The Greatest Hit in Baseball History
I learned just recently that former major leaguer Hal Smith passed away earlier this year. He was 89 years old and died in Columbus TX where he had lived for many years.
In a way it's not surprising that news of Smith's passing took some time to reach me, even as an avid baseball fan. In many ways, his was a modest and inauspicious career. Over the course of ten seasons from 1955 to 1964 he played for five different teams. (His stats can be found here.) He was mostly a catcher but played some third base for the Kansas City A's in 1958 and 1959. He averaged 88 games a year, platooning for most of his career. He averaged fewer that six homers a season, batted .267 lifetime, and his career OPS+ of 94 reflects his journeyman status. While any player who makes it to the majors deserves to be admired, Hal's career was quintessentially average in almost every way.
Except for one thing: he had the biggest hit in major league history.
The third of his five stops was in Pittsburgh, where he appeared in 144 regular season games over two seasons (1960 and 1961). He platooned with Smoky Burgess, who had a marginally better career and was named an all-star both years. The 1960 Pirates got out of the gate fast, winning 12 of their first 15 contests, and by mid-August held a 7-1/2 game lead in the NL that they never relinquished, cruising to the pennant by 7 games.
They faced the juggernaut Yankees in the World Series, and were outscored 55 to 27 over seven games. But they won the decisive match in what many consider the greatest game ever played. The dramatic conclusion, Bill Mazeroski's walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth, is seared in the memories of all baseball fans of a certain vintage. And for fifty years the only film known to exist of this game was a short highlight reel that featured Maz loping joyously around the bases, escorted by ecstatic Pirate fans, reinforcing the iconography.*
For the Pirates, Burgess did most of the catching that series. Smith got into three games: Games 3 and 6 pitched by Yankees' lefty ace Whitey Ford, and entering late in Game 7 after Burgess was replaced by a pinch-runner in the 7th. Despite having jumped out to a 4-0 lead in the second inning, by the time Smith entered the Pirates were fighting for their lives, after the Yankees scored once in the 5th and four times in the 6th (the big blow being a 3-run Yogi Berra home run) to take the lead. The Yankees then tacked on two more in the top of the 8th to go up 7-4, and the Pirates looked all but doomed.
But they rallied in the bottom of the 8th, aided in part by the baseball gods. Gino Cimoli lead off with a bloop single to short right-center field. Then Bill Virdon hit a crisp grounder toward shortstop that looked like a certain double play. But the ball took a high last hop off Forbes Fields' notoriously flinty infield surface, striking Tony Kubek squarely in the throat. He hit the dirt and both runners were safe. Kubek was hurt badly enough that Casey Stengel removed him from the game.
The next batter Dick Groat hit a single past Kubek's replacement Joe DiMaestri, and when Cimoli scored the margin narrowed to two runs. Stengel lifted Bobby Shantz (who had come on in relief back in the 3rd inning) for Jim Coates. Pirates' skipper Danny Murtaugh then asked his #3 hitter Bob Skinner to lay down a sacrifice bunt (it was a different game back then) which he did successfully, moving Virdon to third and Groat to second. Rocky Nelson made the second out on a shallow fly to right field on which Virdon could not score.
Roberto Clemente then came to the plate and hit a weak roller to the right of first baseman Bill Skowron. But again fate intervened when Coates started for the ball instead of heading straight to first. The fleet Clemente beat him to the bag as Virdon scored, and the Yankees' lead was down to one run.
And here is where our hero enters the picture. Smith took his place in the right-handed batter's box. Coates' first pitch was toward the outside corner and home plate umpire Bill Jackowski called it a strike. The second pitch was further outside and higher and went for a ball. The next offering got more of the plate and Smith took a vicious hack but missed to go 1-2. Coates then came up and in, and Smith leapt at it. In the film you can see him go almost all the way around, then checks at the end and spins back. Jackowski called it a check-swing for a ball instead of the strikeout it most certainly would have been today. (Check-swing calls were definitely more favorable to batters back then, but this still seems extreme.)
