Major League Baseball
10 great home-run moments

Babe Ruth, 1932

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1. No home-run compilation would be complete without some mystical feat by Babe Ruth. We'll skip the obvious — his "did he or didn't he" called shot off the Cubs' Charlie Root at Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series — and focus on his final homer, No. 714. At age 40, playing for the Boston Braves, he summoned his magic one final time on May 25, 1935, cranking three homers in a game against the Pirates. The last one sailed completely out of Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, the first time that feat had been accomplished. Six days later, Ruth retired.

2. Fifteen players have hit four home runs in a single major-league game, most recently Toronto's Carlos Delgado in 2003. But only one player in professional baseball ever has homered for the cycle. That feat was accomplished by Tyrone Horne, a member of the Cardinals' Class AA Arkansas Travelers, who on July 27, 1998, hit the ultimate progression of four homers in a game against the San Antonio Missions. He had a two-run homer in the first inning, a grand slam in the second, a solo homer in the fifth and a three-run shot in the sixth. With nothing left to accomplish, Horne struck out in his final at-bat.

	Josh Gibson

3. According to legend, Josh Gibson, the brilliant Negro League catcher, is the only person to ever hit the ball completely out of Yankee Stadium, in any of its incarnations. Mickey Mantle came close on May 30, 1956, with a shot off Washington's Pedro Ramos that hit about 18 inches from the top of the right-field façade, and with another blast off Kansas City's Bill Fischer in 1963. And Mantle himself swore he saw Frank Howard hit one out of Yankee Stadium on a drive that was barely foul. But several accounts, none verified, have a Gibson blast exiting the building in 1930, a blast that Sports Illustrated pinpointed to September of that year, off a pitcher named Connie Rector, in a game between Gibson's Homestead Grays and the Lincoln Giants.

4. Jimmy Piersall, whose nervous breakdown inspired the hyperbolic movie, "Fear Strikes Out," starring the chronically unathletic Anthony Perkins as Piersall ("If nothing else, it probably helped him get cast in 'Psycho,' " Piersall would say later), etched his way into the home-run annals in 1963, while playing for the woeful New York Mets.

Stuck at 99 career homers, Piersall told teammate Duke Snider, who had just hit his 400th homer, "I'll bet I get more publicity for my 100th homer than you got for your 400th." And indeed he did, commemorating the achievement — a pop fly over the 258-foot right-field wall at the Polo Grounds — by running around the bases backward. One of his teammates asked why he didn't run counterclockwise, to which Piersall is said to have snapped, "What do you think, I'm a nut?" Mets manager Casey Stengel, disgusted by the theatrics, released Piersall two days later.

	NICK DELICH/BASEBALL HALL FAME / HBO Hank Greenberg

5. Detroit's Hank Greenberg, the great slugger who in 1938 made one of the most spirited challenges to Babe Ruth's then-record 60 home runs before finishing with 58, hit one of the most emotional home runs in baseball history in 1945. In May 1941, Greenberg — the American League MVP of 1940 — had been drafted into the Army, the first of many baseball stars to join the service. He was discharged on Dec. 5, 1941, but re-enlisted in the Army Air Corps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two days later. Greenberg didn't return to the Tigers until July 1, 1945, when in his first game in more than four years he smashed a home run in front of a roaring Tiger Stadium crowd of 47,721. Greenberg would later that year hit a grand slam in the ninth inning of the final game of the season to help the Tigers beat the St. Louis Browns, 6-3, and clinch the American League pennant.

6. Another great comeback story: The White Sox's Bo Jackson, after missing the entire 1992 season to recover from hip-replacement surgery, hit a stirring, pinch-hit home run in his first at-bat of the 1993 season at Comiskey Park. Jackson was moved to tears by the prolonged standing ovation, and when the ball was retrieved for him, he said, "I'm going to have it bronzed and put on my mother's tombstone." Jackson had promised his mother, who died the previous April, that he would play baseball again.

	Ted Williams

7. A special spot in home-run lore is reserved for the inside-the-park version, and perhaps the most memorable in baseball history was executed by none other than Ted Williams, who once characterized this particular round-tripper as the most difficult of his 521 because "I had to run."

The homer in question, on Sept. 13, 1946 — Friday the 13th — was memorable for two reasons: It came against the infamous "Boudreau shift" devised by Indians manager Lou Boudreau, and it provided the only run in a 1-0 Red Sox victory over Cleveland that clinched the American League pennant.

Williams was famously frustrated by the Indians' shift, in which the defense swung radically over to the right side, leaving the left fielder, stationed behind what would be the normal shortstop position, to solely man the left side. Williams hated to give in and go the opposite way, but this time he sliced the ball down the left-field line, raced around the bases and slid across the plate just ahead of the throw. "It was one of the greatest sights I ever saw," Red Sox pitcher Boo Ferriss later told the Boston Herald.

8. Back in 1998, two divergent careers merged in St. Paul, Minn., where J.D. Drew was biding his time with the St. Paul Saints during a contract dispute with the Philadelphia Phillies, who had drafted him No. 1 but ran into the immovable object known as Scott Boras. Meanwhile, a woman pitcher named Ila Borders was toiling for the Duluth-Superior Dukes, trying to bring gender equality to baseball.

The two teams from the independent Northern League met June 30, and, sure enough, Drew found himself batting against Borders in the eighth inning. The count worked to 3-2 before Drew spared himself the indignity of being fanned by Borders, crushing a changeup "halfway to Stillwater," according to the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. A disconsolate Borders told the newspaper afterward, "It just was stupid pitching. I should have given him a pitch he couldn't hit hard. Instead, I have this attitude that I'm not afraid of anybody, and look what happens."

9. The most misleading home run in major-league history was hit by a Hall of Famer — Hoyt Wilhelm, the knuckleballing pitcher. In his first major-league at-bat, for the New York Giants on April 23, 1952, against the Boston Braves at the Polo Grounds in New York, Wilhelm went yard.

	Charlie Brown

It was not a portent of things to come. Wilhelm would pitch for 21 more seasons, in 1,069 more games, the most of any major-league pitcher in history until Dennis Eckersley surpassed him in 1998. He never homered again.

10. On March 30, 1993, a hard-luck player produced a home run even more unlikely than Wilhelm's, or Duane Kuiper's lone career blast in 3,379 at-bats.

Charlie Brown, after four decades of well-chronicled cartoon futility, connected for a game-winning homer in the ninth inning. His sister, Sally, asked incredulously, "You?" Poor Chuck never did get to kick that football, however.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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