Inside-the-park home run

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In baseball parlance, an inside-the-park home run or "leg home run" is a play where a hitter scores a home run without hitting the ball out of play.

1 Discussion
2 Statistics
3 Rare occurrences
4 Inside-the-park grand slams
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Discussion

To score an inside-the-park home run the player must run, round, and touch all four bases before a fielder tags him out, the same as he would do for a double or triple. The play often occurs due to a fielding mishap by the defense or a strange bounce in the outfield. If the fielder commits an error during the act, however, the play is not scored as a home run, but rather advancing on an error^{[citation needed]}. The classic situation occurs when two outfielders collide on their way toward receiving a ball hit to the warning track^{[citation needed]}; the missed ball then bounces first off the track and then low off the fence high and far away from the fallen fielders. Another situation occurs when the ball tips off the glove of a diving fielder away from the other fielder.

[edit] Statistics

Of the 154,483 home runs hit from 1951 - 2000, 975 (about one in every 158) were inside the park. The percentage has dwindled over the years with the growing propensity toward smaller parks.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Career Records

Major League - Jesse Burkett - 55 ^[1]
National League - Tommy Leach - 49 ^[2]
American League - Ty Cobb - 46 ^[3]
Major League post 1950 - Willie Wilson - 13^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Single Season Records

Major League and National League - Sam Crawford - 12 - 1901 ^[4]
American League - Ty Cobb - 9 - - 1909 ^[5]

[edit] Single Game Records

Major League and National League - Tom McCreery - 3 - 1897 ^[6]
American League - 17 tied - 2 ^[7]
Ichiro Suzuki is the only player to ever hit an inside the park home run in an All-Star game^[8]. He did it in the 2007 All-Star game in San Francisco, California. His team, the American League All-Stars, won the game and Ichiro was named the MVP.

[edit] Rare occurrences

Roberto Clemente, one of the greatest outfielders in Baseball history, is also the only player in baseball history to have hit a walk-off inside-the-park grand slam.^{[citation needed]}
Jimmy Sheckard completed a phenomenal feat in 1901, hitting inside-the-park grand slams in consecutive games on consecutive days with the Brooklyn Superbas (later the Brooklyn Dodgers).^{[citation needed]} Sheckard is the only person in Major League Baseball history to do so.^{[citation needed]}
Ed Delahanty of the Philadelphia Phillies, on July 13, 1896, hit four home runs in one game (itself quite a rare feat), two of them were inside-the-park home runs. This event is the only time any homers in a four-homer game have been inside-the-park.^[9]
With his inside the park homer on June 17, 2007, Prince Fielder became the 3rd largest player to hit an inside the park home run, at 260 pounds.^{[citation needed]} His homer came when Outfielder Lew Ford of the Minnesota Twins lost a ball in the roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.^{[citation needed]}
Rookie catcher Geovany Soto of the Chicago Cubs was credited with an inside-the-park home run against the Houston Astros on May 19, 2008, though replays showed the ball should have been called an automatic home run. ^[10]

[edit] Inside-the-park grand slams

An inside-the-park grand slam is the same event but, like a grand slam, features the bases loaded for an inside-the-park home run. There have been 40 inside-the-park grand slams in Major League Baseball since 1950 and only eight since 1990 (as of 2007). Honus Wagner had the most in MLB history with five.