An Offbeat Record Held By Willie Mays
You could count on the Say Hey Kid to hit a home run in just about any inning.
Willie Mays holds the record for hitting home runs in the most different innings. Mays hit at least one home run in every inning from one to sixteen. His first-inning and sixteenth-inning home runs, both off Warren Spahn, are the most noteworthy. The one in the first inning was the first of Mays’s career, and the sixteenth-inning blast broke up one of the all-time great pitching duels and provided a 1-0 victory for Juan Marichal.
The following list shows the first home runs Mays hit in innings 1-13, and the only one he hit in innings 14-16. (The data comes from SABR’s Home Run Log.)
| Inning | Date | Pitcher | Team |
| 1 | 5-28-1951 | Warren Spahn | Boston |
| 2 | 6-6-1951 | Willie Ramsdell | Cincinnati |
| 3 | 4-18-1954 | Carl Erskine | Brooklyn |
| 4 | 6-27-1951 | Don Newcombe | Brooklyn |
| 5 | 8-30-1951 | Vern Law | Pittsburgh |
| 6 | 6-23-1951 | Turk Lown | Chicago |
| 7 | 6-18-1951 | Joe Presko | St. Louis |
| 8 | 6-17-1951 (1G) | Howie Pollet | St. Louis |
| 9 | 7-22-1951 (1G) | Ken Raffensberger | Cincinnati |
| 10 | 6-22-1951 | Dutch Leonard | Chicago |
| 11 | 7-4-1955 (2G) | Lino Donoso | Pittsburgh |
| 12 | 6-4-1955 | Warren Hacker | Chicago |
| 13 | 7-3-1951 | Jocko Thompson | Philadelphia |
| 14 | 4-30-1954 | Warren Hacker | Chicago |
| 15 | 9-27-1968 | Ted Abernathy | Cincinnati |
| 16 | 7-26-1963 | Warren Spahn | Milwaukee |
(This article first appeared in the Baseball Records Committee’s August 2010 newsletter.)