An inside-the-park home run is the closest a baseball game can get to a NASCAR race.
An elite MLB speedster can circle the bases as fast as a racecar driver can circle a racetrack. The inside-the-park homer is one of the most exciting plays in baseball, and one of the rarest.
So if you’re watching the MLB Speedway Classic on Aug. 2 and you see electric superstars like Ronald Acuña Jr. and Elly De La Cruz on the field at Bristol Motor Speedway, you might think to yourself: How fast could they do it?
And then you might think: How fast could ANYONE do it?
But what was the fastest inside-the-park home run? And beyond that, what’s the fastest that a baseball player could possibly circle the bases for an inside-the-parker?
As far as the fastest inside-the-park homer we’ve actually seen in a Major League game, we don’t have home-to-home times for all of MLB history, but we do at least have them tracked for the decade of the Statcast era, which goes back to 2015.
The Statcast record? That belongs to Byron Buxton, who circled the bases in 13.85 seconds on an inside-the-park home run for the Twins on Aug. 18, 2017.
So Buxton reigns supreme in the Statcast era. The next step is to try to figure out: How much faster could a player possibly go than that?
There are two methods we can use to find out.
1) Use the sprint speed of the fastest MLB players to estimate the perfect home-to-home
A perfect inside-the-park home run would mean an elite runner going at max effort all the way around the bases.
The first step of that is getting out of the batter’s box and down the line to first base. We know from Statcast’s 90-foot baserunning splits that the fastest players in the world can run that 90 feet in 3.66-3.67 seconds — that’s basically peak Buxton, De La Cruz, Carroll or Billy Hamilton … or Chandler Simpson this year.
For a perfect inside-the-park home run, that would be close to the limit — in real game conditions, batters take longer because they have to round first base, not run straight through it. But let’s start there.
By the time they hit first base, a runner is at full sprint. Now we need them to maintain that top speed over the last 270 feet of their home-to-home run.
For the fastest MLB players, the max sprint speed for such a run would be around 31.5 feet per second. (Keep in mind the Major League average sprint speed is 27 ft/sec, and an elite sprint speed is 30 ft/sec.) If they kept up that speed from first base all the way to home, that gives a time of 8.57 seconds for the final 270 feet. Add that to the 3.66 seconds to get to first, and it gives us a total inside-the-park home run time of about 12.2 seconds.
That 12.2 seconds is, essentially, the absolute human limit of how fast an inside-the-park home run could be — for the fastest MLB player running at top speed all the way around the bases and taking a perfect path with perfect turns.
Realistically, a trip around the bases could not be that fast. No runner is perfect. Real runners lose time either from not maintaining their max speed all the way around the bases or the way they round the bags.
So what about the fastest “real baseball” time in which a player could circle the bases? You won’t see a Major Leaguer shave a second and a half off Buxton’s record time, but you might someday see a player shave something off. Which brings us to method No. 2.
2) Combine the fastest individual base-to-base times of MLB speedsters to create one blazing-fast home-to-home run
We want the fastest possible inside-the-park home run under actual baseball conditions. The way to get there is to build it, one base at a time.
We can take the fastest home-to-first, first-to-second, second-to-third and third-to-home times that MLB players have ever posted in the Statcast era — on plays where they were specifically rounding the bases — and add them up to get one super-fast home-to-home.
The fastest home-to-first times on bunt singles can get down to 3.3-3.4 seconds, thanks to speedsters getting a running start out of the box and running straight through first base.
But a player who’s swinging away and then rounding first base on his way to extra bases — which would be the case on any inside-the-park homer — goes slower than that.
The fastest examples tracked by Statcast are in the 3.8-3.9-second range, and even those are rare times for an extra-base hit. Buxton, Kevin Kiermaier and Carl Crawford are a few of the runners who have done that in the Statcast era. Buxton’s 3.87 is the best time.
As the runner gets up to full speed and rounds first base, the base-to-base times start to get faster.
A couple of runners have gotten from first to second in under 3.3 seconds, including De La Cruz and Jarren Duran at 3.28. A few other classic speedsters, like Jacoby Ellsbury and Lorenzo Cain, have also posted times in the 3.3 range under Statcast tracking.
By the time we get to the back half of our Frankenstein inside-the-parker, the runners are burning around the bases.
Current players like Oneil Cruz, and famously fast runners like Kiermaier and Billy Hamilton, have gone second-to-third in under 3.2 seconds on their way to scoring. All three having posted times of 3.19 as tracked by Statcast. You start to see more examples as you get a little over 3.2 seconds, including players like Acuña, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Mike Trout.
As they fly around third base and enter the final 90 feet, players can smell a run. And they empty the tank.
The absolute fastest third-to-home time tracked by Statcast is 2.94 seconds by Terrance Gore — one of the fastest players we’ve ever seen on a baseball field. PCA and Hamilton have almost equaled that with sub-3 times of their own. That’s about as fast as you can get to the plate.
If we add up the fastest end of each base-to-base leg (3.8 + 3.2 + 3.1 + 2.9), that gives us a total inside-the-park home run time of 13 seconds flat. If we take the “slowest” end of each leg (3.9 + 3.3 + 3.2 + 3.0), where you start to see more MLB runners who’ve posted those times, it gives us a total time of 13.4 seconds. Or if you take a home-to-home run that’s right in the middle of the range, you’re at 13.2 seconds.
That’s about as perfect of an inside-the-park home run as you can have on a baseball field.
It even lines up with the fastest home-to-home times of baseball legend:
Now, with the precise tracking technology we have in 2025, we might never see an inside-the-park time like that — who’s going to cut half a second off Buxton in his prime, circling the bases on all cylinders?
But we can dream. And any inside-the-park home run is an electric home run, whether it sets land speed records or not.
