole worked out to one in every one million balls hit.
Awesome. Except for one thing:
Even the AI genius inside Perplexity’s brain basically admitted that wasn’t really a guess. It was more like a wild guess.
Whaaaat? AI can be so disappointing. But Perplexity alibied by telling me that a “simple” calculation wasn’t the way to go anyhow. Lots more data needed to be inputted. And I was pretty sure that the least qualified person I knew to input it was me. So …
Anybody know a physicist?
What do you know? I did! So I turned to an astrophysicist with expertise in baseball — Dr. Meredith Wills, a senior data scientist at SportsMEDIA Technology Corp.
She’s more famous for her years of fascinating reporting on how lively or not lively the baseballs might be in any given season. But once she made it into my contacts under the label, “baseball physicist,” she moved quickly to the top of my list.
I texted her, pretty much begging for help in trying to figure out the odds of Cruz hitting a home run that landed on top of the foul pole.
“I’m not even sure where to start,” she replied. “You need one of the NASA engineers who’s landing people on the moon. And the moon landing is probably easier.”
So could it be true that not even someone labeled in my contacts as a “baseball physicist” views calculating the aeronautical odds of bizarre homers as their areas of expertise? It could. But did that mean Dr. Wills wasn’t highly intrigued by all this? Turns out it did not.
“Wait,” she then texted. “He actually hit a HR that landed on top of the foul pole?!?!”
The flight path of Oneil Cruz’s “one in a million” home run. (David Adler / Statcast / MLB)
Our official aeronautical odds research project was off and running. Next, we had an enjoyable phone conversation much like those that all the great scientific minds of baseball have regularly.
I wondered: Was this really as impossible as it looked? You just have to land a round baseball on top of a really high pole and pull it directly down the line. What’s so hard about that?
When she’d finished laughing, she conceded that hitting a foul pole in right field was “easier than if you had the equivalent of a foul pole in dead center field.” Good point!
But then she told me all the data points that would need to be considered to accurately calculate these odds: launch angle … trajectory … meteorological conditions … drag on the baseball … angle of flight as it approached the foul pole … and so on. Yikes! I was not the person to supply all of that.
“I just want to at least describe to people the degree of difficulty,” I told her. “I’m thinking, if we can fly a plane from Stockholm to LaGuardia and it lands on the actual runway on time, why can’t somebody hit a baseball on top of an actual foul pole?”
Not surprisingly, she wasn’t in agreement that this was a perfect analogy — and not simply because that plane would land at JFK instead of LaGuardia.
When a plane lands at LaGuardia, she reminded me, it’s working with slight advantages like “pilots and engines.” Not to mention a steering wheel. Did Cruz work with either of those? Let’s go with no.
“Once that ball is hit and launched off the bat,” she asked, “what are the odds of it getting to the foul pole without any other interference on our part to steer it and make sure it gets there?”
Once again, you’ve got me. But why did I infer she was trying to tell me those odds weren’t good?
“Frankly,” she said, “it’s like comparing it to us sending a spacecraft up and having it land on, like, an asteroid or something.”
My mind raced. Up next for Oneil Cruz: Hits dramatic home run that plunks an asteroid! But instead, I asked:
“Do you really think it would be easier to land on the moon than to do what he just did?”
“Well, let’s put it this way,” Wills explained. “I actually think they’re of the same order of difficulty. If he was trying to do it intentionally, then, yeah, it’s a hell of a lot harder to do with a baseball than planting something on the moon.”
She’d given me lots to think about. What she hadn’t given me was the exact odds, down to the 43rd percentile point. So the next day, I circled back one more time, to determine …
Was it harder to calculate the odds than hit that homer?
Was there any shot at answering this question, I asked Dr. Wills. Obviously, America needed to know — by which I meant: Obviously, I needed to know.
She reviewed the formulas Perplexity had proposed. The term, “fuzzy math,” came up. She then took a shot at devising her own formula. I won’t lay it out for you here. Suffice to say, it had lots of entries and included words like “arc” and “apex.”
Alas, all the data we would need to compute that doesn’t seem to be publicly available.
“I feel bad that I don’t have a number for you,” she said — but then fired off one more question:
“Do you know the Drake Equation?”
Um, I know Drake Baldwin. And I could probably come up with an equation for him. But that wasn’t where she was going with this.
“It’s the standard equation used to calculate the probability of us finding life elsewhere in the universe,” she said.
Wow. Alas, that’s a calculation that would take millions of years, she said — or even longer than this elusive Oneil Cruz calculation was taking us.
Oneil Cruz’s shot off the top of the foul-pole sent W&W down another rabbit hole. (Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)
So here’s a little window into the investigative work us dogged baseball researchers sometimes embark on. Sometimes you find your answer in 30 seconds on Baseball Reference. Sometimes you wind up two days later calculating whether there is intelligent life beyond Pluto but no closer to answering the question you started out with. I tried to convey that to Dr. Wills.
THE ATHLETIC: “This is very cool. But there has to be a higher probability of hitting a home run off a foul pole than finding life elsewhere in the universe. Right?”
WILLS: “Definitely.”
TA: “OK, here’s the real question. If we ever do find intelligent life in the universe, will they be intelligent enough to have foul poles?”
WILLS: “More importantly, would they be dumb enough to call them ‘foul poles’ when balls that hit them are actually fair?”
We had arrived, at that point, at a place far deeper than the foul-pole question that had launched this investigative journey. But speaking for you, our loyal readers, I was grateful we’d landed there.
“That,” I replied, “would be the test of how intelligent they really are out there!”