One of the rarer events seen in a Major League Baseball game is the phenomenon known as the inside-the-park home run.

Sal Baxamusa of The Hardball Times recently put up a post dedicated to the inside-the-park homers in the 2006 season, complete with the circumstances at the moment of the insider, who the opposing pitcher was, the distance the ball travelled based on Greg Rybarczyk’s “hit tracker” and a video of each of these events.

And as is often the case, Baseball Almanac comes through with Major League records for inside-the-park home runs, for a career, for a season and for a single game.

For example, one might think that Ty Cobb would own the Major League career record for inide-the-park shots, but NOT!  Cobb only owned the American League record with 46 for his career.  A guy named Tommy Leach, a middle-wrung infielder who only had 66 homers for his career, hit 49 of them inside-the-park — a National League record.

But the Major League career record of 51 inside-the-park jobs belongs outfielder/1st baseman Sam Crawford who hit 13 NL insiders with Cincinnati and another 38 in the AL with the Detroit Tigers.

Cobb and Crawford own their respective league marks with 9 and 12 respectively.  Cobb set the AL mark in 1909 and Crawford set his NL mark, hitting 12 of his 13 career NL insiders in the 1901 season.

The all-time single game record for short homers was set by utilityman  Tom McCreery of the old-time Louisville Colonels of 1897 with 3 in a single game.

51 other players have hit 2 inside-jobs in a game, including aminingly enough, Dick Allen who never was a particularly fast baserunner, but who hit 2 in a game while with the Chicago White Sox on july 31, 1972.

Others performing the feat included Cobb, Honus Wagner, Willie Keeler,  Dan Brouthers and Jesse Burkett who each performed the feat twice in their careers and last, but not least, the immortal Casey Stengel who did his 2 insiders in a game with the Brooklyn Dodgers on May 1, 1913.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under All Time Baseball Highlights, All Time Hitting Highlights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.