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 top 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.”

Stargell’s longest home run—the July 3, 1967, shot off Drysdale at Forbes Field—ranked as the 32nd longest home run ever hit in a major league game, according to Bill Jenkinson’s Baseball’s Ultimate Power. According to Jenkinson, Stargell authored four more of Major League Baseball’s 100 longest home runs. Number 48, struck on May 20, 1978, in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, went 515 feet. He is credited with three homers that traveled 510 feet—tied for number 73 on the Longest 100 list. The first came August 19, 1969, at Forbes Field; the second on August 9, 1970, at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium; and the last on July 4, 1979, at St. Louis’ old Busch Stadium. Jenkinson also credits Stargell with the eighth-longest opposite-field home run in the game’s history—a 460-foot blast to left-center field on July 8, 1966, at Forbes Field. Batting right-handed, Mickey Mantle also hit a 460-foot opposite field homer in Detroit on September 17, 1952.²⁶ And Jenkinson claims Stargell’s 475-foot shot onto the right-field grandstand roof at Forbes Field on July 9, 1967, was the sixth-longest walkoff home run ever, tied with Jimmy Foxx’s blast in 1939 against Boston. In terms of power rankings by position, Jenkinson pegged Stargell as number two among all left fielders who ever played the game, behind Frank Howard. Of Jenkinson’s top 100 “Tape Measure Sluggers,” Stargell ranks number seven behind Ruth, Foxx, Mantle, Howard, Dick Allen and Mark McGwire.²⁷

Stargell also owns some of the longest drives in the history of six stadiums—the Astrodome in Houston, Dodger Stadium, Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia and the two Pittsburgh parks, Forbes Field and Three Rivers Stadium, according to Baseball’s Ultimate Power. At the Astrodome, Stargell’s 490-foot bomb on May 28, 1966, was the longest to right-center. Stargell’s Dodger Stadium shot off Foster on August 5, 1969, topped all homers hit to right field at that ballpark at 506 feet. His 515-foot bolt to right off Wayne Twitchell on May 20, 1978, was the longest hit at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, and his 505-foot shot to right on June 25, 1971, set the pace for all homers hit to right field in Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium.

The drive Stargell hit in Philadelphia—a blast off Jim Bunning that landed in Section 601—came on an off-speed pitch called by catcher Tim McCarver. Bunning told MLB.com in June of 2003 that he threw a “high slider that I used to get Stargell out on, only I didn’t throw it hard enough and didn’t get it in. It got over the fat part of the plate. He couldn’t hit it any further.”²⁸ Larry Bowa, the Phillies’ shortstop that night who was stationed to the right of second base due to an infield shift, said it sounded like a golf ball coming off a metal driver. “I’d never seen anything like that,” he said. Richie Hebner, the Pirates’ third baseman at the time, said he went up to the spot where the ball landed two days later. “I couldn’t believe it,” Hebner said. “That’s a $25 cab ride.” Stargell said he knew it had distance. “But I had no idea it would carry that far.”²⁹ Bowa said the ball was still rising when it reached the stands. “As an infielder, when a guy hits one that you know is a home run, you give it a casual look. When he swung, you didn’t take your eyes off it because you wanted to see where it was going. It was majestic. I couldn’t believe how far that ball went. It would take me three swings to get one up there—from second base.”³⁰ Phillies third-baseman John Vukovich remembered saying, “‘Wow, look at that son of a bitch.’ It just kept going. It didn’t come down. At the time, you knew it was a monster. And as time has gone on, you really realize how long it was.” Among those who witnessed the blow in the stands that night was Joe Kerrigan, a student at Father Judge High School in Philadelphia at the time who later played in the big leagues and became a respected pitching coach as well—even doing one stint with the Pirates. Kerrigan was sitting in the upper deck—the same altitude as Stargell’s moon shot—but behind home plate rather than in right field. “My most profound memory is that, for two or three innings, people were still buzzing about it,” he said. “My reaction was that nobody could hit a ball that far. Especially in those days. We were talking about that home run on the playground for the next few days.”³¹

Stargell’s blast off Bunning was the longest hit at the Vet. When Stargell made his final appearance as a player in September, 1982, the Phillies unveiled a star to hold the spot where the home run came to rest. Over the years, the star disappeared a couple of times and finally the Phillies painted the star directly on the cement above an exit runway. When Stargell died on April 9, 2001, the club repainted the background from gold to black. McCarver said in 2003 that he never was so proud to call a home run as he was the shot that Stargell hit 32 years earlier. “It was a slider that didn’t slide,” McCarver said. “We were trying to go inside and didn’t get there. Half the team was trying to figure out where it went instead of shaking his hand. There’s a seat in SkyDome that’s a different color because that’s where Jose Canseco’s landed. They do that in many parks. But the star isn’t where the ball landed. It was where it was last seen.”³²