On the 2-2 pitch, Coates tried to sneak across fastball belt-high, but Smith was looking for it. He clubbed it deep to left field, far over the head of outfield Yogi Berra and well clear of the tall ivy-covered wall. Groat scored, Clemente frolicked to the plate behind him (foreshadowing Mazeroski's romp that would happen the next inning), and Hal Smith completed his circuit and was mobbed in the dugout by his teammates. Down 7-4 going into the bottom of the 8th, the Pirates had scored five times to take a 9-7 lead into the 9th.
You can watch the entirety of Smith's at-bat below. It's three minutes well spent.
And here's a ten-second slo-mo of the "checked swing".
Smith's home run is, definitively, the biggest play in baseball history. No single play has ever added more to a team's chances of winning a championship. As Smith came to the plate with two outs and the Bucs down by one run, their odds of winning the game (and therefore the series) stood at 30%. When the ball cleared the fence, they jumped to 93%. Smith's home run increased the Pirates' likelihood of winning the World Series by 63%. No other play comes close to it. (A list of World Series plays ranked by "championship Win Percentage Added" (cWPA) can be found at the end of this article. The results will probably surprise you.)
In his excellent condensed biography of Hal Smith on the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website, Dick Rosen opens with this paragraph: "Andy Warhol once suggested that 'In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.' Hal Smith was no exception, even though he had only about 13 minutes of fame, or even less." The game moved to the top of the 9th and Harvey Haddix proceeded to squander the two-run lead, a precursor to the greatest "vulture win" in baseball history. However if not for some amazing baserunning trickery by Mantle (that I wrote about here) the Pirates would have held the lead and Smith, not Mazeroski, would have been the long-remembered hero of this epic World Series.
Noted American neuroscientist and best-selling author, David Eagleman, says "There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. And the third is that moment, sometime in the future, where your name is spoken for the last time." While Hal Smith has now passed the first two gateposts, let's hope that he will live on in the memories of true baseball fans for many decades to come.
_________________________________________________________________________________
* In September 2010 a kinescope of the entire game was miraculously uncovered in the wine cellar of a home once owned by Bing Crosby. Crosby was a part-owner of the Pirates in 1960 and very much wanted to view the game, but was in Paris on tour when it was played. So he asked that the game be "kinescoped" (a method of filming a television broadcast) so he could watch it went he got home.
In a way it's not surprising that news of Smith's passing took some time to reach me, even as an avid baseball fan. In many ways, his was a modest and inauspicious career. Over the course of ten seasons from 1955 to 1964 he played for five different teams. (His stats can be found here.) He was mostly a catcher but played some third base for the Kansas City A's in 1958 and 1959. He averaged 88 games a year, platooning for most of his career. He averaged fewer that six homers a season, batted .267 lifetime, and his career OPS+ of 94 reflects his journeyman status. While any player who makes it to the majors deserves to be admired, Hal's career was quintessentially average in almost every way.
Except for one thing: he had the biggest hit in major league history.
The third of his five stops was in Pittsburgh, where he appeared in 144 regular season games over two seasons (1960 and 1961). He platooned with Smoky Burgess, who had a marginally better career and was named an all-star both years. The 1960 Pirates got out of the gate fast, winning 12 of their first 15 contests, and by mid-August held a 7-1/2 game lead in the NL that they never relinquished, cruising to the pennant by 7 games.
They faced the juggernaut Yankees in the World Series, and were outscored 55 to 27 over seven games. But they won the decisive match in what many consider the greatest game ever played. The dramatic conclusion, Bill Mazeroski's walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth, is seared in the memories of all baseball fans of a certain vintage. And for fifty years the only film known to exist of this game was a short highlight reel that featured Maz loping joyously around the bases, escorted by ecstatic Pirate fans, reinforcing the iconography.*
For the Pirates, Burgess did most of the catching that series. Smith got into three games: Games 3 and 6 pitched by Yankees' lefty ace Whitey Ford, and entering late in Game 7 after Burgess was replaced by a pinch-runner in the 7th. Despite having jumped out to a 4-0 lead in the second inning, by the time Smith entered the Pirates were fighting for their lives, after the Yankees scored once in the 5th and four times in the 6th (the big blow being a 3-run Yogi Berra home run) to take the lead. The Yankees then tacked on two more in the top of the 8th to go up 7-4, and the Pirates looked all but doomed.
