Bryce Rainer as he appeared when drafted by the Detroit Tigers in 2024.

Getty

Detroit Tigers 2024 first round draft pick hit the longest recorded home run by any member of the Tigers organization on Friday.

Bryce Rainer, the 20-year-old shortstop who is rated the Detroit Tigers No. 3 prospect by MLB Pipeline, accomplished two feats no member of the Tigers organization had ever done at any level in a game on Friday, and he did both on one pitch.

The Tigers made Rainer their first-round draft pick in 2024, No. 11 overall. They selected the Simi Valley, California, native out of Harvard-Westlake High School in Los Angeles, a school with an impressive baseball pedigree, to say the least.

Rainer was the fifth first-round pick out of Harvard-Westlake since 2012. In 2020, the Chicago Cubs drafted Pete Crow-Armstrong out of the school, while three big league pitchers, Lucas Giolito, Max Fried, and current Tigers major leaguer Jack Flaherty were all picked out of the same high school. Fried and Giolito were both drafted in 2012 and Flaherty two years later.

Of the five, Rainer received the largest signing bonus at $5.8 million, but he has not had much of a chance to prove he was worth it yet. Last season, his first as a pro, Rainer found himself on the shelf after just 35 games with season-ending surgery for a dislocated shoulder, according to Tigers reporter Tony Paul of the Detroit News.

Just five games into the 2026 season with the Single-A Lakeland Flying Tigers, Rainer is off to a slow start, with only three hits, albeit with four walks, in 22 plate appearances while striking out nine times.

But with one swing on Friday, Rainer showed the baseball world what the Tigers saw in him when they made him their highest draft pick.

Rainer Blasts Record-Setting Home Run

In a Florida State League game against the Daytona Tortugas, the Cincinnati Reds Single-A affiliate, the left-handed hitting Rainer came to the plate in the fourth inning to face Tortugas righty Edgar Colon. Jumping on the first pitch he saw, a sinker that evidently did not sink the way Colon had hoped, Rainer smashed the pitch, according to MLB.com reporter Ben Weinrib, “over the center-field wall, marked 420 feet away, over the towering batter’s eye. And from Colon’s facial expression, he knew it was gone off the bat.”

The blast ended up traveling a staggering 477 feet, according to Statcast measurements. Since 2015, the start of the Statcast era, Rainer’s blast was “the longest measured homer by a Tigers Major or Minor Leaguer (surpassing Colt Keith’s 473-footer for Triple-A Toledo on June 30, 2023),” according to Weinrib.

Watch the historic Bryce Rainer home run in the video below.

Rainer’s Moonshot Set a Second Tigers Record, As Well

But the records did not stop there. The massive home run came off Rainer’s bat at a blistering 116.2 mph, per the Statcast measurement reported by Weinrib. That made the homer the hardest hit ball of the Statcast era by any Tigers player at any level, breaking the record set by Chris Meyers, also at Lakeland, in 2022. Meyers, a Tigers 13th-round pick in 2021, smashed a ball at 115.7 mph.

Meyers is not ranked among Detroit’s top 30 prospects, according to MLB Pipeline. In his sixth minor league season, Meyers had advanced only to Double-A ball.

The Tigers have much bigger things planned for Rainer, who is projected by MLB Pipeline to reach the organization’s No. 1 prospect ranking by 2028, and to get his call-up to the major leagues that same year.

Jonathan Vankin JONATHAN VANKIN is an award-winning journalist and writer who now covers baseball and other sports for Heavy.com. He twice won New England Press Association awards for sports feature writing. He was a sports editor and writer at The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo, Japan, covering Japan Pro Baseball, boxing, sumo and other sports. More about Jonathan Vankin

More Heavy on Tigers

Loading more stories