Stargell’s 515-foot shot in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, also recorded as 534 feet by some historians, landed in Section 351, Row C, seat No. 3—a seat that eventually made its way to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. On the night of Stargell’s death, the Expos held a moment of silence in his honor and then shone a spotlight on the seat, where a flower had been placed. Chuck Tanner couldn’t believe Stargell’s shot. “How can anyone hit a ball that far?” he marveled after the game that day.³³ Rudy May, who grew up idolizing Stargell in the East Bay, was pitching for the Expos at the time and called it “the longest ball I’ve ever seen hit in my entire life. It left the ballpark so fast and went so far. It was one of the most awesome things I have ever seen in my life. I will never forget it. It was almost like we weren’t playing the same league—Willie should have been in a league or two higher than us to hit a ball like that. I was watching Andre Dawson, who was playing center field, and Ellis Valentine, who was playing right field. When he hit it, Andre didn’t move. I remember asking him if he had ever seen ball hit like that before. He said no. I said, ‘You didn’t even move.’ He said, ‘There was no reason to.’”³⁴

Jerry Reuss, a Pirate pitcher at the time, was sitting on the bench when Stargell unloaded. “It was kind of hard to see in there—there was a bank of lights at Olympic Stadium and when the ball got up in that bank, you’d lose it momentarily. But with Willie’s, it got well above the lights and I was able to track it—and then it never came down. I said, ‘Where in the hell did that go?’ Then I looked at the reactions of the outfielders and they were doing the same thing—where did it go? And it was the same reaction on the bench. It was a monster of a home run.” It was only one of several impressive homers that Reuss saw Stargell hit. “He hit one many years before that against Ken Forsch when I was with Houston. It was like a golf ball. You expect balls to have a downward arc as they leave the ballpark. This one just kept going straight—it was in right-center field at Three Rivers Stadium. It went into the lower deck and it was the damndest thing. God, that got out of there fast.”³⁵

Twitchell, a 6-foot-7, 230-pound left-hander, had faced Stargell on many occasions prior to May 20, 1978, and had what he called “fairly decent luck” against him. He felt he could get a read on Stargell’s approach by studying his timing mechanism—the rhythmic windmilling of the bat while he awaited a pitch. “He’d loop the bat forward through the strike zone, to distract the pitcher and keep him from seeing the strike zone,” said Twitchell. “I always thought hitters had bad intentions. It was probably more of a timing mechanism. But one thing you could count on. When he did a double loop, he was going to swing—it didn’t matter where the ball was, he was going to be swinging at it. This was one of those situations. I thought first, ‘Good—he’s going to swing.’” But that was because Twitchell thought the ball would arrive belt high, in tight. It did not—it sunk low. “He made perfect contact with the ball,” Twitchell said of Stargell. “The last I heard at the time, the best they could do measuring to where the seat was in the upper deck was 534 feet. And it hadn’t even started to come down yet. I had fabulous eyesight. But by the time I could snap my head around, our right fielder Ellis Valentine was looking behind him. I can’t tell you how fast it got there—this ball made it to the upper deck in a heartbeat. It was like trying to watch a tracer bullet. And to add insult to injury, you could hear it when it hit. Bang! It hadn’t slowed down much.”³⁶

Twitchell said pitchers are conditioned to avoid thinking in the past tense when it comes to giving up home runs. “There’s nothing you can do about it so you move forward. It’s rare when pitchers show much emotion. We’re just machines out there—you get the ball and throw it. But in that case, I was kind of in shock. I had never seen anything like that before. I’d given up some home runs, but nothing like that. I had no idea a baseball could be hit that far.” None of Twitchell’s teammates said anything to him the day Stargell took him 534 feet deep. But the next day, when he arrived at the ballpark, a present awaited him in the clubhouse. “There was a baseball lying in my chair,” Twitchell recalled. “On it, someone had inscribed, ‘Some French Canadian guy found this in Quebec City. He thinks Stargell hit it.’” Quebec City is about 160 miles east of Montreal.

