Chapter 8
The Bombs and the Victims
STARGELL WASN’T EXACTLY SURE where he was heading in retirement, but one thing was certain—wherever he went and whatever he did, he would no longer provide nightmare content for legions of major league pitchers. While a number of hitters compiled gaudier totals in terms of hits, home runs and RBIs, virtually no one instilled the fear in pitchers that Stargell did. “He didn’t just hit pitchers,” Hall of Fame pitcher Don Sutton once remarked, “he took away their dignity.”1
He started that process long before he reached the major leagues. From the earliest days of Stargell’s lifelong love affair with baseball, he began gaining notoriety not so much for the frequency of his home run blasts, but for the sheer power and the distance he hit them. Although not physically imposing as an amateur, Stargell served notice of what would come by launching several titanic shots at Washington Park, near the Encinal housing project in Alameda, where he spent his formative years. That power potential didn’t immediately translate into home runs in the professional ranks though, in part because he was still growing. Bob Zuk, the scout who signed Stargell, said years later that Stargell weighed only 152 pounds when he first saw him. The future slugger didn’t top 170 pounds during his first year with the Pirates organization, in 1959 at San Angelo, Texas, and Roswell, New Mexico, in the Class D Sophomore League, when he hit all of seven home runs. His second season, at Grand Forks, North Dakota, in Class C ball, he connected for 11 home runs. Still, Joe L. Brown—the Bucs general manager at the time—liked Stargell’s chances down the road. “Willie had this sheer raw potential,” Brown told the Post-Gazette’s Paul Meyer in 1988 after Stargell’s election to the Hall of Fame was announced. “He always looked like he was going to hit more home runs than he did—until he did.”2
By the time Stargell had advanced to Asheville, North Carolina—his third of four minor-league stops in the Pirates system—in 1961, “He didn’t have to grow anymore,” as Brown put it. “He was big enough.” Stargell turned that 6-foot-2, 200-pound package of power and strength into 22 home runs in Asheville, where fans took to calling him “On the Hill Will” because of his propensity to hit home runs onto a hillside that loomed beyond the right-field fence at McCormick Field.
Stargell’s reputation as a tape-measure slugger grew with age and experience, and after arriving in the big leagues, he began to turn heads—toward the highest reaches of NL stadiums and beyond—with regularity. His long-ball propensity made him a fan favorite in Pittsburgh and he remains a conversation piece among power aficionados to this day. No discussion about the ultimate slugger can take place without Stargell’s name and his tape-measure home runs surfacing. He tried to downplay his penchant for going deep throughout his career, often saying he would trade a titanic shot for a victory and that organizations didn’t pay for distance—only frequency. He was even somewhat embarrassed by some of his longer homers and said the shots only made pitchers bear down even harder against him. Even long after he had finished playing, he shrugged off talk of his ability to hit balls in places that few others could reach. “If you stick around 20 years and have that God-given ability to hit them, sooner or later you’re going to tie into a few,” he told Jerry Crasnick of the Denver Post in June of 1997. But he also told Crasnick it was gratifying and tried to describe—as Crasnick put it—what it was like to “hit a baseball a football field and a half long.”
“It’s like a cross between two locomotives on a collision course and your first sensuous encounter,” Stargell explained. “On the one side, it’s very destructive. On the other, it’s mostly enjoyable.”3 In June of ’97, he talked about what it felt like to have “the perfect swing. When you hit the ball just on the sweet part of the bat, it’s such a great feeling. It’s almost like the bat bends. There’s no recoil. Two forces are meeting, the force of the bat and the force of the ball, and when they meet perfectly, you don’t feel a thing.”4
Stargell’s first career big-league homer came off the Cubs’ Lindy McDaniel on May 8, 1963, in his second game at Wrigley Field. According to the website Retrosheet.org, Stargell was an equal-opportunity slugger in that he hit plenty of home runs on the road—254 of his 475 career taters were hit in visiting ballparks—as well as in his two home parks, Forbes Field (74) and Three Rivers Stadium (147). His home and road splits were remarkably similar; he played 1,178 games at home, for example, and 1,182 on the road. And he banged out 1,115 hits at either Forbes or Three Rivers, compared with 1,117 away from home. In the RBI department, Stargell amassed 781 at home and 759 on the road.
