The home run has taken on a life of its own, mythological in its remembrance.

It was the 2006 Virginia state championship, and the big left-handed sophomore slugger for St. Anne’s-Belfield in Charlottesville, Va. launched one that led his head coach to say 13 years later, “I’ve never seen a ball hit like that.”

Advertisement

Kyle Long, the big lefty himself, referred to it simply as, “The water tower shot.”

As Long enters his seventh year in the NFL, the second-longest-tenured Bear still lets himself periodically wonder what his life would be like if he stuck with baseball. He went to Florida State to pitch, but looking back at his time in high school, it’s his hitting that helped cement his legend in central Virginia.

“It wasn’t just hitting bombs,” said Ryan Caldwell, Long’s high school teammate. “The kid could hit it to left field, he could hit it in the gaps, if he wanted to lay down a bunt he could lay down a bunt. He led our team in stolen bases. It was anything. He was literally an all-around player and was so fun to watch. I can only imagine what he would’ve done if he played in the show.”

Baseball was Long’s way to make new friends when his family moved to Charlottesville. He played T-ball with kids he still calls friends, and then would follow his older brother Chris around at little league.

“The Elks Club, that was the team I got to go and watch,” he said. “I always had a bat in my hand.”

Alan Swanson had a batting cage set up in his yard, where his son and Chris Long, little league teammates, would hit. When Kyle tagged along, Swanson was taken aback by the 10-year-old’s ability.

Swanson was the head coach at St. Anne’s-Belfield (STAB), where Chris played and Kyle eventually transferred.

“He was a talented player before we got him,” said Swanson, who left STAB in 2008 after leading the team to multiple state titles. “He was looking at several schools and his dad wanted him to come to St. Anne’s for many reasons, including his older brother Chris, who also played baseball. He knew it was a program where we took baseball very seriously.

“My first impression of him was he came from a very good family. The family is hard-working. Chris was wonderful. His dad and mom were very supportive of the program. He was a talented kid with a supporting family coming. It was a great situation.”

Advertisement

Everyone at STAB knew Chris, and they had heard stories about his bigger, younger brother.

“We’re hearing we’re getting another Long coming in, and it was insane, they said he’s bigger than Chris,” Caldwell said. “I said, ‘No shot!’ He comes in, he’s bigger than Chris, he’s more athletic than Chris and he was just an unbelievable athlete in everything that he did.”

Trevor Knight also crossed paths with Kyle through Chris.

“Everyone knew who he was,” Knight said. “Very big kid but what was surprising was how athletic he was. To be as big as he was but could throw very hard, could swing a bat, had a great swing and an overall great athlete.”

When Long picked up a baseball bat, Caldwell said, “It looks like a twig in his hand. It was a man playing against boys. You hear that a lot, but the guy was unbelievable in everything he did.”

That included running the bases.

“Let me tell you about the scariest moment I had coaching baseball in 20 years,” Swanson said. “I was coaching third base and Kyle was on second and a kid got a base hit. I was sending Kyle, so I was down toward home plate so he could pick me up as he rounded third and I’m waving him on. He’s flying and he rounds kind of wide and all of a sudden I realize he’s coming right at me. I kind of move to the right and he kind of veers to his left, and I think to myself, ‘He’s gonna run me over.’ I would have died.

“Then I kind of stood there and relied on his athleticism and he got around me, but I never before had somebody that big, that fast coming to me, and I knew he would kill me if he hit me. And then he’d probably get up and score, which is the cool part.”

When he pitched, Long would put eye black all over his face.

“It was a scary sight,” Swanson said.

As if a 6-foot-7, left-handed fireballer needed the extra intimidation factor.

Advertisement

“He was the complete package,” Swanson said. “Florida State doesn’t recruit pitchers who aren’t very, very good and they loved him. He had everything. He had a great fastball and he let the ball go about four feet in front of the batter’s face because he was so big. He had a breaking ball. He had an attitude. The best thing he had going for him as a pitcher was his attitude. I wouldn’t have wanted to face him.”

Said Knight, “I guess you would say he’s a stud. He was very good. He was a big lefty. Could throw hard. At one of these recruiting or scouting tournaments or travel ball scenarios, he was clocked at 97, which in the baseball world, that’s very hard, especially coming from a 6-7 lefty. From a pitching standpoint, he was a hard thrower, he had good breaking stuff, very competitive. He definitely was one of the most competitive guys out there. He was a tough one to beat.”

Knight was a two-time Virginia state player of the year and went on to play at James Madison. Long described Knight as having “the nastiest slider I had ever seen. He used to get on the mound and go like this (motions with glove hand), ‘It’s comin’,’ and then whew. Guys would whiff and he would wave them back to the dugout.”