Twitchell, who died in September 2010, showed no bitterness about being taken so deep and in fact almost seemed to appreciate his place in local home run lore. “For a pitcher, it’s hard to say you take pride throwing a ball hit that far,” he said. “But Willie couldn’t have hit the ball that far off Jamie Moyer. It took someone throwing a 90 mph fastball. I played my part, I guess.” Twitchell called the Olympic Stadium bomb the “product of the perfect storm—a 90-some mph fastball hitting a 38-ounce bat swung by a very strong man. As a team, they used fabulously large bats, the Pirates did. Willie gave me one of his bats and it was unbelievable how big it was. When I was playing baseball, I was 6–6, 230 and no way I could have swung that bat in batting practice and hit a ball to the left side of second base.”

Twitchell had his successes against Stargell. One time in particular, while pitching for the Phillies, Twitchell struck Stargell out three times in a game. “The next day I’m out there playing catch and all of a sudden a baseball hits me gently in the back. Here [Stargell] is 50 feet away with big smile on his face. I can’t tell you what the first word was that he said to me. But the second word was ‘you.’”

While Stargell was capable of putting on a road show of the first order, he left more than a few of his marks at home, including four balls that he sent into the upper deck at Three Rivers Stadium. No one else hit more than one. The first of Stargell’s upper-deck shots at Three Rivers came off Mets right-hander Ron Taylor—a mammoth blast estimated at 469 feet—on August 9, 1970.

The two were no strangers; Taylor and Stargell had battled one another over a period of more than 13 years, dating back to when Stargell played for Columbus and Taylor pitched for Jacksonville in the International League in 1962. The right-handed Taylor would try to keep his sinker off the plate and jam the powerful left-handed hitter with his slider. “Unfortunately, I didn’t always have that much success,” Taylor said. “But a lot of guys didn’t. He just had this raw power. I observed him from a very dangerous position—the pitching mound.” Taylor called Stargell’s upper-deck shot off him at Three Rivers “majestic.” “What I remember is that I thought I was throwing pretty hard that day,” he said. “So I thought I’d try to throw one by him. It was just amazing. The crowd cheered as the ball left his bat, then it became silent.”³⁷

The previous year, Stargell connected for a Forbes Field roof shot off Taylor’s teammate, Hall of Famer Tom Seaver, who surrendered eight career home runs to Stargell—tied for the most among any opposing pitcher. Phil Niekro—like Seaver, a Hall of Famer—also yielded eight round-trippers to Stargell. Although it had been decades since Niekro tried to flutter his knuckleball past Stargell, he had no trouble in 2010 recalling what it was like to face the powerful left-handed slugger. “As a hitter, the thing I remember most was his stance and that unusual way of getting that bat going before he got ready to hit the ball,” said Niekro, who was among the group of players that Stargell traveled with to Vietnam in 1970. “What I was always wanting to see—not when I was pitching—was how far a human being could hit a baseball. And I always thought he was the one guy I was going to see it from. He could have been the guy. He had the physique, the strength, the quickness of the bat—he had everything going for him. And also—and I never thought about this until after a game was over or before it started—I would hope to God that he would never hit one back at me.” Niekro said his approach to Stargell was no mystery. “I was a knuckleballer,” he said. “He knew it was coming. No one was fooling anyone. If I had a good knuckler, I’d get him out. If I made a mistake, he’d hit it in the upper deck.”³⁸

Niekro said whenever the Braves would get ready to take on the Pirates, the first thing that came to mind was Stargell. “You’d just hope he had a bad four-game series and a bad game against me,” he said. Niekro got the best of Stargell more often than not, holding him to a .225 batting average in 111 career at-bats. But there were those eight round-trippers. “I remember pitching in the old ballpark, Three Rivers Stadium, one time when Eddie Mathews was the Braves manager,” Niekro recalled. “We were going into the bottom of the ninth and I was winning by two runs with two outs. Willie came up to the plate and I got two balls and no strikes. Eddie came out and said, ‘I don’t know if you realize it, but Bob Robertson is on deck and he hits home runs. If you put Stargell on and Robertson hits a home run, you’ve got a tie ballgame.’

“Eddie says, ‘Just throw it right down the middle of the plate. Do you think he’ll hit it into the center-field bleachers? Do you think he’s God or something?’ I don’t think Eddie even got to the bench before I threw a fastball and Willie hit it into the center-field bleachers for a home run. And then I got Bob Robertson out and we won the game 3–2. I went into the dugout and walked up to Eddie and said, ‘I know he’s not God, but he might be a real close relative.’”

