On Oct. 15, 1988, a gimpy-kneed pinch hitter named Kirk Gibson stepped into the batter’s box in the bottom of the ninth inning at Dodgers Stadium and knocked a 3-2 pitch from A’s reliever Dennis Eckersley out of the ballpark.
The two-out, two-run blast gave Los Angeles a one-game lead in the World Series, and in the press box behind home plate, Holyoke-born radio announcer Jack Buck exclaimed, “I don’t … believe … what I just saw!”
Such are the moments that Joshua Shifrin and Tommy Shea describe in their book, “DINGERS: The 101 Most Memorable Home Runs in Baseball History” (Skyhorse Publishing).
Gibson had been called from the locker room by manager Tommy Lasorda as a last-gasp hope to snatch victory from defeat with one swing of the bat.
In baseball, you gotta get three out in the ninth, kid. It’s why in the sports archive of my mind, few moments haven’t involved a baseball leaving the yard — Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary to beat the Hurricanes and Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception in the Super Bowl come to mind — but mostly it’s those long ball moments that are seared into my memory.
Everyone has their favorites — mine include a Ted Wlliams home run into the Red Sox bleachers, Frank Howard’s parabolic moon shot over the left field wall at Fenway and Carl Yastrzemski’s line drive off a Ron Guidry fastball into the seats near the Pesky Pole — but Shifrin and Shea’s are universal.
Shifrin and Shea put Gibson’s dinger fifth on their list. According to USA Today, Gibson had remembered a scout telling him that Eckersley would throw a backdoor slider on a full count. He stepped back in, waited for the pitch to bend back over the plate, and crushed it several rows deep.
Dodgers announcer Vin Scully waited for Gibson to fist-pump his way around the bases and crowed, “In a year so improbable, the impossible has happened.”
Indeed, baseball is like stargazing, filled with hope and possibility. The Yastrzemski home run had given Boston an early 1-0 lead in the 1978 playoff game against the Yankees. I was standing on a narrow brick outcrop behind Section 27 when he hit it. A few innings later, Bucky Dent’s homerun into the screen gave the Yankees a 3-2 lead. I was under the grandstand buying a beer and heard a collective gasp from above.
Dent’s homerun and Aaron Boone’s midnight blast a quarter-century later are both in the book’s top 25. I was there for that one too, coming out of the bathroom on the upper deck of Yankee Stadium, when radio’s John Sterling and Charlie Steiner tangled tongues vying to broadcast news of Boone’s pennant-winning blast.
I ran down the ramp and out of the Stadium, away from the sort of home run that Shifrin and Shea culled from the over 275,000 that have been hit since 1901, according to “Baseball Almanac.”
“It took almost a year to pull it together,” said Shea. “We looked at loads of “great homer” lists, went to YouTube and baseball websites, and we talked with baseball writers and read lots of baseball books.”
Shea is well known to western Massachusetts newspaper readers, having spent 40 years writing for The Springfield Republican, including six covering the Red Sox. In 2003, he received the New England AP Award for best New England column.
Shifrin is a Longmeadow native and licensed psychologist whose “101 Incredible Moments in Tennis” inspired him to write “DINGERS.” When he found the task more daunting than expected, he called Shea for relief help.
Together, they pored through Dan Okrent’s “Ultimate Baseball Book,” Jimmy Piersall’s “Fear Strkes Out,” and Connie Mack’s “My 66 Years in the Big Leagues.” They also read baseball articles by Richard Hoffer, Henry Schulman and Michael Cahill, and cyber-researched on such sites as sabr.org, hardballtimes.com and baseball-reference.com.
The fruit of their effort begins with a humorous recollection of the day Carlos Martinez hit a fly ball that bounced off right fielder Jose Canseco’s head and into the stands at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium.
From there, they take readers from Candlestick to Fenway and back through time to Opening Day at Yankee Stadium in 1923, when Babe Ruth became the first player to hit a home run inside the new House that Ruth Built.
The Ken Burns documentary, “Baseball,” includes a quote by Walter Johnson saying, “Those balls that Ruth hit got smaller quicker,” and the Bambino gets multiple mentions, as do the players who broke his records — Roger Maris, Henry Aaron and Barry Bonds.
The authors recount Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” and Willie Mays’ home run that ended a 16-inning pitchers duel between Hall of Famers Juan Marichal and Warren Spahn. The game was scoreless until the Say-Hey Kid hit a screwball that “didn’t break worth a damn,” Spahn said afterward.
The photo of Gibson’s celebratory trot around the bases is on the cover of the 320-page hardcover edition, and the photo of Henry Aaron’s reception at home plate after his 715th homerun is on the back page.
Neither dinger, however, makes the top two all-time.
Readers will want to compose their own lists of memorable home runs. I had Bernie Carbo’s pinch hit blast in the sixth game of the 1975 World Series in the top five. Shifrin and Shea rank it 22nd, one spot behind Hal Smith’s homerun that Pittsburgh’s Dick Groat called “the most forgotten home run in baseball history.”
Both set the stage for more momentous blasts.
Partial spoiler alert here, but the book and I agree that the most memorable homerun in baseball history was hit by a smooth fielding second baseman who was the Dustin Pedroia of his day.
I was nine years old, and sitting in a barber’s chair the moment it happened — my mother having deemed it more necessary to get a crewcut than watch the seventh game of the World Series. It is one of my most memorable mother moments.
The game was on the radio and time stopped inside the barber shop the moment Bill Mazeroski hit the home run that beat the mighty Bronx Bombers. The barber stopped cutting my hair, people waiting for haircuts stopped reading “Field and Stream” and “Argosy,” and the world felt a little more amped.
“DINGERS: The 101 Most Memorable Home Runs in Baseball History” is good hot stove reading. Customers at Amazon.com are giving it five-star reviews, finding perhaps that a dinger a day keeps the baseball blues away.