Underrated home runs?

Bah. People poo-pooed Ned Williamson for a long time, too.

 

Edgar Martinez's grand slam in Game 4 of the 1995 ALDS.

Everyone (who remembers that series) remembers the 11th-inning rally in Game 5. But as someone who was at all three games (drunk and otherwise inebriated as a college student), nothing during that psychedelic, 29-inning piece of dramatic baseball taffy was as exciting or pivotal or clutch as Edgar's four-run bomb into that garbage-baggy tarp that hung behind the center-field wall in the Kingdome.

 

There was one from a regular-season A's-Mariners game at the Kingdome sometime in the mid-90s. Randy Johnson threw a 98 mph fastball and Mark McGwire got every last bit of it. I think the ball literally hit the back wall of the Kingdome, thus answering the eternal question of what would happen if the game's biggest slugger connected off its fastest pitcher.
Sadly, thanks to MLB's policing of YouTube, there's probably no video of this except buried somewhere in the archives of whatever network broadcast the game.

 

You do realize that MLB probably has about a million hours of video clips available for free on its own website, right? They police YouTube because they own the copyright. But it's not like MLB.com is hoarding this stuff. Their video footage is more extensive than any other sports organization ... by far.

There's more than a dozen McGwire clips linked here, but unfortunately the 56K/300K RM files from the old MLB site haven't been updated yet: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/events/mlb_events_mcgwire.jsp

You can view about 55 other clips related to McGwire (mostly MLBN segments) here: http://mlb.mlb.com/search/media.jsp?query=mark%20mcgwire. The 1997 homer off Randy Johnson isn't one of them.

But McGwire's swing -- alas, not the flight of the ball -- on his "538"-foot homer can be seen at the 0:14 mark here:

 

Thanks. A little Googling after the fact found those 56/300 clips, but I couldn't get them to load.
Didn't realize they had clips going back that far, either. Thought it was only more recent stuff.

 

Pretty sure it was a Friday night. Which meant that in a lot of papers, it would have been relegated behind HS football and college previews, among other things.

He also hit No. 72 that night, IIRC.

 

I witnessed this.