That confidence was something he and long Long shared.

“Straight heat, that was it,” Caldwell said. “If he got pissed off, he would just throw … My senior year, I caught for him. I wouldn’t even put down signals, he would literally give me like he was warming up, fastball signal, and just throw a fastball. The kids couldn’t hit it because he was throwing like 96 from the left side, 6-7, 96 looks like 106 to those kids. It was unfair.

“He didn’t care (that the hitters knew). If somebody somehow got a hit off him, that’s when he would do it. At the beginning of the game, he would get the signs, whatever, then somebody gets a hit, he gets pissed off, he would say, ‘No more signs, I’m going to tell you what I’m gonna throw, and yeah, tell the hitter, too.’ It was insane.”

Caldwell stood 5-foot-7, so he didn’t dare mess with Long’s competitive spirit through a visit to the mound, and Swanson didn’t want Long to change, either.

Advertisement

“He loved to compete. He absolutely enjoyed the competition,” Swanson said. “He liked the one-on-one aspect of pitching. It’s simply you against the batter and Kyle loved that. He always wanted the ball in big situations. He never wanted to come out. He was the ultimate competitor and if anything happened on the field, Kyle was going to take care of it. And you love that as a coach. Sometimes it was hard because he would get emotional but you loved his competitive fire.”

Former Giants pitcher Gary Lavelle was a coach in the area. He told Swanson one day, “Don’t try to curb any of (Long’s) enthusiasm because that’s what makes him.”

“When he’s looking at you, he’s seeing nothing but more of, ‘Hey, I’m gonna beat this guy,’” Knight said. “You can feel that. When I talked to other guys, they said, ‘Yeah, you knew he was going to beat you.’ There was nothing you could do to win against him. It was awesome to be a teammate of that.”

In the state semifinals in ’06, Caldwell recalls Long throwing a one-hitter.

“It was just insane,” he said. “(Long) cruised through that game. We went 22-4 that year and Kyle was probably 8-0 with however many strikeouts but didn’t get hit around a lot. He was fun to watch. Not a lot of action behind him standing in the field. Kind of got a little boring.”

That performance sent STAB to the state title game, where the opponent, Paul the Sixth, was probably relieved that they didn’t have to face Long on the mound. But they still had to contend with him at the plate.

Before we get to the home run, it should be noted that Long’s legend as a hitter stemmed from what he would do in practice. Or more specifically, what he would hit.

“(The headmaster’s house) used to be across the street in right field,” Long said. “We used to pepper his second-level windows and front door. Until he had small kids, then it was like, let’s hit it to left-center.”

Advertisement

“The headmaster’s house was behind right field and he was a big lefty. For most high school hitters, it’s still difficult to hit it that far,” Knight said. “For Kyle, he’s just peppering the truck like it’s nothing. It’s comical watching it happen.”

Caldwell remembers it being a daily ritual in practice.

“We would sometimes have to go over there and say, ‘Hey, you might wanna move the cars. We’re about to take batting practice,’” he said. “It was one of those. There was the fence, then the road, then the headmaster’s driveway and his house. It was pretty crazy. Then the lacrosse field was behind that. I think multiple balls ended up in the middle of lacrosse practice. He was unbelievable.”

David Lourie, the headmaster at STAB, told the Daily Progress in 2008, “It was sort of like a short pop fly for Kyle to hit that (moving) truck in front of our house. If there is a baseball game going on, I had to think twice about letting my son shoot hoops in the driveway.”

“That’s the kind of fun Kyle would have,” Swanson said. “That’s the kind of thing that made practice a lot of fun, doing something like that. If he hit it, I was happy. You had to hit it a long way.”

Sitting down after a May Bears practice, Long tried to think of his favorite baseball memory. He said it was winning the state championship “alongside some of my best friends.”

The humble Long made no mention of his home run. Only when prompted later did he call it “the water tower shot.”

Fortunately, his teammates and former coach remember it well.

Knight: “The No. 1 thing that I’ll always remember was my senior year. We’re playing the state championship against Paul the Sixth. They’re supposed to have a pretty good team. A bunch of guys going D-I. Kyle had just pitched the game before so they thought they were in the clear. They were like, ‘Hey, they’ve gone through their ace, we’re good to go.’ Well, in the championship game, they may not have known that he’s a really good hitter as well. I remember he hit one ball, I can’t even put a footage on it because of how far it seemed it was hit. He hit a ball that I know that my dad and his dad, they’re walking after and they never found it. The reason I think they never found it is because they didn’t walk far off. They were old men and got tired, and that’s the reason they didn’t find the ball. I swear the ball was hit at least 530 feet. It was mashed. I’m sitting over here like, what do you do? The kid is such a good athlete. There’s nothing you can do to compete against that. It was incredible how good he was.”

