Even if they hadn't been such wonderful games, watching the Twins play in Fenway against the Red Sox these last two nights has set my mind wandering--for example, to the baseball equivalent of alternative history, along the line of: What if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated and had lived to preside over reconstruction? Me: What if Harmon Killebrew had played for the Red Sox?
You get the idea. Laser missiles that are homers everywhere can get knocked down to the warning track--my daughter calls it the "worry trail"--by the Green Monster, but Harmon's moonshots would all have been over it. On the other hand, a fair number of his long outs would have been, in Fenway, doubles or even homers. I haven't been able to find a website that sets out player stats by ballpark, but I did find this relating to most homers by a visiting player at Fenway Park:
Babe Ruth 38
Mickey Mantle 38
Harmon Killebrew 37
Al Kaline 30
Alex Rodriguez 29
Joe DiMaggio 29
A couple of fast notes about this result. The Babe had a bit of an advantage on account of having played his entire career before the league expanded beyond eight teams--keeping the schedule for the Yankees would have brought him to Fenway for eleven games per season, year after year after year. Harmon would have played there nine times a season for most of his career, less frequently after 1968. Note, too, that the Babe is the only left-handed batter on the list (Mantle was a switch hitter, the other four batted right-handed). Fenway is not a homer haven for left-handed batters: I happened to see, while clicking around to feed my curiosity, that of Ted Williams's 521 career homers, only 248--substantially less than half--were in home games. (Williams batted left-handed and played his entire career for the Red Sox.) Finally, there's quite a gap between Harmon's 37 and Kaline's 30; the Twin is alone at the top of this list with the two most celebrated American League sluggers, ever.
It's also interesting that I found this information on, of all places, Twitter. People who think they're smart like to run down social media sites, but they (social media sites) can be either sinkholes or highly useful. I'm endlessly amused and entertained, sometimes even uplifted, by people I follow on Twitter. Did you hear about the promiscuous violin maker? Friends called him Straddle-Various. I read that on Twitter this week. In the uplifting category, someone tweeted:
my dad is dying and my friend brought me a brownie in bed and said remember u can call me in the middle of the night just to say Horrible Things!!!! the most fucked up things u can think of!!!!! then she told me some gossip and left for dance class. 100% pure love.
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