Watching the video of his work, Matt Olson was caught by surprise. When he yanked a slider over the left-center fence Saturday at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park, he hadn’t realized how far beneath the strike zone Graham Ashcraft’s slider had dipped.
It was some low-hanging fruit. Catcher Curt Casali had dropped to one knee and positioned his mitt to block a pitch in the dirt. With his bat at about a 45-degree angle to the ground, Olson shoveled it 407 feet to left center, the ball’s travels ending atop the Reds bullpen.
“When I went and looked at the video, it was a lot lower than where I thought it was,” Olson said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday. “For me, that’s typically a good sign when you’re getting some pitches that you feel like are hittable pitches and they’re well below the zone or out of the zone.”