Advertisement

Caldwell: “That home run, people are still talking about that home run. I remember I was standing on first base and he hit it and I didn’t even move. I just turned around and looked at it. By the time it went halfway up the water tower and landed, he’s standing right next to me, like, ‘Let’s get on it. We’ve gotta run around the bases now.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ It was nuts. It was great because it was a state championship game. I don’t know what the score was at that point but we ended up winning 6-2 and it might have been 3-2 at that point. It wasn’t an insignificant home run. It was pretty cool. The place was going nuts.”

Swanson: “One of our coaches, Larry Mitchell, played for the Phillies in the Major Leagues, said he had never seen a ball hit like that before. It was kind of a bizarre scene. The team we were playing was great. We were playing great. He hit the ball over the fence. He hit the ball over the next fence surrounding the whole park. I think it went way up above a water tower and then it went over somebody’s house. It’s the kind of thing where you’re quiet, where you’re going, ‘Oh my.’ And then Howie Long walks around behind that house and there’s a barbecue going on and he’s saying to them, ‘Did anyone see a baseball around here?’ It’s a surreal situation, first of all that a baseball would come that far, and then that Howie Long would be walking around looking in your backyard during a barbecue for a baseball. The whole thing was bizarre. I’ve never seen a ball hit like that.”

At the 2007 Perfect Game showcase in Cincinnati, Long hit a home run that went off the University of Cincinnati gym, estimated to be 450 feet away.

The Perfect Game showcase was the first time Long was clocked on a radar gun. A few of the players there from the Dominican Republic were watching and laughing because Long had no idea how hard he was throwing.

“In Spanish, I figured out he was saying, ‘How fast?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, 89 maybe 90,’” Long said. “He looked at me like, ‘OK.’ It was 95, 96. I came back in and him and all of his buddies were laughing at me, because I didn’t know.”

Swanson said they snuck a radar gun into the press box periodically and knew Long could throw in the 90s, so he was not surprised when word came back that Long had hit the mid-90s.

That showcase put Long on the map, from his fastball to the bomb he hit off the gym, but also because of what he showed scouts about his personality.

Advertisement

“He made a bunch of good impressions (at Perfect Game),” Swanson said. “I loved the fact that after he threw bullpens, he always said thank you to the catcher. That’s the kind of kid Kyle was. Lots of kids throw bullpens, they kind of ignore the bullpen catcher who’s got the worst job on a baseball field. But every time Kyle threw a bullpen at perfect game or anywhere, he would always make it a point to say thank you to the catcher. And that made a big impression on the scouts there, the fact that that was the kind of kid Kyle Long was, to always remember a guy that was helping him that other people frequently forget.”

There’s still a scouting report on the Perfect Game website describing Long. Here it is, alongside his reaction.

Kyle Long is a 2008 1B/P with a 6’7”, 280 lb. frame from Ivy, VA who attends St Anne’s Belfield HS.

“Yeah, I was 280, 285,” he said.

He’s a unique athlete who is very hard to describe or project athletically. Added to that is his high energy personality that makes him approach the game a bit differently when coupled with his size and athletic ability. Long’s baseball future is probably on the mound. He threw 96 mph and was consistently 94-95 mph from the left side with plenty of life. His slider had good spin at 80-81 and despite lots of effort Long threw strikes with both pitches and had an idea what he was doing. To say he was aggressive would be understating things.

“Yeah. I wanted to throw a lot of fastballs. I wanted to challenge guys.”

(He) attacked hitters with his pitches and looked as if he would after he threw the ball as well.

“You know, that’s just, they’re just accusing me of things now. That’s hearsay.”

Offensively, Long suffers from having no trigger to start the bat and still wasn’t overmatched against the high quality live pitching at the event.

Advertisement

“Yeah, I was overmatched. Those guys were really good. That was the first day where I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be a pitcher if I do play baseball.’”

In BP, though, he showed his tools with a huge blast off the U Cincinnati gym wall about 450′ away.

“Yeah. They had the basketball arena over the right field wall.”

It’s hard to project someone Long’s size to hit upper level stuff but with some coaching/adjustments he could hit a ball as far as anyone on the planet.

“Yeah, that’s probably true.” (Laughs)

You can’t help but like this young man because of his energy and approach to the game.

“I had a lot of fun. Just like when I’m out here on the football field. I had more energy because I wasn’t hitting people and running around all the time. I imagine that closeted energy and then I was able to unleash it when I was on the field. It was a lot of fun.”

