With Barry Bonds one home run away from 700, which certainly will be a memorable moment although not as memorable as when he closes in on Hank Aaron’s mark of 755, it’s worth a look at 10 great home run moments.
Ruth’s final home run
1. No home-run compilation would be complete without some mystical feat by Babe Ruth. We’ll skip the obvious–his alleged called shot at Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series–and focus on his final homer. At 40, playing for the Boston Braves, he summoned his magic one final time on May 25, 1935, cranking three homers against Pittsburgh. No. 714 sailed completely out of Forbes Field. Six days later, Ruth retired.
A home-run cycle
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2. Fifteen players have hit four home runs in a single major-league game, but only one player in professional baseball has ever homered for the cycle. On July 27, 1998, Tyrone Horne of the Cardinals’ Double-A Arkansas Travelers hit a two-run homer in the first, 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, he struck out in his final at-bat.
Out of Yankee Stadium
3. According to legend, Josh Gibson, the brilliant Negro Leagues catcher, is the only player to hit the ball completely out of Yankee Stadium, in any of its incarnations, although Mickey Mantle came close in 1956 and in 1963. But several accounts, none verified, have Gibson exiting the building in 1930, a blast that Sports Illustrated pinpointed to September of that year in a game between Gibson’s Homestead Grays and the Lincoln Giants.
Piersall’s 100th
4. Jimmy Piersall, whose nervous breakdown inspired the hyperbolic movie, “Fear Strikes Out,” 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. Mets manager Casey Stengel, disgusted by the theatrics, released Piersall two days later.
Greenberg’s return
5. Detroit’s Hank Greenberg hit one of the most emotional home runs in baseball history in 1945. Greenberg, after serving in World War II, returned to the Tigers on July 1, 1945. 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. In the final game of the season, Greenberg hit a grand slam in the ninth inning to help the Tigers beat the St. Louis Browns and clinch the AL pennant. The Tigers then beat the Cubs in the Series.
Bo knows comebacks
6. 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.
An inside-the-parker
7. A special spot in home-run lore is reserved for the inside-the-park version, and perhaps the most memorable one was executed by none other than Ted Williams, who said this particular round-tripper was the most difficult of his 521 because “I had to run.” On Sept. 13, 1946–Friday the 13th–against the infamous shift devised by Indians manager Lou Boudreau, the homer was the only run in a 1-0 Red Sox win that clinched the AL pennant. Williams hated to give in and go the opposite way, but he sliced the ball down the left-field line and slid across the plate just ahead of the throw.
`Stupid pitching’
8. Back in 1998, two divergent careers merged in St. Paul, Minn. J.D. Drew was biding his time with the St. Paul Saints during a contract dispute with Philadelphia. A woman named Ila Borders was pitching for the Duluth-Superior Dukes trying to bring gender equality to baseball. In the eighth inning of a Northern League game on June 30, Drew crushed a 3-2 changeup “halfway to Stillwater,” according to newspaper reports. A disconsolate Borders said afterward, “It just was stupid pitching. I should have given him a pitch he couldn’t hit hard.”
His one and only homer
9. In Hoyt Wilhelm’s first major-league at-bat for the New York Giants on April 23, 1952, the knuckleball pitcher went yard against the Boston Braves at the Polo Grounds in New York. It was not a portent of things to come. Wilhelm, who pitched in 1,069 more games (431 more at-bats), never homered again.
A comic-book moment
10. On March 30, 1993, a hard-luck player produced a home run even more unlikely than Wilhelm’s. 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.