There’s no telling how many career homers Stargell would have hit had he spent less time playing in old, cavernous Forbes, a nine-year stretch that he once claimed cost him as many as 150 home runs. But the gargantuan dimensions of old Forbes couldn’t hold the longest of Willie’s bombs, and his left-handed pull hitting stroke enabled him to zero in on the roof that covered the right-field grandstand. The first batter to clear the 86-foot-high roof was none other than George Herman Ruth, who did so on May 25, 1935, while playing for the Boston Braves. It was the last of the Babe’s 714 career home runs. But Stargell one-upped the Babe—or rather he seven-upped him, as he clubbed seven of the 18 balls that sailed over the grandstand before Pirates moved to Three Rivers Stadium midway through the 1970 season.
The first of those seven came on July 9, 1967, when he snapped a 1–1 tie in the bottom of the ninth inning against Cincinnati by sending a Jim Maloney pitch through the pouring rain and over the right-field roof. “It didn’t even feel good when I hit it,” Stargell said after the game. “I thought it was going foul, afraid it would curve before it got to the roof.” The Post-Gazette’s Charley Feeney described it like this: “Maloney went 2–1 on Stargell. Willie swung with the rain in his eyes and then everything seemed to be bright and clear to the Buccos as the ball cleared the roof.”5 Stargell would do it a second time on August 18, victimizing the Mets’ Jack Fisher—who had served up the first-ever home run in Shea Stadium to Stargell in 1964—as he went over the roof with no one on in the fourth inning of what would be a 7–2 Pirates win.
Stargell seemed to have a fondness for Fisher; on June 7 that year, Willie slammed a Fisher pitch over Forbes’ 436-foot marker in right center for his 100th career home run. A Pittsburgh Press reporter the next day wrote that a local man named Phil Dorsey “paced off” the distance and found that the ball landed 40 paces beyond the outfield wall.6 But that was a mere warm-up to a bomb he hit off the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Don Drysdale on July 3 at Forbes. Witnesses saw the ball clear Forbes’ 457-foot sign in center field and the ball reportedly landed in a Little League Field in nearby Schenley Park. According to the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper, a caretaker at the Frick Fine Arts building, beyond Forbes’ 12-foot wall, told the media that Stargell’s shot landed at third base on the Little League diamond, and the blast was measured at 542 feet.7
Although Stargell sprinkled long balls liberally throughout his 21-year career—he hit 20 or more home runs in a season 15 times—1969 was a particularly memorable one in terms of Stargell’s power display. On April 13 of that year, he enjoyed a two-homer game, with one of them again clearing the 436-foot marker at Forbes. He also deposited a shot over the wall in left, to the right of the scoreboard, in a win over the Phillies. When told it was the third ball he hit over the center-field wall, Stargell was not impressed. “I don’t remember those other two I hit in centerfield very well,” he said. “I can’t even remember who I hit them off of. And I’ll tell you another thing. A year from now, I won’t remember this one.”8
Stargell also continued his assault on Forbes right-field roof that year. He belted three balls that cleared the structure that season, including one on July 4 off New York Mets ace Tom Seaver. Of Stargell’s August 19 shot, which came off fireballing Don Wilson of the Houston Astros, Pirates pitching coach Vernon Law, who was in the bullpen, noted, “I think that ball went over everything. I don’t even think it hit the to
p of the roof.” After the game, though, Stargell only wanted to talk about Wilson. “Wilson’s going to be one of this league’s great pitchers,” he told the media. “Take what he was throwing tonight: a great fastball, a great slider and that fastball was overpowering.” He tried to explain how he managed to hit Wilson that night. “To tell you the truth, I was fooled by that pitch. I wasn’t expecting a breaking ball. But when it came up there, I figured I better swing at it because, man, I didn’t want to have to try to handle that fastball of his again.”9 It only took another week for Stargell to belt his third roof shot of the season, as he took Atlanta’s Ron Reed for a long ride in a 6–4 Braves’ win.