Stargell’s other two upper-deck shots at Three Rivers Stadium came off the Expos’ Howie Reed on June 20, 1971—a 472-foot drive—and off the Braves’ Gary Gentry on May 31, 1973, a blast that traveled 468 feet. Gentry was no stranger to Stargell’s feats of strength; he was on hand when the slugger took his Mets teammate Taylor into the stratosphere in August 1970—the first ball to reach the upper deck at the new waterfront park. “I tried to muscle him—I threw it too hard,” said Gentry, who was working on a shutout in the eighth inning before Stargell’s three-run bomb. “I didn’t get the location I wanted on the pitch. I threw it as hard as I could and he hit it as hard as he could. I guess that’s why it went so far.”³⁹ Pirates starter Nellie Briles, who benefited from the blow, was stunned by its sheer distance. “I didn’t think it was humanly possible for someone to hit the ball that far,” he said.⁴⁰ Stargell, though, said he would have been happier if the ball had just cleared the fence. “When you hit balls like that, those pitchers don’t forget,” he said. “They bear down on you that much harder the next time. I’d rather hit 50 of them that just barely make it.”⁴¹

He got his wish, at least when it came to his home park, as his blow off Gentry would be the last ball he would hit into Three Rivers Stadium’s upper deck. But he wasn’t done dialing long distance. And he didn’t save his prodigious blasts for the big-league competition. On June 18, 1979, during the Pirates’ visit to Portland, Oregon, for an exhibition game with their Class AAA affiliate, Portland general manager David Hersh was offering $100 to any player who went deep during a pre-game home run derby contest at Multnomah Stadium. Hersh offered Stargell $1,000 if he could reach the balcony of the adjacent Multnomah Athletic Club during the derby. The balcony sat more than 55 feet high and some 403 feet from home plate, behind the right-field wall. “Make it $2,000,” Stargell reportedly told Hersh, who agreed. The Pirates slugger then sent the next batting practice pitch onto the balcony and into the middle of a crowd of spectators. “The ball that he hit is something ... you can call it once in a lifetime,” Hersh said. “The fact that he called his own shot made it more incredible.”⁴² The shot remains a legend of sorts in the Portland area. Dwight Jaynes, a longtime Portland sports journalist, said that at the time Stargell unloaded during the home run derby, no one had ever reached that part of the ballpark in batting practice or a game. The park had been used as a baseball field since 1956 before being reconfigured in 2010 to accommodate only soccer and football. “It was an incredible feat and it had to carry more than 500 feet,” Jaynes said. “I think we estimated it around 527 at the time.” Stargell hit more than one home run during the derby and Jaynes called them “startling in their majesty and made for special memories for those who were there. Even now, that first one is probably the most famous home run ever hit in that ballpark. And it wasn’t even hit in a game!”⁴³

Willie lets loose with one of his patented home-run swings during the Hall of Fame Game in Cooperstown, New York, in July 1980 (courtesy Pittsburgh Pirates).

Stargell worked his exhibition magic the following summer, this time in the picturesque hamlet of Cooperstown, New York, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. While in town with the Pirates to play in the annual exhibition game on August 4, 1980, Stargell gave the visitors a thrill and a memory to cherish one day after they had watched outfielders Al Kaline and Duke Snider take their place in the hallowed hall. Stargell was not in the starting lineup that afternoon against the Chicago White Sox but as the game progressed, some of the 9,000 fans who had packed Doubleday Field to see the reigning World Champions—and the reigning co–MVP—began chanting, “We Want Willie.” Their pleas went on for two innings before Tanner summoned Stargell to the plate in the sixth inning. It didn’t take long for Stargell to deliver, as he pounced on Francisco Barrios’s first pitch and rocketed it more than 400 feet for a two-run homer. “With one shrug of his broad shoulders and a snap of his bat, Stargell made the crowd momentarily imagine Al Kaline or Duke Snider knocking a ball out of sight,” wrote Mike Brown of the Oneonta, New York, Daily Star. “Before Stargell’s monstrous home run, everyone in Doubleday knew what he’d be trying for. So did Chicago White Sox pitcher Francisco Barrios. Willie did it, an awesome blast over the bleachers in rightfield and onto a barn roof.”⁴⁴

Stargell’s feats of long-ball strength were renowned around baseball, and stories of his prodigious blasts were passed down from one generation of players to the next. Bob Walk, who pitched for three teams in the big leagues—including Pittsburgh—before going on to work as a color analyst on Pirate broadcasts, said that when he first came up to the big leagues with Philadelphia in 1980, he would notice seats of different colors in some of the ballparks the Phillies visited. When he’d ask his teammates why those seats were different colors, they’d tell him that Stargell hit balls in those seats. “You needed a telescope to see them,” Walk said of Stargell’s tape-measure blasts. “Everyone used to talk about them. He didn’t hit home runs. He hit conversation pieces.”⁴⁵