.@Ky1eLong, starting pitcher?

What could've been…. pic.twitter.com/dz0d47Zsn7

— Cut4 (@Cut4) June 4, 2018

You can still watch videos of Long’s hitting and pitching from the showcase. The bat really does look like a twig in his hand. 

Long committed to Florida State and MLB teams knew he planned on honoring that commitment. He had no idea where he would be drafted in 2008, but wanted to use it as a gauge for comparison’s sake.

“I was sitting at home and I waited so long I ended up just shutting the computer because the later rounds weren’t on TV,” he said. “I was just hanging out. I got like six calls from my buddies saying they were the Yankees and I was getting drafted, so I just shut my phone off.”

The White Sox wound up taking Long in the 23rd round as a draft-and-follow candidate. If he stuck with baseball, would he be pitching on the South Side today?

“I would love to think that, but you know how sports works,” he said. “It’s rare that I’ve been in Chicago for seven years. It doesn’t usually work like that.”

The next part of Long’s baseball story is better known in Chicago, as it all came to the forefront when Phil Emery drafted Long in the first round of the NFL Draft in 2013.

Advertisement

Long was arrested on Jan. 4, 2009 for driving while intoxicated. His blood-alcohol level was 0.10 and he was pulled over for driving the wrong way. Before his freshman season could begin at Florida State, Long left the team for academic reasons, a decision that was made before the arrest.

Long was away from competitive sports for nearly two years and spent time in Newport Beach, Calif. working at Jack’s Surf Boards.

“I fixed wheel bearings and stocked fans,” he said. “It was good to meet people and it was good to understand the power of a dollar and how hard people worked and the things that they do to make a living. You have to have an appreciation for that.”

When it was time to return to college, he was sitting with a friend trying to decide if he wanted to play football or baseball in junior college.

“They always said, ‘Do what you love and do it to the best of your ability and if you’re not having fun, don’t do it.’ I have fun with everything I do, so it was always a hard decision for me,” Long said. “(My friend) had a coin with him and we flipped it and heads is baseball — use your head — then tails, go kick some tail (and play football). We ended up landing on tails. Coach (Mark) McElroy, I was in his office the next week.”

Long played at Saddleback Junior College in 2010 and 2011 before his one year at Oregon. For those who saw his baseball talent, it was no surprise that he made the switch back to football with relative ease.

“Kyle is an adult and he made a decision as an adult to pursue football and I absolutely respect that and it’s been a great decision for him,” Swanson said. “Sure, as a guy who was there from when he was rolling around on my lawn with my dogs by the batting cage until the end of high school, it was fun to project and see how far he would go, but that’s not why you coach. You coach so you can help kids and you coach so you can be a positive influence in their lives.

Advertisement

“I thought he had a chance to be a spectacular baseball player, but so what? He turned out to be a spectacular football player.”

It is fun, though, for them to think about what it would be like if Long, who has earned upward of $33 million in the NFL, were playing baseball.

“You look now and you look at some of the guys, like Aaron Judge, what’s his size? Dude, that was Kyle — playing in high school,” Caldwell said. “When he got drafted, there was some stat floating around, if he was in the show right now he would be the biggest player in the major leagues. I would’ve liked to see him hit vs. pitch in the majors just because he was so fun to watch.”

In May, Long saw a tweet: “If you could change one moment in sports history, what would it be?” He immediately thought, “What if I stuck with baseball?”

“It’s crazy for me to think about what life would be like,” he said. “The fear of the unknown, but the reason I ended up picking football is I knew I could roll out of bed and just hit somebody. Baseball, you have to really, really … after taking two-three years off and working a job and being out of school, I figured the path of least resistance would be football. That’s funny that I would think that, but at the time it made sense.”

Long, who could make a particularly lethal softball player in retirement, joked that he probably would have “chilled out a lot” if he pursued baseball as his career.

“You can’t choke a guy out in practice,” he said.

He also knows baseball probably would have been a little easier on his body. Long has suffered through a litany of injuries and surgeries in his football career.

“Some days when I wake up and I can’t get out of bed, I say, ‘Shit, I wonder if I can go hit a fastball right now,’” he said.

(Top photo: Brian D. Kersey / Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kGltcHFjbnxzfJByZmlvX2WGcLWMsKaupJSjwW60wK%2BcZq%2BRo8GmsIytpmaekZiybrTIpmStoJViuaazxKebZqeWYri6uMRmo6iml6h6qbXGoWSsm5ikvK15wZqqnpqRoblur8CrnJ6qXw%3D%3D