Home-Run Hitters: Heroes of the Four Home-Run Game

"Home-Run Hitters: Heroes of the Four Home-Run Game" is an interesting juvenile baseball book in that it gives equal attention to Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays and Mike Schmidt with players young readers will never have heard of before such as Pat Seerey, Joe Adcock, and Mark Whiten. But then hitting four homers in a single game has only been accomplished ten times in baseball history, which is still more than the number of times three home-runs have been hit in a World Series game or the number of times someone has gone deep twice in the All-Star game. Babe Ruth never turned the feat, but John A. Torres begins his book by looking at the premodern era of the game to Babe Ruth, when everything changed. Instead of the game being based on smarts and speed as favored by the Ty Cobb and John McGraw, the long ball was what was drawing the big crowds. Torres, a veteran sportswriter, tells the story of these ten players and the combination of talent and luck (and power) that made them into the greatest slugger in the world for one game. The ten players on this short list, in order, are: Lou Gehrig, Chuck Klein, Pat Seerey, Gil Hodges, Joe Adcock, Rocky Colavito, Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, Bob Horner, and Mark Whiten. So, from a statistical standpoint, half of these players ended up in the Hall of Fame, which serves to prove that not just great players have great days at bat.My only real complaint about "Home-Run Hitters" is that Torres spends relatively little time talking about the actual four homers for most of these players. For example, there is a great story about Gehrig hitting his four homers that is not included. Gehrig hit his first three home runs to right field against starter George Earnshaw of the Philadelphia Athletics. Manager Connie Mack pulled Earnshaw from the game and insisted the pitcher sit on the bench next to him and watch how relief pitcher Roy Mahaffey pitched to Gehrig, who then hit his fourth home run to left field. The story is that Earnshaw turned to Mack and said: "I see, Mr. Mack. He made him hit it the other way." Then there is the irony that Gehrig, always in Ruth's shadow, did not get the biggest headlines on the sports page the next day because John McGraw, the manager of the New York Giants, winner of ten National League pennants, had announced his retirement.Torres wrote this book in 1995 and in his epilogue he speculates that the feat been duplicated in the near future is rather doubtful. He makes an interesting but ironic argument that the emphasis in the game "today" is on team speed and defense, as evidenced by artificial turf and large domed stadiums making home runs more difficult to hit. Of course, this was before Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds all shattered the magic 61* mark set by Roger Maris in 1961. Then again, Bonds is never going to be allowed to hit three home runs in a game let alone four because managers are going to walk him (he set a new single season mark for inten