PITTSBURGH — They gathered in their brightly colored kayaks and rubber rafts, several dozen of them at least.

There along the north shore of the Allegheny River they waited, surveyed by the watchful eye of the United States Coast Guard. It was July 10, 2006, and nearby, under the lights illuminating an evening sky above PNC Park, eight of MLB’s top sluggers competed in the Home Run Derby.

And so there were those in the kayaks and the rubber rafts, patiently — or maybe a bit impatiently — waiting for baseballs to soar over the Clemente Wall in right field, clear the grandstand and the concourse and the trees and splash into the water.

Then they would dive from their vessels, hunting those buoyant home run balls like piranhas.

A handful of homers skipped off the concrete riverfront and into the Allegheny River, but only David Ortiz, Lance Berkman and derby winner Ryan Howard walloped home runs directly in.

At the time, it was a feat seen only once during a game since PNC Park opened in 2001.

In the 25 years of the ballpark’s operation, seven home runs have been hit into the river on the fly — no bounce, straight from the barrel of the bat to the drink.

“It’s part of the guys’ mentality,” Pirates’ hitting coach Matt Hague said recently. “The ultimate prize is, absolutely, river balls.”

Aside from the sheer distance necessary — home plate to the Allegheny River is 443 feet, 4 inches — what makes this so difficult for the best hitters in the world to accomplish?

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette spoke to a former nuclear physics professor who researches the physics of baseball, the lead design architect for PNC Park and multiple statistics and data science experts, as well as members of the Pirates, to find out.

The basics

Let’s begin with dimensions.

PNC Park measures 320 feet down the right-field line to the foul pole, and from there, the ball needs to clear 38 feet of the stands and then carry roughly 85 more feet past the concourse and the trees and the riverfront to reach the water.

David Greusel knows those numbers well — he was a senior designer for HOK Sport (now Populous), the architecture firm tasked with sketching the blueprint for Pittsburgh’s ballpark in the late 1990s.

Greusel met with Steve Greenberg, the Pirates’ former vice president of marketing and new ballpark development, at the old Froggy’s bar Downtown early in the planning process. The two shared a heaping plate of loaded nachos and got to talking about the city’s rivers.

As the design materialized and construction began a few years later, Greusel was asked “constantly” if a home run could be hit into the Allegheny River.

“The answer was yes, but it’s going to be really hard,” said Greusel, who was also the lead designer for the Houston Astros’ Minute Maid Park (now Daikin Park). “It’s not going to be an easy poke.”

Based on the data we have a quarter-century later, he was spot on.

Among the seven homers hit straight into the river, there are a few foundational commonalities we can observe. Perhaps the most obvious is they all came off the bat of a left-handed hitter and were pulled to right field.

Even for baseball’s most prodigious righty bats, slicing a home run of such distance the other way is, well, improbable, to say the least.

There is a statistical threshold those special seven meet, as well. Mike Petriello, a Statcast aficionado and analyst for MLB.com, calls it “the price of the ticket.”

Statcast began tracking in 2015, so there are no available metrics for the home runs hit by Daryle Ward and Garrett Jones in 2002 and 2013, respectively. But for the remaining five, Petriello noted they were each hit over 110 mph with a launch angle between 24-38 degrees.

In the Statcast era, there have only been 28 balls hit to the pull side at PNC Park by lefties that met those criteria — and all 28 were home runs.

“It’s not so much like balls are being hit hard and not making it,” Petriello said. “It’s very rare to see a lefty who gets up into that range in the first place.”

The most recent home run hit into the river on the fly came on May 29 from Oneil Cruz. His homer traveled a Statcast-projected 450 feet, hit with a 110.8 mph exit velocity and a 26 degree launch angle.

“It’s the combination of having to hit it at a certain angle as a left-handed hitter, being pulled in this way, which makes it a more rare occurrence,” said Ron Yurko, a Carnegie Mellon statistics and data science professor.

More to the equation

Speaking from his home office over Zoom, Alan Nathan ducked away from the camera frame and returned a few moments later, gripping a baseball.

He started to explain the nature of how the ball travels in the air.

Nathan was a longtime professor at the University of Illinois who received his Ph.D. from Princeton and primarily researched nuclear physics — but in recent years, he’s been focusing on the physics of baseball.

Certain exit velocities and launch angles are prerequisites for an Allegheny River splashdown, sure. But they’re far from the only relevant components.

“The weather matters because the ball experiences drag. The ball is colliding with air molecules, and every time it collides with one, it loses a little bit of speed. The air drag depends on the density of the air. The higher the density, the more air molecules there are.

“And the density depends on temperature. So at low temperature, the density is higher, and at higher temperature, the density is lower.”

Put simply, fly balls travel further with warmer temperatures — and thus lower air density — because the ball is encountering less resistance during its flight.

In general, PNC Park isn’t drastically affected by factors such as temperature and elevation relative to the rest of the league. Coors Field in Denver is a home run haven with an extreme altitude of 5,190 feet above sea level — more than 4,000 feet greater than the next highest.