But they rallied in the bottom of the 8th, aided in part by the baseball gods. Gino Cimoli lead off with a bloop single to short right-center field. Then Bill Virdon hit a crisp grounder toward shortstop that looked like a certain double play. But the ball took a high last hop off Forbes Fields' notoriously flinty infield surface, striking Tony Kubek squarely in the throat. He hit the dirt and both runners were safe. Kubek was hurt badly enough that Casey Stengel removed him from the game.
The next batter Dick Groat hit a single past Kubek's replacement Joe DiMaestri, and when Cimoli scored the margin narrowed to two runs. Stengel lifted Bobby Shantz (who had come on in relief back in the 3rd inning) for Jim Coates. Pirates' skipper Danny Murtaugh then asked his #3 hitter Bob Skinner to lay down a sacrifice bunt (it was a different game back then) which he did successfully, moving Virdon to third and Groat to second. Rocky Nelson made the second out on a shallow fly to right field on which Virdon could not score.
Roberto Clemente then came to the plate and hit a weak roller to the right of first baseman Bill Skowron. But again fate intervened when Coates started for the ball instead of heading straight to first. The fleet Clemente beat him to the bag as Virdon scored, and the Yankees' lead was down to one run.
And here is where our hero enters the picture. Smith took his place in the right-handed batter's box. Coates' first pitch was toward the outside corner and home plate umpire Bill Jackowski called it a strike. The second pitch was further outside and higher and went for a ball. The next offering got more of the plate and Smith took a vicious hack but missed to go 1-2. Coates then came up and in, and Smith leapt at it. In the film you can see him go almost all the way around, then checks at the end and spins back. Jackowski called it a check-swing for a ball instead of the strikeout it most certainly would have been today. (Check-swing calls were definitely more favorable to batters back then, but this still seems extreme.)
On the 2-2 pitch, Coates tried to sneak across fastball belt-high, but Smith was looking for it. He clubbed it deep to left field, far over the head of outfield Yogi Berra and well clear of the tall ivy-covered wall. Groat scored, Clemente frolicked to the plate behind him (foreshadowing Mazeroski's romp that would happen the next inning), and Hal Smith completed his circuit and was mobbed in the dugout by his teammates. Down 7-4 going into the bottom of the 8th, the Pirates had scored five times to take a 9-7 lead into the 9th.
You can watch the entirety of Smith's at-bat below. It's three minutes well spent.
And here's a ten-second slo-mo of the "checked swing".
Smith's home run is, definitively, the biggest play in baseball history. No single play has ever added more to a team's chances of winning a championship. As Smith came to the plate with two outs and the Bucs down by one run, their odds of winning the game (and therefore the series) stood at 30%. When the ball cleared the fence, they jumped to 93%. Smith's home run increased the Pirates' likelihood of winning the World Series by 63%. No other play comes close to it. (A list of World Series plays ranked by "championship Win Percentage Added" (cWPA) can be found at the end of this article. The results will probably surprise you.)
In his excellent condensed biography of Hal Smith on the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website, Dick Rosen opens with this paragraph: "Andy Warhol once suggested that 'In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.' Hal Smith was no exception, even though he had only about 13 minutes of fame, or even less." The game moved to the top of the 9th and Harvey Haddix proceeded to squander the two-run lead, a precursor to the greatest "vulture win" in baseball history. However if not for some amazing baserunning trickery by Mantle (that I wrote about here) the Pirates would have held the lead and Smith, not Mazeroski, would have been the long-remembered hero of this epic World Series.
Noted American neuroscientist and best-selling author, David Eagleman, says "There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. And the third is that moment, sometime in the future, where your name is spoken for the last time." While Hal Smith has now passed the first two gateposts, let's hope that he will live on in the memories of true baseball fans for many decades to come.
_________________________________________________________________________________
* In September 2010 a kinescope of the entire game was miraculously uncovered in the wine cellar of a home once owned by Bing Crosby. Crosby was a part-owner of the Pirates in 1960 and very much wanted to view the game, but was in Paris on tour when it was played. So he asked that the game be "kinescoped" (a method of filming a television broadcast) so he could watch it went he got home.
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