June 19, 1967: Last of its kind? Cleveland starting pitcher Steve Hargan hits walk-off home run

“The greatest thrill in the world is to end the game with a home run and watch everybody else walk off the field while you’re running the bases on air” Al Rosen1

Known as walk-offs since the late 1980s,2 game-ending home runs are unforgettable for those ballplayers fortunate enough to have hit one. To no one’s surprise, Hall of Fame sluggers stand atop the career walk-off homers list. Jim Thome’s 13 is the major-league record through the 2024 season, followed by Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Albert Pujols, Frank Robinson, and Babe Ruth, who hit a dozen each.3

At the other end of the spectrum are the most infrequent of walk-off homers – those hit by pitchers, who are typically weak hitters. No American League pitcher has hit a game-ending home run since the designated hitter was introduced in 1973, and only one National League pitcher, reliever Craig Lefferts in 1986, has done so since the mid-1960s.4 Rarer still are game-ending homers hit by starting pitchers, feats driven to virtual extinction by pitch-count limits and the DH.

According to play-by-play records available at Baseball-Reference.com, which as of May 2025 dated to the mid-1910s, 11 starting pitchers have hit walk-off home runs. That select group includes three Hall of Famers: Grover Cleveland Alexander, who did it in 1920; Red Ruffing (1933); and Juan Marichal (1966). Alexander hit his in the 10th inning, making him the first of six starters to hit a walk-off in extra innings. The others were Kirby Higbe, in the 13th inning of a 1947 game; George Uhle (11th inning; 1926); Leon Cadore (10th inning, 1922); Dizzy Trout (10th inning, 1947); and Wes Ferrell (10th inning on August 22, 1934, with what was his second four-bagger of the game). A career .280 hitter with 38 lifetime home runs, Farrell hit another walk-off in a game he started in 1935. Claude Passeau (37) was the oldest starter to hit a game-ending home run when he did it in 1946. Ferdie Schupp’s inside-the-parker in 1919 proved to be his only major-league home run.

The youngest and most recent pitcher to join this group also never hit a home run other than his game-ender – Steve Hargan of the 1967 Cleveland Indians.

A native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Hargan was a fastball specialist signed at the age of 19 by the Indians. Called up to Cleveland from Triple-A Portland in August 1965, he was immediately inserted into the starting rotation, where he held his own, going 4-3 with a 3.43 ERA. In 1966, Hargan’s first full season with the Indians, he was 13-10 with a 2.48 ERA that was third best in the AL.

Despite his success the year before, Hargan began the 1967 season as a reliever, left out of first-year manager Joe Adcock’s rotation, a talented group that included Sam McDowell, Luis Tiant, Gary Bell, and Sonny Siebert. In his first start of the season, on April 20, Hargan tossed a five-hit shutout over the Kansas City A’s. Five days later, he shut out the Minnesota Twins on two hits. On June 4 Hargan notched his fourth shutout and sixth complete game in which he didn’t allow an earned run.

“I can’t say he’s the best right-hander in the league,” pitching coach Clay Bryant said, “because I haven’t seen them all. But I can say I haven’t seen anybody better.”5 In his next start, Hargan carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the A’s in Kansas City but lost 2-0 to hard-throwing 23-year-old Chuck Dobson, who earned his first career shutout.

While Hargan was dominant most days he pitched, the Indians in aggregate were average over the first two months of the 1967 season. They sat one game below .500 when the A’s came into Cleveland for a two-day, three-game series on June 19, with the two teams tied for fifth place in the 10-team AL. Adcock sent Hargan (7-6, 2.40 ERA) out as his starter for the opener of the doubleheader that day, in a rematch with Dobson, who carried a 4-2, 3.56 record into the contest. As in their previous meeting, Hargan was facing a lineup that Kansas City manager Alvin Dark had filled with promising youngsters.

