The number everyone actually wants: Chandler Simpson, the fastest home-to-first runner in the sport, could have sprinted down the line roughly ten times in the time it took Junior Caminero to jog around the bases Monday night. Do the arithmetic yourself. Statcast clocked Caminero's trot at 38.66 seconds. Simpson's quickest tracked home-to-first time this year was 3.78 seconds on a bunt single. That's a shade over ten Simpsons per Caminero lap. By the time Caminero reached first base alone, which took him 13.23 seconds, Simpson's speed would have gotten him down the line and back roughly three-and-a-half times.
These are real Statcast numbers. The clean "ten times" framing is just two true figures divided into each other, so don't go quoting it as an official stat, but the gap is exactly as absurd as it sounds.
Now for the part some people want to ruin. Caminero's trot was the second-slowest undisputed home-run trot Statcast has tracked since 2015, trailing only his own 40.65-second stroll from back in September. He owns both of the two slowest fully-tracked trots on record. He turned to his dugout and pounded his chest before he touched first, cupped his ear at the crowd rounding second, pointed to the sky and to Randy Arozarena down the third-base line, then stopped short of home and crossed his arms in Arozarena's own stone-faced pose with Arozarena sitting right there behind the plate.
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The unwritten-rules crowd wants you to be offended, but they lost this argument before he reached first base.
Look at what this home run meant. Caminero had gone homerless through the first 34 at-bats of his postseason career, a drought stretching back to 2023. He broke it off an All-Star closer in Cade Smith, a two-run shot that pushed the Rays to a 5-1 lead in the seventh and sent them to a 7-3 pennant-clinching win, the third trip to the World Series in franchise history. If there was ever a moment to take your time, it was that one. He earned every second of that lap and then some.
The guy with the best possible reason to sulk didn't. Smith, the pitcher who gave it up, told ESPN's Jesse Rogers afterward: "It's not my style but I guess if I don't like it, I shouldn't give up home runs." A pitcher got beat, and he didn't go hunting for a grievance. The people manufacturing outrage over "disrespect" are doing something Smith himself refused to do.
The comedy only works because of who shares that Rays lineup. Simpson stole an AL-best 46 bases and hit .306 in 2026 with zero home runs, and he still hasn't hit one over the fence in 946 career plate appearances. A 3.78-second blur who never gets to trot, next to a slugger who takes ten times as long to savor one. You can't write a better odd couple. Simpson is the one guy on earth who'd have a legitimate complaint about Caminero's pace, and he's been in Caminero's corner all year, telling reporters back in September that he'd called the MVP case months before anyone else.
This is the content baseball should be printing on billboards: two teammates at opposite ends of the speed spectrum, one clocked at 31.4 feet per second, the other barely moving at all. It's funny and shareable, a rookie speedster and a young slugger both having the time of their lives on the way to the Fall Classic.
Caminero made the moment, and Smith handled it like a grown man. The only people out of line are the ones trying to turn a pennant-winning home run into a scandal.
