Fun With Inside-The-Park Homers

I’ve been having fun lately going through Baseball-Reference’s Event Finder looking for inside-the-park homers. Some of this ended up on Twitter, but I had plenty more left over for a post.

In case you’re curious, is the list of all the inside-the-park homers since 1950 (952 in all) that I used as the basis for this post: Part 1

/ Part 2 .

Let’s start with the overall individual IPHR leaders. Here are all the hitters with at least 6 in their career:

• Willie Wilson
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  , 12
• Lou Brock
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  , 7
• Willie Davis
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  , 7
• Dick Allen
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  , 7
• Roberto Clemente
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  , 6
• Amos Otis
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  , 6
• Robin Yount
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  , 6
• Willie Mays
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  , 6

So that Willie Wilson was pretty fast, huh?

Amazingly, 3 players have hit 2 inside-the-park homers in a single game. Here they are:

• Hank Thompson
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  , 8/16/50
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• Dick Allen, 7/31/72
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• Greg Gagne
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  , 10/4/86
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Thompson hit a 3-run inside-the-parker off of Carl Erskine

in the 1st inning and added a solo shot off of Dan Bankhead in the 7th. In between, he added a single, a walk, and a strikeout in a blowout Giants win over the Dodgers.

Allen hit both of his off of Bert Blyleven

, in the 1st and 5th innings, with a strikeout in between. The first was a 3-run shot and the second was a 2-run shot. His White Sox would beat the Twins, 8-1.

The first 3 at-bats of Gagne’s game were certainly impressive: solo inside-the-park homer, 3-run inside-the-park homer, triple. Both homers came off of the White Sox’ Floyd Bannister

, and Gagne’s Twins won 7-3. Amazingly, this game had a lot in common with Allen’s game. First off, it was also a White Sox-Twins matchup. Secondly, even though the two games were 14 years apart, Bert Blyleven started both games for the Twins. So there have been just three games in which a player has hit 2 inside-the-park homers in the past 60+ seasons, and Blyleven started 2 of them.

Of the 952 inside-the-park homers since 1950, only 7 led off games:

It’s interesting that 4 of the 7 games happened against the Yankees, but not too surprising. The old Yankee Stadium was one of the best triple/inside-the-park homer parks in baseball; 71 of the IPHRs in the sample occurred there, second only to the Royals’ Kauffman Stadium. The big surprise to me is that there haven’t been more leadoff IPHRs; given the speed of most leadoff hitters, I would have expected a lot more than 7.

There have also been 14* walkoff inside-the-parkers in that time span. They’re listed below.

* There was also a game-ending IPHR by Kelly Gruber

in this game

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, but it wasn’t really a walkoff, since the game ended early due to rain.

So Willie Wilson is the only player since 1950 to both begin and end games with inside-the-park homers. I guess that’s to be expected, since Wilson has so many more IPHRs than anyone else in that time frame.

An interesting coincidence is that Jim Owens

of the Astros gave up the first two walkoff inside-the-parkers on the list. I say “coincidence” because I can’t think of anything that could explain why a pitcher might be notably more prone to such an unusual play. Also coincidental (and kind of cool): both came in the 10th inning, with the scored tied 5-5, and against the Phillies.

The coolest homers on the list are the two in which the hitter’s team was trailing. Both Amos Otis and Bob Dernier

came up with their team one out from losing and representing the tying run, and both just kept running until their team had won. I can’t think of any more exciting way to end a game.

Since 1950, there have been just 9 inside-the-park homers by pitchers. Amazingly, one guy had two of them:

Former Giants pitcher Jim Hearn

didn’t have a particularly notable career–though he had an MLB-leading 5 shutouts in only 16 starts in 1950–but being the only pitcher with 2 inside-the-park homers isn’t bad. Also notable is that Mel Stottlemyre hit an inside-the-park grand slam. That’s one of only 29 such slams since 1950.

There hasn’t been an IPHR by a pitcher since Joaquin Andujar

‘s in 1979; I greatly look forward to the next one.

There have also been 15 pinch-hit inside-the-park homers, and again, amazingly one guy had two of them:

Dustan Mohr

holds a major-league record. Who knew?

Stay tuned for more fun with inside-the-park homers in the coming days!