A crowd of 8,770 was on hand at Cleveland Stadium on a sunny and pleasant Monday, with temperatures in the low 70s at game time.6 Hargan surrendered a two-out, first-inning double to hot-hitting rookie Ramón Webster (7-for-18 in his last three games), but struck out another rookie, 21-year-old Rick Monday, to end the inning. Cleveland plated a pair of runs in the bottom of the inning on a one-out single by Chuck Hinton and two-time All-Star Leon Wagner’s 11th home run of the season.

Kansas City knotted the score at 2-2 in the fourth, with a rally kicked off by 21-year-old rookie Reggie Jackson’s single to right field. The second overall pick in the June 1966 amateur draft, Jackson had been promoted from Double-A Birmingham 11 days earlier. Yet to hit the first of his 563 career home runs, Jackson was well on the way to a major-league record 2,597 career strikeouts, having collected 21 in 44 at-bats.

Hargan walked the next batter, Webster, then surrendered an opposite field single to the left-handed-hitting Monday. Left fielder Wagner’s throw home was late, allowing Jackson to score, Webster to reach third, and Monday to take second.7 Playing the percentages, Hargan walked the left-handed-hitting Jim Gosger, preferring to face righty Danny Cater with the bases loaded. Cater plated Webster with a sacrifice fly but Kansas City could do no more damage as John Donaldson, recently called up from Triple-A Vancouver, grounded into an inning-ending double play.8

Over the next three frames, neither Dobson nor Hargan allowed a baserunner. Cleveland’s Max Alvis ended Dobson’s string of 13 straight batters retired when he led off the bottom of the seventh with a double to right-center field.9 A walk to Pedro González and a single by number-eight batter Larry Brown loaded the bases with one out.10 On a full count, Cleveland third-base coach Del Rice flashed a squeeze-bunt sign, but both Hargan and Alvis missed it. Hargan struck out on the pitch, after which Lee Maye grounded out to end the inning.11

Cleveland threatened again in the eighth after a leadoff double by Hinton over the head of Gosger in right field, but once again Dobson held fast, getting fly-ball outs from Wagner, Fred Whitfield, and Alvis.12

Jackson led off the top of the ninth with his second single of the game, ending Hargan’s string of 14 consecutive batters retired, but was erased when Webster grounded into a 3-6-3 double play. On his 100th pitch, Hargan fanned Monday for the third out.13

Dobson retired the first two Cleveland batters in the bottom of the ninth, but elected to pitch around Brown, 4-for-8 lifetime against him, with a home run and a triple, to face Hargan instead. The Cleveland hurler carried a .118 career batting average to that point (13-for-110), without a single extra-base hit.

Looking down his bench, Adcock had multiple pinch-hit options, including lefty Vic Davalillo, who’d had some success off Dobson, but he let Hargan hit.14 Adcock claimed he never considered lifting his pitcher. “Steve was getting stronger from the fifth inning on,” he said.15 The American Amateur Baseball Congress’s “graduate of the year” for 1967 came to the plate with a bat he borrowed from Horton after the Whitfield model he had been using broke earlier.16

One pitch later, Adcock looked like a genius. Hargan socked Dobson’s first offering high over the 390-foot mark in left-center field, giving himself a 4-2 win.17 Asked later if he knew the ball would clear the fence, Hargan admitted, “How could I? I never hit one in pro baseball before, so I didn’t know what it felt like.”18 Hargan gave batting coach Pat Mullin the lion’s share of the credit for his game-winning hit, explaining that Mullin had persuaded him to hold his hands back and hit against his front foot.19

“If I never hit another homer in my life, I’ve got one now,” an overjoyed Hargan said. “It’s great. It’s a night to remember.”20 Asked about his four-hit, eight-strikeout pitching performance, he said, “I kind of mixed them up, nip and tuck, in and out, a lot of this and that. My fastball was moving and it went where I wanted it to go.”21

As Hargan reveled in his good fortune, Dobson sat in shock in the A’s locker room. On the verge of tears, he was “totally destroyed,” according to Dan Coughlin of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.22

The Indians took the nightcap as well, their 2-1 comeback win pulling them into a tie for third place with the Twins and a half-game ahead of the eventual pennant winner, the Boston Red Sox.

