July 19, 1996: Reds’ Dave Burba becomes first pitcher in the 1990s to homer in two straight starts
“If you’d ever seen me swing, you’d say, ‘No way this guy could hit a home run.’ I step in the bucket. My back side flies up. It’s not a pretty swing.” – Cincinnati Reds pitcher Dave Burba, 1996.1
Rory Glynn, a Cincinnati Reds beat writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer, jested in 1996 that the odds of starting pitcher Dave Burba hitting a home run fell “somewhere between winning the lottery and being involved in an auto accident more than five miles from home.”2
But on July 14, 1996, the light-hitting Burba tagged a pitch from visiting Pittsburgh Pirates starter Paul Wagner and sent it to the opposite field and into the seats beyond right field at Riverfront Stadium. Burba’s first career home run, in his fifth National League season, sent him smiling and sprinting around the bases and put the Reds dugout into hysterics – the idea it could happen seemed absurd.
“My philosophy as a pitcher hitting is that I’m swinging and hacking,” Burba said. “I’m not up there to walk because I don’t have a good eye. I don’t get enough at-bats to see a lot of pitches. I might look bad on some breaking balls, but I’m swinging. Hopefully, something happens.”3
Given that approach, few expected that a pitcher carrying a .083 season batting average and two career extra-base hits would find another jackpot when he took the mound against the Pirates again five days later.
But on July 19 – this time before 17,153 fans at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh – Burba defied the odds. On his way to winning for the fifth time in six decisions, the 30-year-old right-hander launched the first pitch he saw from rookie reliever Chris Peters into the left-field seats for a fifth-inning home run, becoming the first pitcher of the 1990s to homer in consecutive starts as the Reds rolled to a lopsided 11-3 victory.4
Burba contained his smile as he rounded the bases this time, but with so little experience making that 360-foot trip, his home run trot was still clunky and made him the target of ribbing from his teammates.
“Eric Davis got all over me after I hit the second one,” Burba said of Cincinnati’s power-hitting center fielder who had hit 220 career homers in his first 11½ major-league seasons. “He said, ‘OK, the first one, you’re all excited. I understand. But once you hit a second one, you’ve got to come up with a trot.’ … And I said, ‘Eric, I’m not like you.’
“When he hits them, he says, ‘How far did it go?’ When I hit ’em, I say, ‘Where did it go?’”5
Burba’s home run combined with a career-high-tying four hits by reigning NL MVP Barry Larkin and three by Jeff Branson to put an end to Cincinnati’s four-game losing streak in the second meeting of a four-game series between the two worst teams in the NL Central Division.6 In victory, the Reds – the defending division champions – improved to 43-48, while the Pirates dropped to 42-53 and lost their modest two-game winning streak.7
The Reds had scored more than four runs only four times in 15 games since July 1 and had not reached double-digit runs in a month.8 Their 11 runs in this game equaled their total for the last three games combined. Cincinnati had also not collected as many as 15 hits since April 30, and the offensive explosion answered first-year manager Ray Knight’s pregame request – even if it was more flippant banter than an actual expectation.
“I was just walking around saying, ‘Fifteen hits! Fifteen hits! I need 15 hits tonight,’” Knight said. “It was just a bunch of [nonsense], but I got it. I guess I haven’t been asking for enough from them this year.”9
Pittsburgh struck in the first inning when Al Martin lifted a fly to shallow right field and Reggie Sanders let the ball bounce to him and added a throwing error that allowed Martin to get to third. Martin scored on Jeff King’s sacrifice fly to center.
For the seventh time in 20 starts, Burba faced a deficit after the first inning. Six of those came as Burba struggled to a 0-8 record in his first 14 starts, and the Reds rallied to win only one of those games.10 But with wins in his last four starts, Burba felt good about his team’s chances in this game.
“A game like tonight where I got behind in the first inning would have been over in the first half of the season,” Burba said. “I would lose focus and let it get away. Tonight I buckled down and kept after it, and we scored some runs.”11
Cincinnati responded in the second, as Willie Greene walked and Davis singled before Branson’s one-out RBI single to right. But the Pirates continued to pester Burba in the bottom of the frame. Charlie Hayes walked and Jay Bell reached on an infield single. Catcher Angelo Encarnación – making his season debut12 – moved Hayes to third by hitting into a force at second, and Wagner drove Hayes home with a groundout to third.
