Stoler: Jim Rice, and the longest home run I have seen
From SABR member Mark Stoler at Things Have Changed on March 12, 2017:
This is prompted by a conversation at the recently concluded Analytics Conference of the Society for American Baseball Research held in Phoenix. At lunch I was talking with a fellow attendee who mentioned that at his first game at Fenway he’d seen Mark Fidrych pitch against Luis Tiant. It turned out I had been at the same game on May 25, 1976 (see The Bird).
I’d been able to figure out the date of the game with the invaluable help of Baseball-Reference. I’ve also used BR to reconstruct the first time I saw Willie Mays play and the day I met him (see Meeting Willie Mays), as well as narrowing down the possible dates on which I’d seen my first major league game (My First Ballgame?), and even figuring out what New York Giants game my dad had attended in 1939 based on a blank scorecard he left me (Baseball Scorecard 1939). After the lunch conversation, I decided to use BR to track down another event I remembered vividly and to see how my recollection matched up with the facts.
Read the full article here: https://havechanged.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-longest-home-run.html
Originally published: March 15, 2017. Last Updated: March 15, 2017.