Every so often, you’ll hear a baseball announcer attempt to explain why the triple is the most exciting play in baseball.  Sometimes, others will say that there is nothing more pure or exciting than a great pitching duel.  You may even run into someone who says that the balk is the most exciting play in baseball since nothing gets the umpire more excited (BALK!!!).  All of these instances are just trying to come up with alternatives to what is the most common sense answer—a home run that is absolutely annihilated.  Nothing else can keep a crowd buzzing for several innings afterwards than a destroyed ball.  Hell, there are many people in St. Louis still discussing a foul ball that was hit by Mike Laga over 20 years ago.  This week’s Top 7 takes a look at the biggest bombs that have been hit since 1989 (so Reggie Jackson in the All-Star Game and 94 legendary Willie Stargell homers are ineligible).

7. Andres Galarraga

Playing in Colorado has made and/or rejuvenated many players since 1993, but no one more so than The Big Cat.  He hit .237 for the Cardinals in 1992 before putting up wiffle ball-like numbers for the Rockies for several years, including being the annual “will he hit .400?” player in his first year while improving his previous year’s average by 127 points.  The Cat hit one in Florida, not sure which year, that went over halfway up the left field upper deck.  He laughed when he saw where the ball landed.  At the time, it didn’t even seem possible that someone could hit it into the upper deck at all, much less nearly the whole way up.

This dong was shown on ESPN at least 6,000 times over the next week, though maybe I just remember that as such because it was in one of those “see the same SportsCenter 7 times per day” phases for me.

6. Cecil Fielder

Before his son was launching balls into the upper deck at Busch Stadium, Cecil was the most legendary ball-launcher for a good few years.  He had one of those classic swings where he could hit a pop-up to short and you would still be amazed at the punishment he attempted to put on the ball.  There was one in particular where he put all 500 pounds into the pitch, and it cleared the entire roof of Tiger Stadium.  It’s hard to imagine a better feeling in life than being able to hit a ball out of an entire building.

5. Bo Jackson

Sometimes you have to give extra points for the stakes of the bomb.  Bo Jackson was unquestionably the face of the 1989 All-Star Game.  He was having a huge season, making amazing plays seemingly every day, and people were raving about how he was one of the greatest athletes to ever play baseball.  To top it off, Ronald Reagan was in the broadcast booth with Al Michaels when he stepped up for his first plate appearance, and absolutely crushed one into dead center field in Anaheim, with Michaels exclaiming, “Bo Jackson says hello!”  Poor Wade Boggs…he went back-to-back in the next at-bat, but no one recalls that too much.

4. Albert Pujols

But if you’re giving points for high stakes, Pujols has that covered.  There were no bigger stakes than two outs, two on, Game 5 of the NLCS, and literally anything other than a home run ends the season (with Reggie Sanders on deck and sure to strike out).  There was no drama to the home run itself, only as to how fast it would get out and how far over the train tracks it would hit.  If he would do this in a potential Cards/Cubs NLCS, two cities would probably burn to the ground.  There has been talk this week about the possibility of a Cards/Cubs NLCS, but the most intense possibility is probably a one-game playoff for the division title.  Most Cards and Cubs fans would be so into it that they wouldn’t even enjoy it.  I know I’d be throwing up for three hours.  And considering how upset Cub fans got over “Cubs” being the least intimidating pro sports team name, it’s needless to say that the game would get a tad bit heated.

3. Glenallen Hill

In 2000, Hill hit an inside pitch with such force that the crowd gasped as soon as he hit it.  The left fielder didn’t move.  The ball left in about a second-and-a-half, and it ended up going onto the roof across the street from Wrigley Field.  Hill’s reaction was the best--he just stood there and admired his work.  Whoever the color guy is on the Cub broadcast at the time immediately says “Oh my gosh!  He hit it on the roof!”  Arne Harris, possibly the most famous baseball broadcast producer of all-time, says that he had never seen it in 37 years of covering Cub baseball.  No one afterwards, fans, broadcasters, or players, ever remembered seeing someone hit it that far either.  Google Videos actually has the video up right now if you do a search, so check it out before MLB forces them to take it down.  It’s an ungodly blast.



2. Mark McGwire

There are many to choose from—he is the Willie Stargell of this era because every single park you go to, there is a story about one that McGwire hit there.  He hit upper deck shots with such normalcy that you almost didn’t even flinch anymore when he did it.  Rickie Weeks hit a ball into the “Big Mac Land” at Busch as a visiting player a couple of years after McGwire left, and no one in the crowd even batted an eye, they were so used to seeing such destruction on a regular basis.  The easiest one to go to for McGwire is the 545-foot blast off of the Post-Dispatch sign in center field at Busch, which almost went into the center field upper deck.  But for this list, McGwire’s most amazing bomb came in 1997, during a Randy Johnson 19-strikeout game, when he took a 3-2 pitch almost to the very back of left-center field at the Kingdome.  It was the equivalent of when Truman Burbank reached the end of the “Truman Show” set--you really couldn’t get any further than that ball unless it broke through the roof.

1. Jose Canseco
This one takes the top spot because it basically encompasses all of the prior slots on the list.  Canseco’s home run in the 1989 ALCS at the Skydome in Toronto had it all: the high-stakes of a playoff game, the player doing the connecting being the biggest star at the time, swinging with ridiculous viciousness, and the fact that he reached places in the park that were thought impossible.  Canseco’s bomb went into the top deck of the new Skydome (which the park itself was a wonder at the time), and it took the cameraguy a couple of seconds before they could find where the ball went.  One of the best shots afterwards came an inning later where they sent another cameraman up to where the ball landed, and home plate was a mere speck.  And since it’s illegal to write about baseball nowadays without its mention, I’ll end with a final word—steroids.

Look for the best baseball bats and equipment to increase your chances of hitting your own home-run bomb.