Faced with a 2-1 deficit, the Reds offense took off in the third. Larkin drew a walk and Hal Morris was hit by a pitch to set up Sanders’ RBI single to left. After Greene walked to load the bases, Morris scored the go-ahead run as Davis grounded out to short.13
With runners on second and third and left-handed batters Ed Taubensee and Branson up next, Pittsburgh manager Jim Leyland called on Peters for his major-league debut.14 The 24-year-old lefty allowed Taubensee’s sacrifice fly and Branson’s RBI ground-rule double, pushing Cincinnati’s lead to 5-2.15
In the fourth, Peters hit Thomas Howard, who stole second and advanced to third on Encarnación’s throwing error. Larkin looped the next pitch into shallow right for an RBI single. Morris singled to put runners on the corners, and Greene’s one-out fly to center gave Larkin time to score for a 7-2 lead.
Peters got two quick outs in the fifth, bringing Burba to the plate. Burba drove the first pitch he saw to deep left to become the first Reds pitcher to homer in back-to-back starts since Tom Seaver in September 1977.
“I like to hit,” Burba said. “It’s a part of baseball. If you get a hit, you really help yourself, and if you don’t, it doesn’t matter because nobody expects you to. I’ve always enjoyed hitting, but I wouldn’t say I’m a good hitter.”16
“I’m just swinging,” he added. “… I never know where it’s going. I swung and made contact, looked up, and saw it heading for the left-field seats. At least this time I didn’t break into a smile until I got to the dugout.”17
Peters, who finished the year with a mix of starts and relief appearances for the Pirates, began the season with the Double-A Carolina Mudcats and impressed enough in four starts for the Triple-A Calgary Cannons to earn his promotion to the majors.18
Peters grew up a Reds fan in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, a small town just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, giving friends and family a chance to watch his debut on television. When he was in fourth grade, the family moved to Peters Township, Pennsylvania, about 15 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, and Peters changed his allegiance to the Pirates.19
His family already had planned a trip to Three Rivers Stadium to celebrate his sister Amy’s 22nd birthday on July 18, and his promotion to the majors made the trip more special, even though he did not pitch until the next day.
“It was exciting,” Peters said of his debut, which lasted 2⅔ innings. “I’m disappointed I wasn’t able to get the job done. I don’t use my first major-league appearance as an excuse. I felt confident I could get the job done. But I still had fun out there.”20
Sanders added an RBI single off rookie Elmer Dessens in the sixth,21 and Morris poked a two-run single to left in the eighth off Steve Parris to run Cincinnati’s lead to 11-2. In the ninth, Reds reliever Johnny Ruffin surrendered a home run to pinch-hitter Mark Johnson, the 28-year-old first baseman’s franchise-record-tying third pinch-hit homer of the season.22
Wagner took the loss, dropping to 4-8 for the season and winless since May 4. He had opened the season 3-0 with a 0.77 ERA in three starts and a relief effort but went 1-8 in his next 12 starts and missed time because of arm inflammation from June 7 through July 1. Four days after this game, Wagner was back on the disabled list, and he had Tommy John surgery on August 7. He did not appear in another major-league game until July 1997.23
Burba improved to 5-9. He made 13 more starts in 1996 and closed the year with a new career-high 11 wins against 13 losses.24 Offensively, he collected 3 more hits in 28 at-bats, finishing the year with a .104 average. He hit the third and final home run of his career on June 7, 1998, for the Cleveland Indians in an interleague game against the Reds in Cincinnati.25 For his career, which spanned 1990 to 2004, Burba batted .134, securing 26 hits in 194 at-bats.
Acknowledgments
This article was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Len Levin.
Photo credit: Dave Burba, Trading Card Database.
Sources
In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the Baseball-Reference.com, Stathead.com, and Retrosheet.org websites for pertinent statistics and the box scores. He also used information obtained from the Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati Post, Dayton Daily News, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PIT/PIT199607190.shtml
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1996/B07190PIT1996.htm
Notes
1 Jayson Stark, “Major-Leaguers Earn Medals of Their Own With Olympian Feats,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 28, 1996: C13.
2 Rory Glynn, “Reds Hit Four HRs,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 15, 1996: C2.
3 Bill Peterson, “Perez Belts Winner,” Cincinnati Post, July 15, 1996: 1C.
4 The last pitcher before Burba to hit home runs in back-to-back starts was Ron Darling of the New York Mets on June 24 and 30, 1989. The span of 2,576 days between Darling’s and Burba’s feats is the longest dating to 1915. The next-longest gap came between Schoolboy Rowe’s consecutive homers on August 18 and 23, 1935, and Claude Passeau’s home runs on May 15 and 20, 1942 – a span of 2,462 days. The NL adopted the designated-hitter rule in 2022, so occurrences of pitchers hitting home runs in consecutive starts will likely become even rarer – though Shohei Ohtani accomplished the feat in 2023.