Nathan estimated a 400-foot home run at sea level would gain close to 20-25 feet of distance at Coors Field.

PNC Park is 743 feet above sea level, which is the sixth highest in MLB, but the ballpark doesn’t particularly lean in favor of hitters or pitchers.

And then there’s wind.

Although home runs at PNC Park have been among the least affected by wind since MLB began using Weather Applied Metrics technology in 2023, the wind blows out 58% of the time at the ballpark.

“The aspect of uncontrollables is crazy in baseball,” Pirates 25-year-old infielder Tyler Callihan said. “It has to be perfect — the wind has to go the right way, stuff like that. It’s all crazy.”

‘Luck of the draw’

When Callihan was a senior at Providence School of Jacksonville (Fla.) in 2019 and a soon-to-be MLB draftee, he attended a Pirates game with his dad.

The two admired the skyline that paints the backdrop of the ballpark, and Callihan’s father, John, pointed out the Allegheny River. Then he offered his son some prophetic words.

“I think you could hit a ball in the river one day,” he said.

On June 10, in the fourth inning against the Los Angeles Dodgers at PNC Park, Callihan stepped into the batter’s box across from Shohei Ohtani, the historic two-way star with four unanimous league MVP awards to his name.

Callihan swung on the first pitch he saw — a 97.8 mph fastball inside — and sent it beyond the right-field seats, where it bounced off the walkway outside the ballpark and into the river.

That was Callihan’s first big-league home run and the 88th splash hit in PNC Park history.

“You have certain at-bats in your life where you can still see the pitch coming in when you close your eyes,” Callihan said. “It probably replayed in my mind 100 times before I went to sleep. I didn’t go to sleep until like 3:30 that night.”

Callihan hit that home run 427 feet with a 107.3 mph exit velocity and 35 degree launch angle, narrowly missing the aforementioned traits of a direct river hit.

The temperature was a little over 80 degrees when he hit the home run, and there was a moderate wind speed of 13 mph, but there was another problem — the wind was blowing out to left field, not right.

Again, the uncontrollables.

That brings us to another factor: the baseball itself.

Home run rates skyrocketed in 2019, and MLB released a report detailing inconsistencies with the baseball’s seam heights. When the seams on the ball are higher, there is generally a higher drag (resulting in a decrease in batted ball distance). And when the seams are lower, the drag decreases (causing an increase in batted ball distance).

That season, Josh Bell hit two mammoth home runs into the Allegheny River on the fly in a span of roughly two weeks. One traveled 472 feet — the longest home run ever hit into the river by a Pirate.

Nathan previously visited the Rawlings Sporting Goods factory in Turrialba, Costa Rica, where he observed 100 or so people in the room stitching the balls by hand.

“It’s hard to control, and you do see a lot of variation,” Nathan said. “ ... It could be luck of the draw.”

Greater opportunity?

There is an unmistakable fact that can be ignored no longer: The Pirates have not hit a whole lot of home runs in recent years.

Regardless of atmospheric explanations and any other various theorizations, that is an important caveat here. The Pirates ranked among the bottom six home run-hitting teams in each of the past three years and they haven’t finished a season better than 18th since 2014.

Additionally, from 2001-11, they only finished within the top 20 once.

Petriello put it simply: “It’s possible this might have happened more if they just had more guys who were capable of doing it.”

This season, however, has presented what should be a greater opportunity for river shots due to the volume of lefty plate appearances.

Last year, the Pirates had the second-fewest plate appearances from left-handed hitters in the National League. But with offseason acquisitions Brandon Lowe and Ryan O’Hearn, the Pirates added more lefty power to a lineup that already featured prime Allegheny River candidates in Cruz and Bryan Reynolds.

In the month of May, lefties made up 48.8% of plate appearances across the entire league, according to FanGraphs, which was the most in a month since 2002.

“If you’re thinking maybe you just see more lefty hitters in Pittsburgh, that increases the chances that somebody could do it,” Petriello said.

That even extends to players who aren’t quite regarded for their power.

Pirates outfielder Jake Mangum is primarily a line drive and ground ball hitter — and he has just one homer this year — but with the right conditions ...

“Maybe if he got a hold of it on the right day with the wind, yes,” Pirates manager Don Kelly said. “He’s got power.”

‘A prized possession’

On July 6, 2002, the fans in right field at PNC Park collectively craned their necks toward the river.

Daryle Ward, then playing for the Astros, hit a no-doubt grand slam off of Kip Wells — the question was: How far was the ball going?

It ultimately dropped 479 feet later into the water. A man standing aboard a docked boat ripped off his shirt and dove in to snag the ball.

A decade later, Hague was playing for the Pirates alongside Pedro Alvarez and Jones, who each etched their names into Allegheny River lore.

“They absolutely thought of it like a prized possession to have one of those,” said Hague, who was hired as the Pirates’ hitting coach in 2024.

And today, it remains an elusive feat.

During batting practice, the Pirates will announce “river ball time” amongst themselves and compete to reach the water.

Who knows? Maybe there will be a couple extra souvenirs floating around later this season.

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