People care about home-run distance, because people like impressive home runs, and impressive home runs tend to have considerable distances. One is impressed when a batter drives a baseball 480 feet and out of the yard. As far as quality of contact is concerned, though, what might be more significant is the baseball’s speed off the bat. All a hitter ever wants to do is hit the baseball hard, so looking at the speed off the bat tells us who hit the baseball the hardest. The ESPN Home Run Tracker provides this data for dingers, and unsurprisingly, the hardest-hit homer of the year so far was hit by Giancarlo Stanton. It was a homer that damaged a scoreboard. You can sort the data in the other direction to see the weakest-hit home runs The fifth-weakest dinger of the year so far was hit in Petco Park by Beltre