There's nothing in baseball, maybe not even in all of sports, like an inside-the-park home run. A great hit and serious hustle are not enough to achieve the feat, it takes a freak occurrence to round all four bases with the ball still in play. A strange bounce off a tarp on the outfield wall enabled Ichiro's game-winning, inside-the-park home run at the 2007 All-Star Game. The most recent inside-the-parker was hit by the Phillies' Chase Utley on Thursday. He would have had to settle for a double had the ball not rolled along the outfield wall for 50 feet, evading two Astros fielders as he raced for home. The inside-the-park home run is a thrilling and unique part of baseball that deserves it's own statistical category, separate from the standard, out-of-the-park homer.
The two ways of hitting a home run are so absurdly different, that it seems ridiculous to place them in the same stat column. I tried to come up with a similar situation in a different sport, but I can't think of anything that comes close to this discrepancy. So I'll try an art analogy instead.
Think of the classic home run as Michelangelo's David, and an inside-the-park homer as a Jackson Pollock painting. David is huge, bold, and in your face, like a Josh Hamilton crushing a ball into the night sky. No one can deny that it took incredible talent to create it. But if you don't see its amazing detail from close up, David kind of looks like Lowe's garden statuary on a massive steroid cycle. Nothing different or special about it.
Then there's Pollock's splatter paintings. You look at one and think, that's not art! It's craziness, a mess! But you could never copy the painting exactly, no matter how hard you try. The painting was born of randomness and chaos, the very things that turn a double or triple into a magical inside-the-park home run.
Article comments
1 - jerryman
A really wonderful article. So good that it should be sent to the Commissioner of baseball.