In the fourth inning of ALDS Game 5, José Ramírez did something that should not be physically possible. He took a 78 mph knuckle-curve from Sean Burke — a pitch that crossed the plate at 0.74 feet off the ground — and drove it 348 feet into right field at Progressive Field. It was the lowest pitch turned into a home run in any postseason game since MLB began Statcast tracking in 2008. The two-run shot was the only offense either team needed. Cleveland won 2-0, completed a comeback from down 0-2 in the series, and punched their ticket to the American League Championship Series.
A Swing That Shouldn’t Exist
To put 0.74 feet in perspective: that’s less than the length of a standard sheet of paper held lengthwise. Rob Friedman, the account behind @PitchingNinja — one of the sharpest pitch-analysis voices in baseball with over a million followers — watched the clip and landed on one word: «diabolical.» He wasn’t wrong.
It’s worth being precise here: the pitch height as it crossed the plate and the height at the moment of contact are two different Statcast measurements that circulated online. The figure that sets the record is the height at contact — 0.74 feet. Saying the ball «touched the ground» is viral hyperbole. It was a legal pitch, impossibly low, and Ramírez put it in the seats anyway.
The Comeback Nobody Saw Coming
Cleveland arrived at Game 5 having dropped the first two games at home. They needed to win three straight. They did it — and it was only the 11th time in history that a team has rallied from 0-2 in a best-of-five series, the first since the 2017 Yankees.
Ramírez was the thread running through the entire run. In Games 3 and 4, he hit a double, triple, single, and home run — essentially a cycle spread across two games. Then he closed it out with the biggest swing of the series. The Game 5 homer was his sixth career postseason home run and his second in as many games: in Game 4 he had already gone deep off Jordan Hicks with a 103.1 mph exit velocity that carried 378 feet.
On the mound, Gavin Williams was just as extraordinary. The Cleveland starter struck out 12, and the pitching staff combined for 21 strikeouts in Game 5 — a record for a nine-inning postseason game in MLB history. Williams also became just the third pitcher in postseason history to record the final out of one game and start the next while his team faced elimination in both.
How Does He Even Hit That Pitch?
Ramírez’s 2026 regular season was not his finest. A left hamate surgery affected his numbers across the board:
- Plate appearances: 544
- Home runs: 12 | RBI: 53
- AVG: .235 | OPS: .688
- xwOBA: .325 (what quality of contact says he should be producing)
- Exit velocity (avg): 88.6 mph
- Barrel rate: 4.1%
- Hard-hit rate: 38.8%
- Bat speed (avg): 70.2 mph
By raw power metrics, those numbers sit in the lower quartiles of the league. But Statcast tells a different story about how he makes contact. His whiff rate sits at the 91st percentile in MLB — elite — and his squared-up rate at the 79th percentile. Translation: Ramírez almost never misses the ball, and when he does make contact, he makes it clean. He doesn’t need to swing hard to hit it well. That’s the whole explanation for how a 78 mph curveball at shin level ends up 348 feet away.
The fact that his regular season was so quiet makes the home run even more improbable on paper. And even more Ramírez.
