SI

Wild Night Starts and Ends With MLB Inside-the-Park HR History

A first for baseball in the inside-the-park department.

Kyle Koster

Patrick Bailey hit a walkoff inside-the-park home run for the San Francisco Giants
Patrick Bailey hit a walkoff inside-the-park home run for the San Francisco Giants / Kelley L Cox-Imagn Images
In this story:

Few things in baseball—actually, few things in all of sports—are more exciting than an inside-the-park home run. It's almost impossible for a player to get one without something unusual happening, whether it be a catastrophic miscalculation from a fielder or the ball taking a zany bounce. Point is, if someone tells you that there was an inside-the-park homer, you're going to want to see it.

Tuesday night brought two of those strange round-trippers to Major League Baseball. First, Lawrence Butler of the Athletics casually cruised 360 feet to lead off the game against the Atlanta Braves.

Later, the San Francisco Giants' Patrick Bailey ran very fast to walk off the Philadelphia Phillies after his shot to right-center decided to explore the space far away from any fielder.

They've been playing baseball for a long, long time. So it's a bit surprising to learn that this was the first time in Major League Baseball history that a leadoff inside-the-parker and a walk-off inside-the-parker occurred on the same day.

Considering the fact that baseball teams used to play in bizarrely-shaped playing surfaces back in the day with cavernous power alleys, one would think something like this would have happened before. But considering Butler's scamper was the Athletic's first leadoff inside-the-parker since 1943 and Bailey's was the first walk-off of the variety across all baseball in the last decade ... yeah, definitely a rare night.

More MLB on Sports Illustrated

feed

Published
Kyle Koster
KYLE KOSTER

Kyle Koster is an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated covering the intersection of sports and media. He was formerly the editor in chief of The Big Lead, where he worked from 2011 to '24. Koster also did turns at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he created the Sports Pros(e) blog, and at Woven Digital.

Home/MLB