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| Willie Mays was in a groove at the plate April 30, 1961, tying the record for homers in a game with four in the San Francisco Giants' 14-4 victory at Milwaukee. |
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| Hank Aaron, Willie Mays' rival throughout their respective careers, also had his home-run swing on April 30, 1961, hitting two round trippers and driving in all of the Braves' runs in their14-4 loss to San Francisco. |
By Phil Ellenbecker
It wasn't The Launching Pad, but on this day it was certainly a launching pad.
It was five years before the Braves of Milwaukee became the Braves of Atlanta and moved into their Fulton County Stadium home known by that Space Age-synonymous moniker because of the number of home runs that flew out of there. But County Stadium was bursting with rockets of its own the Sunday afternoon of April 30, 1961.
And nobody was more ready for liftoff than Willie Mays, who had four of a total of 10 homers clearing the County walls that day as the San Francisco Giants bludgeoned the Braves 14-4, with all but two of the runs for both teams reaching home via the round tripper.
Mays went 4-for-5 on the day with eight RBIs. His homer total matches the single-game standard reached by 17 others from 1894 through 2017.
While Mays was touching down, he was also going for distance. Each of his homers went at least an estimated 400 feet, according to an article on the Society for American Baseball Research's Games Project website.
Mays' performance overshadowed a two-homer game by Hank Aaron, a momentary partner of Mays in the Babe Ruth all-time homer king chase in the 1970s, before Aaron completely took it over. Aaron drove in all of the Braves' runs and finished the game 2-for-4 with four RBIs and two runs scored.
Teammates joining Mays in the brash brigade were Jose Pagan with two homers and Orlando Cepeda and Felipe Alou with one apiece.
Mays also stole some thunder from Pagan, who went 4-for-5 with three runs scored and two RBIs. The Puerto Rican native, in the first full season of a 15-year major league career, tied his career game highs for homers, hits and runs scored. He had a .204 lifetime batting average coming into the game, with no homers.
That all those balls should leave the yard shouldn't have been surprising since the game included five Hall of Famers, all of them among the top homer hitters of all time. Ironically, two of those, Eddie Mathews and Willie McCovey, failed to clear the wall.
McCovey, No. 20 on the all-time list with 521 homers, went 0-for-3 with two walks for the Giants. Mathews, No. 23 on the all-time list at 512, was 1-for-4 for the Braves. He avoided drawing the collar with a single in his final time at bat.
Another slugger with the collar was the Braves' Joe Adcock (336 homers, 106th all time), who went 0-for-4. (Mays joined Adcock in the four-homer club. Adcock clubbed four July 31, 1954, and added a double that day to set a record for total bases in a game with 18).
Cepeda (379 homers, 73rd all time) joined Mays and Aaron as Hall of Famers with circuit clouts this day. Aaron is second on the all-time homer list at 755 while Mays is fifth at 660.
Getting to the actual account of the game, which matched teams in first place (Giants) and third in the National League coming in, Aaron held the upper hand early on. After Mays belted a solo homer in the top of the first off Lew Burdette, a 420-foot drive to center field, Aaron countered with a three-run shot in the bottom of the inning off Billy Loes.
The Giants moved ahead in the third on a solo shot by Pagan and a two-run homer by Mays, Mays teeing off on a Burdette sinker for a 400-foot blast.
Cepeda led off the fourth with a homer, and Burdette's day was done. Alou greeted the new pitcher, Carlton Willey, with another homer, and one batter later Pagan went yard again to make the score 873.
Braves manager Chuck Dressen went to a third pitcher to start the fifth, and Moe Drabowsky managed to keep Mays in the park for the only time of the day, getting him to fly out to Aaron in center field.
But Mays resumed his onslaught in the sixth inning with a three-run dinger off a slider from Seth Morehead, capping a four-run inning that made it 11-3. The homer went an estimated 450 feet into County Stadium's Braves Reservation picnic area in left-center, appropriately enough since Mays was feasting on Braves pitching. Only with no reservations.
Asked if this had been his longest home run, Mays told the Milwaukee Sentinel: “I think I’ve only
hit one as long or longer. That was the one I socked over the eagle on the
Anheuser-Busch sign against the Cardinals at Busch Stadium.” Aaron got his second homer of the day in Milwaukee's half of the sixth.
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| Jose Pagan, shown on his 1960 Topps baseball card when he was just breaking into the major leagues with the San Franscisco Giants, had a career day April 30, 1961, but it was overshadowed by teammate Willie Mays' four homers. Pagan had two homers of his own and went 4-for-5 with three runs scored and two RBIs. |
Mays then assumed his place in history in the eighth with his fourth tater, a two-run shot off Don McMahon that closed out the scoring. Mays connected with a slider and sent it an estimated 430 feet to left-center.
Just to show you how differently managers thought back then, Giants skipper Al Dark had Loes lay down a sacrifice bunt, with his team ahead by 10, after Pagan got his fourth hit in the ninth.
That brought up the top of the order with Mays three at-bats away from a chance at a fifth homer. But Chuck Hiller and Jim Davenport were both retired on ground outs, and out went Willie's chance at standing alone in history.