The next day, Hargan celebrated by buying himself a Jaguar. “Home run hitters drive Cadillacs, home run hitting pitchers drive Jaguars,” wrote Couglin.23 

Selected to the 1967 AL All-Star team in early July,24 Hargan finished the season 14-13, with a 2.62 ERA and a league-leading six shutouts. His 12-year career concluded in 1977 with a record of 87-107, a 3.92 ERA, a .129 batting average, and a game-ending home run that may prove to be the last of its kind.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Victoria Monte and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Steve Hargan, Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet.org, Stathead.com, and Baseball-Almanac.com websites, including box scores listed at the links below:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE196706191.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1967/B06191CLE1967.htm

Notes

1 Murray Olderman (Newspaper Enterprise Association), “Punch Quote,” Orangeburg (South Carolina) Times and Democrat, April 9, 1982: 8.

2 Oakland A’s reliever Dennis Eckersley is credited with coining the term “walkoff piece” to describe a game-ending home run, which over the next decade evolved into “walk-off home run.” Lowell Cohn, “What the Eck?” San Francisco Chronicle, April 21, 1988: D1; Steven C. Weiner, “Ryan Zimmerman and the Walk-Off Home Run,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Vol 50., No. 2 (2021): 7-12, n. 2, https://sabr.org/journal/article/champs-and-iconoclasts-ryan-zimmerman-and-the-walk-off-home-run/.

3 Keith Jenkins, “Players with the Most Walk-Off Home Runs in MLB History,” ESPN, April 10, 2025, https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/44619417/players-most-walk-home-runs-mlb-history.

4 Lefferts hit a game-ending 12th-inning home run off Greg Minton of the San Francisco Giants on April 25, 1986. Having worked two innings in relief, he was on the hook for a loss until Graig Nettles led off the inning with a game-tying home run.

5 Russ Schneider, “Hats Off: Steve Hargan,” The Sporting News, June 17, 1967: 23.

6 “Sunny and Pleasant,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 19, 1967: 4.

7 Sid Bordman, “A’s Drop Two Close Ones,” Kansas City Times, June 20, 1967: 12.

8 “A’s Drop Two Close Ones”; “Highlights on Inside Pages,” Kansas City Times, June 8, 1967: 1. Also promoted to the A’s that day was 21-year-old catcher Dave Duncan, from Birmingham. Future All-Star third baseman Sal Bando was one of three A’s players demoted from the major-league club to make room for the new additions.

9 “A’s Drop Two Close Ones.” Baseball-Reference lists Alvis’s double as landing in left field.

10 “A’s Drop Two Close Ones.”

11 Russell Schneider, “Indians Gain Sweep,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 20, 1967: 33.

12 “A’s Drop Two Close Ones.”

13 Dan Coughlin, “Mullin Gets Assist for Hargan’s Blast,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 20, 1967: 33.

14 Davalillo was 2-for-4 against Dobson, with both hits (a double and a single) coming in Dobson’s second major-league appearance, in April 1966.

15 Jim Schlemmer, “Hargan’s HR Stuns A’s,” Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, June 20, 1967: B-3.

16 Russell Schneider, “Batting Around,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 16, 1967: 56; “Indians Gain Sweep.”

17 “A’s Drop Two Close Ones”; “Hargan’s HR Stuns A’s.”

18 “Indians Gain Sweep.” According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Hargan’s last home run had come when he was a Pony Leaguer.

19 “Mullin Gets Assist for Hargan’s Blast.”

20 “Mullin Gets Assist for Hargan’s Blast.”

21 “Mullin Gets Assist for Hargan’s Blast.”

22 “Mullin Gets Assist for Hargan’s Blast.”

23 “Hargan Buys Jaguar as Pitching Dividend,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 21, 1967: 36; “Mullin Gets Assist for Hargan’s Blast.”

24 “White Sox Hurlers Feature American League All-Stars,” Tri-City Herald (Pasco, Washington), July 2, 1967: 37.