Major League Baseball
Swingin' for the fences

By Larry Stone
Seattle Times staff reporter

ELLEN M. BANNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Even in his Mariners days, Ken Griffey Jr. was known for watching his blasts fly.

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Through Friday, there had been 225,026 home runs hit in major-league history, starting May 2, 1876, with Ross Barnes of the Chicago White Stockings ("straight down the left field to the carriages, for a clean home run," according to the Chicago Tribune) and ending late Friday with Jayson Werth of the Los Angeles Dodgers hitting his second home run of the night.

That doesn't count the 766 in the World Series, the 534 in the League Championship Series, the 308 in the Division Series or the 164 in the All-Star Game.

It also doesn't count, of course, all the soaring drives that curved just to the wrong side of the misnamed foul pole (or to the right side, except the umpire didn't see it that way). It doesn't count the ones robbed by leaping, tumbling outfielders, or the ones that died at the warning track, the victims of stiff winds or heavy air or mighty swings that were just a tick off kilter.

Nor does it include the three hit by Michael Jordan in the minor leagues, nor the 868 hit by Sadaharu Oh in Japan, nor the one that 75-year-old Luke Appling hit in an old-timer's game in Washington, D.C., in 1982.

It does, however, include one homer temporarily nullified because of a bat with too much pine tar, and one off a transformer in Detroit. It includes one by a portly left-hander that he may or may not have called (we like to think he did). There was that one that bounced off the head of an outfielder, right over the fence. And one in the gathering twilight of Coogan's Bluff.

Home runs have always been baseball's glamour event, the one that inspires both poets and statisticians. Most ballplayers are loath to admit they swing for the fences, but they're lying if they say they don't savor the moment when it happens.

"I remember Billy Williams hitting a homer one day at Wrigley, and when he got back to the dugout he said, 'I felt that one all the way down to my toes,' " said Hall of Famer Ernie Banks. "When you catch it right, it's a perfectly wonderful feeling. It's one you continuously want to have. You practice, you change bats, change stances, get a little more history on the opposing pitcher, all in search of that feeling. It's a feeling that's unbelievable when you hit the ball right and it goes out of the park."

Banks, who hit 512, putting him in the exclusive (but getting less so by the year) 500-homer club, is just getting started.

"When you round the bases, the feeling is still there, the memory of it. When you touch home plate, it's still there. When you get to the dugout, it's still there. It lingers throughout the game, throughout your ride home. I'm telling you. It's amazing."

Mr. Cub would get no argument from another 500-club member, Reggie Jackson, who said famously that hitting a home run was better than sex — prompting Roberto Alomar (not a prolific home-run hitter, it should be noted) to say, "I think Reggie is lying."

Mike Cameron, a member of the even rarer four-homer-in-a-game club (just 15 players belong), was also skeptical of Jackson's claim.

"I doubt that — but it's a sexy feeling," he said with a laugh. "Reggie's right about that."

Jackson once put the lure of the long ball a slightly different way: "God, do I love to hit that little, round sum-bitch out of the park and make 'em say, 'Wow!' "

The most exciting play

They have been hit over the Green Monster, onto Waveland Avenue (and promptly thrown back, if hit by the enemy) and into McCovey Cove.

Home-run balls have been fought over in the bleachers (and in court), sold for huge profit and treasured for life in bureau drawers. Announcers have forged careers over clever or bombastic home-run calls, and some of the most famous — "It could be, it might be, it is!" — are part of the national lexicon. Others, like "Fly, fly away," are regional catchphrases.

Home runs have saved baseball more than once, and probably will again. After the Black Sox scandal of 1919, it was Babe Ruth. After the new deadball era of the 1960s, it was Hank Aaron and Carlton Fisk. And after the strike of 1994, it was Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, in their frantic battle for the season record in 1998.

Oh, there are detractors, people who think homers are sound and fury, signifying nothing.

George Foster, who hit 52 for the Reds back in 1977, when 50 homers really meant something, once said, "I don't know why people like the home run so much. A home run is over as soon as it starts ... the triple is the most exciting play of the game."

Mark Armour, president of the Northwest chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research, notes that home runs, strikeouts and walks are all on an inexorable rise, a troika of activities that condenses the action to the pitcher, catcher and batter.

"My personal thought is that in comparison to other events in baseball, the home run is the one that involves the least number of people," said Armour. "I think it's somewhat less interesting than things like the double and triple. I realize it's a minority viewpoint, however."

Indeed, the home run has seared itself into the national consciousness, the very phrase becoming a symbol of ultimate achievement. Its name brings to mind the epic journeys of Homer, author of the Odyssey and Iliad — and also of Bart Simpson's father, which just goes to show that the homer can appeal to both the literati and the common man.

