Your right hokie, he probably didn’t hit them from both sides. He definately hit them off the same pitcher.
According to the ESPN web site, Tatis bats right, not switch.
AFAIK, the only player to hit homers from both sides of the plate in one inning was Carlos Baerga. He did it for the Cleveland Indians on April 8, 1993, against Steve Howe and Steve Farr of the Yankees in the seventh inning.
Fernando Tatis hit his two grand slams off of Dodger pitcher Chan Ho Park in third inning of a game in May of 1999 (I’m not quite sure of that date). The Cardinals scored 11 runs in the inning.
I think it was more amazing that Dodger manager Davey Johnson left Park in to pitch Tatis a second time with the bases loaded.
I was watching that game with a friend of mine and she asked me if such things happened frequently.
Rastahomie there would have been no need for Tatis to switch sides of the plate if he were facing the same pitcher.
Hitting for the cycle does seem to have an element of randomness in it. The Los Angeles Dodgers in 43 of playing on the West Coast have had only one player hit for the cycle, Wes Parker in 1970. The New York Mets have had eight players do it in four fewer years.
In that same time period, Dodger pitchers have thrown 10 no-hitters and the Mets have thrown none.
When I used to play Little Leauge ball, I hit for the cycle several times. But as someone mentioned earlier, with the crummy pitching and aluminum bats, it wasn’t nearly as hard as a lot of people would think. I used to be coni=sidered one of the suggers of my leauge…it was great being a rolemodel.
…Fernando Tatis bats exculsively from the right side. He doesn’t switch hit.
I think you have me confused with somebody else, BobT. I never mentioned Fernando Tatis.
I remember that one. I watched it on TV. That was when the Yankees were terrible. Howe Farr have we come from those days?
Fortunately, the Yankees turned it around the following year.
Zev Steinhardt
My apologies. Missed by one when I was scrolling up.
BobT said:
This reminds me of the story I heard about a guy who was understandably excited when Nolan Ryan threw his seventh no-hitter. He told his wife about it and she asked how long he had been in baseball. When the guy told her 20 or so years, she said, “And he only has 7 no-hitters?”
“Yeah, honey, I don’t know how he lasted so long in this game. Heck, most pitchers throw 3 or 4 no-hitters their rookie season.”
Sorry to arrive so late. New job, don’t get to surf nearly as much as before.
Homering for the cycle (solo, 2-run, 3-run, and 4-run homers in the same game): It’s never been done in the majors, so far as the major statistical services can determine. The reason they looked is that it was done once in the minors, fairly late in the 1998 or 1999 season, by minor league veteran Tyrone Horne, playing for the Arkansas Travelers in the Double A Texas League. It was a big news story for a few days, and Howe, Elias, and the other stat services all came up empty on any other time it had occurred in professional baseball. (rastahomie, J.D. Drew was playing for the Travs, who were then the Cardinals Double-A affiliate, but he wasn’t the one who homered for the cycle).
After a bit of searching, I finally found a reference for this: Lisa Winston’s column in Baseball Weekly for August 5-11, 1998.
I wonder if Nig Clarke did it in his 8 homer minor league game in 1903. Does anybody know?
Zev Steinhardt
Oh hell. More research. I think I have the 1904 Reach Guide, which might say, and I’ll check the Minor League Encyclopedia this evening when I get home. I have to assume that Howe et al. checked it, however.
Can’t find any indication of whether Clarke homered for the cycle in this game. It happened June 15, 1902, not 1903, so my 1904 Reach Guide doesn’t help, and every source I’ve been able to find is silent on the subject. It’s certainly possible – one source says Clarke had 20 RBI for the day, for an average of 2.5 per homer. It’s even theoretically possible he homered for the cycle twice in the game (the RBI total would be right). Corsicana defeated Texarkana 51-3, with 21 home runs total for the game, so Clarke had plenty of help from the other guys, as well as from the short fences in the ballpark in Ennis, Texas, where the game had been moved to circumvent a ban on Sunday games in Corsicana.
I don’t believe there are any full boxscores extant for Nig Clarke’s big game.
Not that I can find. And even if there were, the answer probably wouldn’t be there. Including the number of RBI for each homer in the box score is a pretty recent development; indeed, for such an early box score, from a minor league game, it’s not a certainty that the number of HRs for each player or team would even be there. The most likely source would be a newspaper account of the game, and one with the details in question almost certainly would have turned up by now, if nothing else in the flurry of investigations that followed Tyrone Horne’s feat.