5 Stark.
6 This was the 14th four-hit game of Larkin’s career, and performances like this helped justify his fourth straight and eighth overall All-Star Game appearance as Cincinnati’s lone representative 10 days earlier. He later recorded five hits on June 24, 2000, and added five more four-hit games after this one. For Branson, this was his eighth career three-hit game. He never had four hits in a game but added two more three-hit efforts.
7 Pittsburgh had not won three games in a row in over a month (June 7-11). Coming into the game, the only NL teams with worse records than the Reds and Pirates were the Philadelphia Phillies and San Francisco Giants, both at 40-54. Cincinnati finished the season in third place in the NL Central Division at 81-81, while the Pirates closed the year in fifth at 73-89.
8 On June 19 the Reds beat the Houston Astros 10-7, which was only the third time Cincinnati had piled up at least 10 or more runs in a game. The Phillies, Florida Marlins, and Chicago Cubs were the only other teams in the majors with so few double-digit-scoring games by that point in the season.
9 Jeff Horrigan, “Reds Find Thunder in Bats,” Cincinnati Post, July 20, 1996: 1D.
10 In Burba’s second start of the season, on April 10, he allowed four runs to the Mets in the top of the first inning, but Cincinnati rallied back to win 9-7, leaving Burba with no decision.
11 Associated Press, “Reds, Burba Pound Pirates,” Troy (Ohio) Daily News, July 20, 1996: 6.
12 Encarnación had served as the backup catcher in 1995, but he began the 1996 season in the minor leagues because Pittsburgh’s coaches wanted him to improve his hitting after he batted .226 and had more than twice as many strikeouts (28) as walks (13) in 58 games. Encarnación, who was named a Pacific Coast League All-Star for 1996, returned to the Pirates on July 16 because backup catcher Keith Osik broke his right hand when he was struck by a foul tip in a game the night before.
13 Wagner had missed time earlier in the season when right arm inflammation shelved him from June 7 to July 1. Four days after this start, Wagner landed on the 60-day disabled list with an injury to his ulnar collateral ligament. He had Tommy John surgery on August 7 and did not appear in the majors again until July 18, 1997 – 364 days after this start.
14 Peters joined the Pirates organization as a 37th-round draft pick in 1993 but found success as a starter and a reliever as he quickly ascended the minor-league ladder. The Pirates demoted reliever Jason Christiansen to make room for Peters. Christiansen did not return to the majors until June 19, 1997.
15 Branson got the start at second base in place of Bret Boone, who had struck out 11 times in nine games. Boone had started all but one game since May 11. Branson had also been struggling at the plate, having gone 18 for his last 100 since May 17.
16 Ben Walker (Associated Press), “Reds’ Pitcher Homers Again,” Bryan (Ohio) Times, July 20, 1996: 8.
17 Hal McCoy, “Reds; Offense Hurts Pirates,” Dayton Daily News, July 20, 1996: 1D.
18 Peters went 1-1 with a 0.98 ERA and a .940 WHIP over 27⅔ innings for Calgary.
19 Peters served as a ballboy in the outfield at Three Rivers Stadium during a series against the Philadelphia Phillies in 1987, when he was in high school.
20 Paul Meyer, “Wagner Struggles Again in Pirates’ 11-3 Loss,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 20, 1996: B-1.
21 Dessens saw his opponents’ batting average sitting at .493 after surrendering three hits in his two innings of relief.
22 Johnson joined Ham Hyatt (1913), Al Rubeling (1944), Ed Stevens (1948), Bob Skinner (1956), Dick Stuart (1959), Gene Freese (1964), José Pagán (1969), and Willie Stargell (1982). Johnson broke the record on August 3, 1996, with a pinch-hit home run against the Philadelphia Phillies. In 2001 Craig Wilson broke Johnson’s record and tied the major-league record with seven pinch-hit homers, and he remained tied with Los Angeles Dodgers pinch-hitter Dave Hansen for the all-time single-season record through the 2024 season.
23 Paul Meyer, “Wagner Returning to Pirates: Will Pitch Middle Relief; Silva Sent Back to Calgary,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 18, 1997: B-3.
24 Burba matched his 11 wins again in 1997, had 15 wins in 1998 and 1999, and won a career-high 16 games in 2000.
25 Burba, who was traded from the Reds to the Indians before the start of the 1998 season, still found humor in the idea he could hit a home run, telling reporters after the game that the trip around the bases left him gasping for air. “I couldn’t catch my breath,” he said. “I haven’t run that hard in a long time. Running those bases, your heart’s pumping, it took me a while to settle down.” Scott MacGregor, “Burba Haunts Old Team,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 8, 1998: D1.
Additional Stats
Cincinnati Reds 11
Pittsburgh Pirates 3
Three Rivers Stadium
Pittsburgh, PA
Box Score + PBP:
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