Mighty Casey struck out, but that Bucky Jacobsen precursor no doubt jacked a few out of the yard, too. Who can forget Roy Hobbs, using a bat cut from a tree split by lightning (Wonderboy) to hit a blast off the stadium lights, starting a fiery storm of sparks? Or mythical Washington Senators manager Robert Shafer, desperate to catch the Yankees, vowing: "I'd sell my soul for one long-ball hitter — hey, where did you come from?"

The biggest hitter

Richard Ben Cramer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Joe DiMaggio, wrote of Americans, "We love power. It's about how we see ourselves. It's how we're good when we're very good — with overwhelming force."

That is why Babe Ruth, emerging from the powerless days of the early 20th century (when the ball wasn't just dead, but dirty — so soiled by the end of the game it could scarcely be seen), was such a revelation.

He embodied (or more likely created) the larger-than-life spirit of the Roaring '20s, and when he socked 29 home runs in 1919, aided by the advent of springier baseballs, he was a national sensation. The sport needed it, too, as the magnitude of a crooked World Series began to resonate.

Ruth (who died, appropriately and astonishingly on the same date as his kindred spirit in wretched excess, Elvis Presley — Aug. 16), hit a mind-boggling 54 homers in 1920, 59 in '21, 60 in '27 — totals so completely beyond his peers as to be almost unimaginable.

But not for long. Bill James, the noted baseball researcher and author, argues that Ruth's biggest contribution was to change the mind-set of his peers by making the home run, derided by influential pioneers like Ty Cobb and John McGraw, not just fashionable but desirable.

"Ruth was as much a pathfinder as a dominant talent," James told The Seattle Times in 1998. "He changed the way the game was actually played more than anyone else. Once he established it was possible to do the things he did, others were able to do them quickly. It wasn't that he was that much better than other players, but rather that he was the first guy to establish you could play that way and succeed."

The sweetest hit

Yale physicist Robert Adair, in his book "The Physics of Baseball," tried to quantify the lyrical act of hitting a baseball out of the park.

"For a well-hit ball, the bat-ball collision takes place in a small "sweet spot" region that is near the center of the percussion of the bat and near the nodes of the lowest vibrational amplitudes of the bat," he began.

Reached by phone, Adair is not nearly so obtuse. In fact, he's quite jovial, and passionate in his love of the long ball.

"It's a climactic thing, just from the human side," he said. "There's a drama to it, whether it's 'Casey at the Bat' in the 1890s, to today. Also, tactically, it's really an important thing, in that a home run is worth about 1.4 runs on the average."

Adair crunched the numbers and concluded that, under standard conditions and using an 85-mph fastball as the gauge, "450 feet is about the maximum that ballplayers can hit the ball."

Of course, baseball isn't played under standard conditions, and any number of variations — a pitcher throwing 90-plus mph, the altitude of Coors Field, a doctored bat, a livelier ball, a smaller ballpark, a steroids-enhanced ballplayer — can change the dynamics.

All those factors have been cited as causes of the latest homer explosion that began in 1996 and continues unabated, despite predictions that the introduction of drug testing in 2003 would turn off the power.

"People were talking this year that maybe the numbers would be down a little, and they're not," said David Vincent, a computer programmer from Centerville, Va., who is the world's reigning expert on home-run data. "Runs per game, homers per game, doubles per game — they're all hanging there, or maybe just a touch higher. The supposed downward trend due to smaller players hasn't happened."

Vincent operates a database that contains every home run ever hit, updated constantly. He seems as good a person as any to try to capture the appeal of the long ball, beyond the fact that chicks dig it and home-run hitters drive Cadillacs.

"I've always thought that anyone who watches a sporting event is interested in the fastest, the longest, who can throw it the farthest, jump the highest," Vincent said. "That's what the home run is. Home-run sluggers are certainly the gladiators of the baseball diamond. They do it bigger than anyone else."

Few get to experience that sensation. Banks has done so more times than anyone but 15 men in history. He says, "I've forgotten what it feels like."

He's lying.

"You work so hard in spring training, in batting practice, to get that feeling again, to hit that ball solid," Banks said. "Sammy has a hop when he hits it, he gets that feeling, and he knows it, and hops in the air. Those that watch it know it's gone, and they raise up. Everyone has a feeling.

"I've had Mickey Mantle say to me, when he hit a home run, the feeling he had and the thought he had behind it, that someone might have driven 75, 100 miles to see him play, and to see him hit a home run, and it's so satisfying to him that was it was worth people's time to come that distance and see him play and hit a home run.

"I still get it all the time from people who remember seeing me hit a home run and how much it meant to them. It's a major, major part of baseball. When I see kids playing Little League, boy, I like to see them hit a home run, just one time, to get that feeling of it."

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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