Home Run Derby

With little sports action on TV these days, I’ve been revisiting my youth and what we “watched back in the day”.

There was a weekly televised event in 1960 called the Home Run Derby.  The Derby ran for twenty-six episodes. Each episode featured two current, high profile, baseball stars.  One represented the American League and the second  represented the National League.  The winner of the weekly contest received $2,000  and returned the following week. The loser received $1,000.

Batters were given three outs per inning, and the player with the most home runs after nine innings won.  The defending champion had the advantage of batting last.  Any ball not hit for a home run was an out. The player did not have to swing at every pitch, but if a pitch was in the strike zone that also constituted an out, as did a swing and a miss. These rarely happened as the pitcher was supposed to give the batters good balls to hit. If the players were tied after nine innings, the Derby went into extra innings like regular baseball.

Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were among the highest paid players of the day,   earning about $80,000 per year.  They appeared in the first episode.

 

The guys in our neighborhood started a Derby of our own.  Kenwood Park was at the end of our street and the gathering place for baseball games morning, noon and night.  The eight acre park was bordered by Farnum on the south, Forest to the north, and the backyards of homes located on Dorchester to the west and Symes to the east.

There was a large backstop where Edgeworth and Farnum connected.  We played many of the games there.  It was a dirt field with very little grass.   That was fine for regular games, but it wasn’t the perfect site for our Home Run Derby, as there was no outfield fence to hit the ball over.

We were a creative group so we set up a field on another location within the park.  We chose a spot that had an outfield fence.  The fence was the backyard fence of Mr. and Mrs. Somebody who lived on Dorchester Street.

The guys in the neighborhood all played from time to time. We were joined most often by Bill Graham, Loretto Pizzuti, Bruce Matson, Mark Conti, and others, but the two regulars were Mitch Olejniczak and me.   The Derby required at least three players: a pitcher, a batter and a fielder.  More could play, but you had to have at least three.  Each guy rotated through the positions until each player had batted through nine innings.

We followed the same rules as the pros.  Our only variation was the lack of an umpire.  Each swing counted.   You either hit a home run or made an out.  Three outs constituted an inning.

Mitch and I memorized our stats.  We kept a running total in our head and shared the number each time we headed home.  The lead changed from time to time, but Mitch was the overall winner.

The single moment from that competition that is burned in my brain is a time when I was pitching to Loretto Pizzuti.  We were juniors in high school, and by now Loretto had legally changed his name to Larry.  While I expect he valued his Italian heritage, he wanted an American sounding name.

Loretto was one of the strongest kids I knew.  He was big and broad shouldered.  While I don’t recall how far it was to clear Mr. and Mrs. Somebody’s backyard fence, I do know that the lots on Dorchester were similar to those on my street, Edgeworth. Our lot was one-hundred and fifty feet from the backyard fence to the sidewalk that bordered the front.  I delivered a pitch to Loretto that not only cleared Mr. and Mrs. Somebody’s fence, it cleared their house too!  It was a MASSIVE hit – a towering fly ball that no-one saw hit the ground.

The next time I saw a ball hit that hard was in a game at Tiger Stadium.  The Washington Senator’s,  Frank Howard,  hit a ball off Mickey Lolich over the left field stadium roof on May 18, 1968.

People are still looking for both of those balls.