Perhaps Stargell’s most memorable clouts came away from home that season—one north of the border against the expansion Montreal Expos, in their cozy single-deck playyard known as Jarry Park, and the second in Los Angeles’s pristine Dodger Stadium. On July 16—the same day that Apollo 11 began its historic voyage that would culminate four days later with Neil Armstrong becoming the first human to set foot on the surface of the moon—Stargell launched a moon shot of his own. In Montreal, against a pitcher named Dan McGinn, Stargell hit a drive to right field that left Jarry Park and landed in a nearby municipal swimming pool. To this day, locals refer to the pool as “La Piscine de Willie.”10 Brown, the Pirates’ general manager, stepped off the distance and came up with 495 feet from home plate to the edge of the pool—and the ball landed somewhere in the middle of the pool. It was the longest home run struck in the short history of Jarry Park.11
A blast in Dodger Stadium, struck off Alan Foster on August 5, had a bit more impact, as it was the first ball ever hit completely out of the ballpark—which opened in 1962—and stood as one of just four balls to clear the stadium in its first 50 years of existence. Stargell claimed the first two while Mike Piazza (1997) and Mark McGwire (1999) launched the other two. The day after Stargell struck the first one, Melvin Durslag of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner wrote that the Dodgers’ publicity man, Arthur “Red” Patterson, after huddling with a club engineer, adjusted the distance to 506 feet, 6 inches, in allowing for the height of the pavilion roof. Phil Musick, covering the game for the Pittsburgh Press, wrote the following lead that appeared in the August 6 edition:
LOS ANGELES—Willie Stargell’s muscles have now joined Jack Benny’s violin, Bob Hope’s nose and Raquel Welch’s anatomy as all-time great conversation stimulators here in the neon capital of the western world.12
Ross Newhan of the Los Angeles Times opened his story like this: “It appeared to be Apollo 12.”13
Foster couldn’t bear to watch—and he didn’t. “When it makes that kind of sound,” he said years later, “you don’t even want to turn around and look.”14
Stargell, as always was the case, was not taken with the mammoth blast. “They don’t pay you any more for distance,” he told reporters later. Stargell said he had no idea the ball was headed on that type of a trip. “I wasn’t trying to hit one,” he said. “Every time I try, I can’t do it.”15 Stargell would leave the Chavez Ravine yard entirely again four years later, on May 8, 1973, taking Andy Messersmith over the same right-field pavilion, although this one bounced on top of the pavilion roof before caroming into a parking lot.
Fred Claire, then the Dodgers’ publicity director and later the club’s general manager, wrote in a memo that he sent to the Pirates that 6-year-old Todd Shubin of Fountain Valley, California, retrieved Stargell’s blast as he and his family were walking to the parking lot in the seventh inning and brought the ball to a security guard. The Shubins were leaving the game early because Todd’s father, Dennis Shubin, had to be at work at 3:30 A.M. The Dodgers invited the family to attend the next night’s game, and young Todd, obviously nervous as he was being interviewed by two Los Angeles television stations, worked up enough nerve to ask Stargell for his hat and an autograph. The gentle giant obliged. “I still have the newspaper article and the autograph,” Todd Shubin said in a 2010 interview. He also still has the ball, though much to his surprise. “I thought someone would have asked for it by now—maybe the Hall of Fame,” he said. “But they never did.” So, the ball resides in the Shubin home, locked up in a case, although he is not shy about showing it off upon request—not a rare occasion since he remained close to the sport as a youth league baseball coach in Southern California for more than a decade. “Everyone knows the story—it comes up all the time,” he said of Stargell’s mammoth blast. “People will ask, and I’ll bring it out and show it to them. It’s a rare thing. We’ve gone to a million baseball games and we know how lucky it is just to get a foul ball, let alone the second ball hit out of Dodger Stadium.”16
Ron Cey, then a young Dodger infielder, told Bob Hunter of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, “I honestly can say I never saw a ball hit that far, and I never want to see it again, unless it’s someone from our dugout.”17 Cey’s teammate, relief pitcher Jim Brewer, had a prime viewing position in the bullpen as Stargell’s drive hit the pavilion roof and bounced into the parking lot. “Of course I saw it all the way,” he told Allan Malamud of the Herald Examiner. “I could have seen it if I were in New York.”18 Stargell hit two homers that night off Messersmith, who had just come over from the American League that season and was amazed as he watched Stargell’s blast leave the yard. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, man, that’s going a long way.’” Messersmith said it looked like the National League would be a tough go. “You toss one up over here and they really hit it. I couldn’t believe it when Stargell started to run. I figured he’d stand there and watch it.”19