“To tell the truth, I don’t think I would have hit
anything," Mays said of the missed opportunity. "You see, I started to think about it when it was announced over the
public address and I know I’d be pressing, trying to go for another one.”
Loes, in the final year of an 11-year career made infamous by his losing a ground ball in the sun in the 1952 World Series, went the distance and threw an eight-hitter with four earned runs allowed, one walk and three strikeouts as he improved to 2-1, 12-1 lifetime against the Braves. Loes went on to finish 6-5 with a 4.24 ERA that year, giving him a career ledger of 80-63 with a 3.89 ERA.
Burdette was racked for five runs, all earned, on five hits (four of them homers) in his three-inning stint as he fell to 1-1. Burdette was second in the National League in gopher balls given up that year with 32 in a season in which he finished 18-11 with a 4.00 ERA.
He didn't hit any homers, but Hiller also had a big day at the plate for the Giants, going 3-for-6 with two runs scored. He had two doubles, matching his career high.
The Giants won the rubber game in an early showdown series between the two teams, featuring besides the aforementioned five Hall of Fame position players, two Hall of Fame pitchers who had taken their turns opening the weekend.
Warren Spahn, age 40, beat the Giants 1-0 on Friday with his second career no-hitter, having just thrown his first the year before. Juan Marichal beat the Braves 7-3 on Saturday with the help of five homers -- two by McCovey and one apiece by Cepeda, Alou and Davenport. Joe Adcock homered for Milwaukee.
And then it was Mays' turn Sunday, and he was ready. He'd gone 0-for-7 in the first two games.
“I couldn’t hit
the ball hard before,” he said. “But before today’s game I had an idea I was
going to snap out of it. I was about due to do something.”
Willie's wallops helped the Giants maintain a half-game lead in the NL at 10-6, while the Braves dropped into fifth at 6-6.
The two teams finished third and fourth at the end of the season, the Giants (85-69) eight games behind pennant-winning Cincinnati, the Braves (83-72) 10 back.
Mays' four homers gave him six on the year. He hit 40 for the season, good for second in the NL, to go with 123 RBIs (third) and a .308 average (eighth).
Four-homer facts
Mays became the ninth player to reach the four homers in a game, a milestone most recently achieved by J.D. Martinez of the Arizona Diamondbacks on Sept. 4, 2017. Before Mays, the most recent player to reach the mark was Cleveland's Rocky Colavito on June 10, 1959. But it would be 15 years after Mays' four-homer game before Philadelphia's Mike Schmidt managed the feat April 17, 1976.
The stretch between Mays' and Schmidt's four-home games was the second-longest in history. The longest was the 36 years between Ed Delahanty in 1896 and Lou Gehrig in 1932.
The shortest gap between four-home games was 21 days: Mike Cameron on May 2, 2002, and Shawn Green on May 23, 2002.
The first two decades of the 2000s tie with the 1950s for most four-homer games with three each. The 1930s and 1890s had two each; the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s and 1940s had one apiece.
Mays tied Schmidt and Josh Hamilton for most fourth-most RBIs in a four-homer game with eight. Hamilton hit four in 2012. Mark Whiten had the most RBIs with 12 in 1993, followed by Scooter Gennett with 10 in 2017 and Gil Hodges with nine in 1950.
More homer happiness
Mays took part in another record-tying homer feat involving the Giants in 1961.
On Aug. 23, Cepeda, Felipe Alou, Davenport, Mays and John Orsino each hit a homer in the 12-run ninth inning of a 14-0 shellacking of Cincinnati. That ties a mark set five other times for most homers in an inning.
Cepeda and Alou began the bombardment, which came against three pitchers, with back-to-back solo shots with one out. Davenport added a three-run inside-the-park job, Mays added his with one on and Orsino capped the blitz with another three-run smash.
Sources:
Play-by-play: https://www.
Four homers in a game: https://www.mlb.com/
Additional background came from various sources on the Retrosheet and Society for American Baseball Research's Biography Project and Games Project websites, as well as baseballreference.com.
Additional background came from various sources on the Retrosheet and Society for American Baseball Research's Biography Project and Games Project websites, as well as baseballreference.com.
Most RBIs in a four-home game
Date Player Team RBI
9-7-93 Mark Whiten St. Louis 12
6-6-17 Scooter Gennett Cincinnati 10
8-3-50 Gil Hodges Brooklyn 9
5-8-12 Josh Hamilton Texas 8
4-17-76 Mike Schmidt Philadelphia 8
4-30-61 Willie Mays San
Francisco 8
5-23-02 Shawn Green Los
Angeles (NL) 7
7-31-54 Joe Adcock Milwaukee
(NL) 7
7-18-48 Pat Seerey Chicago
(AL) 7
9-4-17 J.D. Martinez Arizona 6
9-25-03 Carlos Delgado Toronto 6
7-6-86 Bob Horner Atlanta 6
6-10-59 Rocky Colavito Cleveland 6
7-10-36 Chuck Klein Philadelphia
(NL) 6
6-3-32 Lou Gehrig New York (AL) 6
5-2-02 Mike Cameron Seattle 4
Source: Retroshoot.org. Note: No RBI information is available from this
site for the four-home games by Ed Delahanty, Philadelphia (NL), 7-12-1896, and
Bobby Lowe, Boston (NL), 5-39-94.
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