Home runs have soared out of baseball parks at a historic rate in 2017, as MLB hitters have slugged more than 5,700 dingers to set the record for a single season. Those homers are flying awfully far, too.

Perhaps no shot was more impressive than one from New York Yankees rookie Aaron Judge, who blasted a home run 495 feet in Yankee Stadium this summer. And fans who tuned into the Home Run Derby in July saw Judge send baseballs where no baseballs had gone before—including one homer that doinked off the roof of Marlins Park in Miami.

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Aaron Judge just hit one off the roof during batting practice at the @TMobile HR Derby.



This is going to be fun. #ScoreUnlimited pic.twitter.com/SsICB0QJrw — SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) July 10, 2017

After watching the enormous Yankee rookie crush long balls to unreal distances, we started wondering: What's the farthest a human could possibly hit a baseball? So we asked a scientist.

Alan Nathan is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois who has spent a career tracking physics, especially as it relates to baseball. He says two primary factors guide how far a ball is going to fly: exit velocity and launch angle.

Exit velocity is the is the speed at which the ball leaves the bat; you've probably seen this stat start to pop up during games or on SportsCenter. So far this season, Nathan says, 118 mph is the highest observed exit velocity (Statcast gives Judge the top mark for 2017 at 121.1 mph). Having looked at all the data, he says about 120 mph is the hardest a person could hit a baseball.

"That is not typical, but that is where they top out," he says. "If one wanted to try to figure out how far is possible, let's say 120 mph is as hard as anyone ever hits the ball." Each mph of exit velocity can add an extra five or six feet of distance to a dinger, he says, so that helps us set a cap on the longest possible home run.

The other key factor is launch angle—how high the ball flies. Towering home runs look cool, but it's the lower-angle bomb that's going to carry farther. If baseball were played in a vacuum, Nathan says, his trajectory calculator shows that a 45-degree angle proves best for maximum distance. (Count us in for space baseball.) But this is the real world, and with air drag in play, the optimum angle for a distance shot rolls in at about 26 degrees.

Now we need to talk about the external factor a batter can't control—namely, the conditions. Consider Nathan's ideal home run, hit with 120-mph exit velocity at a 26-degree launch angle. If Giancarlo Stanton hit that ball on a 70-degree day, at sea level, with no wind and 50 percent relative humidity, then Nathan's calculations show the ball will travel 492 feet. But we know there have been longer home runs than that, and we know there are ballparks like Colorado's mile-high Coors Field that are given to the ball carrying farther, so atmospheric conditions must play a big role.

"If you start changing those atmospheric conditions, that number can go up a lot," he says. "An out-blowing wind at 5 mph, which is not a lot of wind, can add 24 feet to a fly ball, so now you are at 516 ft. If instead I go to Denver (lower air density at a higher elevation) and that goes up to 533 feet."

Now think of the perfect home run on the perfect day. Go to Denver, where the air density is lower, and make it a hot day, which decreases air density even more. Then add a small breeze of 5 mph blowing out. "That is the perfect storm," Nathan says. On this day, his perfect home run flies 560 feet.

"A ball can be hit a long way, but it very rarely is," he says. "It is very rare to have a perfect storm of simultaneously hit very hard with wind blowing out at the optimum angle."

Historically, Mickey Mantle's 1953 home run at Washington, D.C.'s Griffith Stadium is considered the longest ever, at 565 feet. Nathan has investigated that tater and believes the real number is closer to 540 feet. How could that have happened? A 20-mph outgoing wind. "That made a big difference," he says. "Without the wind, it would not have been over 500 feet."

Physicists dig the long ball. Enjoy the playoffs.

Follow Tim Newcomb on Twitter at @tdnewcomb.

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