But Stargell immediately began his home run trot and did not stop to admire the flight. “I really didn’t think it was going that far,” he said of the second-longest home run in the stadium’s 12-year history. “It must have got caught in some wind.” When asked how the blast compared to the first one, he said he didn’t “keep up with these things,” referring to his tape-measure drives. “But I know that ball a few years ago went further.”20 Stargell’s exploits amused the Los Angeles media, including famed columnist Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote that Stargell was simply born to hit home runs. “Anything else looks silly for his 6-foot-3, 225-pound frame. The bat looks like something he might bite on. The massive chest, bulging arms and enormous hands dwarf it. He looks as if he should carry a tree to the plate.” Murray asked Stargell what it would take to hit 62 home runs in a season and break what was then Roger Maris’ single-season mark of 61. Stargell told Murray he could do it, but that it wasn’t one of his goals. “I’m more interested in breaking Hack Wilson’s record than Roger Maris,’” he said, referring to Wilson’s major league single-season RBI mark of 190.21
Willie adjusts the cap of 6-year-old Todd Shubin, who tracked down one of two home runs that Stargell hit completely out of Dodger Stadium (courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York).
Stargell never hit four home runs in a game, but he did connect for three round-trippers on four different occasions. Those who’d been in the game a while were not surprised at anything Stargell did with respect to the long ball. Brown, the Pirates’ GM, later said that in his time in the National League, Stargell was one of the two most respected power hitters, with the Giants’ Willie McCovey being the other. “They could hit the ball so far,” Brown said. “And pitchers knew that if they made a mistake, they could hit it out in any direction.”22 Stargell’s former manager Harry Walker, considered a hitting guru of sorts, said he had never seen a hitter anywhere who hit the ball any harder. “For sheer crash of bat meeting ball,” Walker once told a reporter, “Stargell was simply the best.”23
Former Cubs third baseman Ron Santo, who died in December 2010, was around for Stargell’s three-homer game in 1968 and saw more than he wanted of the Pirate slugger over the years. Stargell slugged more homers against the Mets—60—than any other team, but the Cubs were number three on Stargell’s hit list with 50. Santo had an up-close-and-personal look at far too many of
them to suit him, including one shot in particular that went a long way toward sinking the Cubs’ pennant hopes down the stretch of their unforgettable 1969 collapse—one that paved the way for the Amazin’ New York Mets to win their first National League pennant. “It was in September in Wrigley Field,” Santo recalled. “It was about 50 degrees out, and the wind was blowing in. We were ahead 2–1 and nobody was going to hit a home run that day. Nobody. That’s the way I felt. Phil Regan came on in relief to face Stargell. Had two strikes—a 1–2 count. It looked like [Stargell] hit a ball around his ankles and not only did he hit it ... he hit it over the bleachers and onto Sheffield Avenue. Oh, it was terrible. It ended up tying the game in the top of the ninth inning. Then we went extra innings and Matty Alou got a base hit to win the game for the Pirates.”24
Santo also was on hand at Three Rivers Stadium on May 30, 1971, the day Stargell turned around a Ken Holtzman delivery and knocked it 458 feet into the upper deck in right field—the second of Stargell’s four upper-deck shots at the park. Holtzman didn’t have much to say after that game—only that he had made a bad pitch. “Heck,” Holtzman said, “I supplied half the power myself.”25 Santo, though, was impressed—even nearly 40 years later. “The home run off Kenny Holtzman—I’ve never seen a ball hit that far,” he said. “And Kenny Holtzman was a left-handed pitcher! I was on third and I watched it. When it left the bat, I couldn’t believe it. They marked that seat at Three Rivers. But you know what? I was not surprised a guy like him could do that. The power he had. He was a big man, but I mean, he had a very quick bat.” Santo said Holtzman’s teammates gave him the business after that game. “Everybody was on him,” Santo said. “We were asking, ‘Did you hold it across the seams or with the seams?’ Kenny was a very competitive pitcher, but a great guy.”
Willie Stargell Page 22