Being the big Mets fan that I am, I figured I'd do a blog in honor of the recent signing of the man that pulled off this throw, Yoenis Cespedes.

This throw is so ridiculous it's almost hard to believe that it's real. It is real, so lets look deeper into this. 

Judging by the distance of the fence down to that corner, I can estimate that Cespedes threw this ball about 320 feet (97.5 m), and I'll make the assumption that the ball came out of his hand at about 95 MPH (42.5 m/s). This means that, counting air resistance, the ball left his hand and reached the catchers glove in a little more than 3 seconds. The runner going towards home was about 70 feet from the plate when Cespedes released this ball, and the ball reached the catcher just an instant before the runner got there. This means that had the runner been going at all faster than 7.1 m/s (15.9 MPH), then the throw wouldn't have been on time. 

The launch angle of this throw was roughly 13 degrees. A 1 degree change in the vertical trajectory of this throw would have either made the ball sail above the catcher or bounce in front of him, making it much more difficult to tag the runner. Also, had the horizontal angle at the release been changed by a single degree, the ball would have traveled further to the left or right of the catcher, likely making it impossible to tag the runner. 

Making a throw that far, at that high of a speed, and that precise of accuracy makes this a pretty incredible throw by Cespedes, and there is a very small amount of people on the planet that could pull this off.