ESPN published a fun oral history yesterday about how much it sucks to pitch at the Colorado Rockies' ballpark. The writers of the story wisely got in touch with current and former pitchers who have experienced the ERA-inflating effects of high-altitude pitching, and then let them recount their horror stories. I enjoyed the story a great deal, but one particular anecdote, from former Rockies reliever and current Seattle Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto, stuck out to me.
From the article:
Dipoto: They had a row of seats in the upper deck in right field that was like a ring around the upper-deck seats, and it was a mile above sea level. An absurd distance beyond home plate.
I remember I had a really difficult time through the years with Ray Lankford. And Jeff Reed was catching me one day and I'm trying to get fastballs by Ray Lankford and I can't get anything past him. It's foul ball, foul ball, it feels like a 10-pitch AB. And he comes walking out. And every day in spring training, in my catch game, I'd throw a changeup. I didn't actually have one or throw it in a game. It was just something to try to get some feel. Reeder came to the mound and said, "Hey, what do you think about just throwing that changeup?" I said, "I've never done it in a game, Reeder."
He said, "Yeah, if you've never done it in a game, he won't be expecting it either." So I threw a changeup, and I actually threw it for a strike, and he hit it above the purple seats. It wound up going a mile. Like literally going a mile.
Hmmm. I was struck by Dipoto's mention of the purple row of seats, which runs along the stadium's upper deck and used to extend into right field, five rows down from the highest part of the stadium. Off the top of my head, I couldn't remember Lankford or anyone else ever hitting a home run above that row during a game. A few hitters had fallen 10-20 rows short of the purple row throughout the stadium's history; Barry Bonds once managed to reach it during batting practice. So if Lankford had hit a dinger off Dipoto that landed "above the purple seats," that certainly would be something that the ex-hurler would remember.
Dipoto, however, doesn't appear to have given up a home run to Lankford in the Rockies' stadium. According to Baseball Reference, Dipoto surrendered 13 career dongs in that stadium, none of them to Lankford. Only three of those homers were given up to left-handed hitters: Barry Bonds, Mark Grace, and Rico Brogna. Bonds feels like the most obvious candidate to have hit the homer Dipoto described, though I would question the mental acuity of anyone who mistakes Barry Bonds for Ray Lankford. In any case, that Bonds homer can be found at the 11:18 mark of this video, and it comes nowhere close to the purple row. I couldn't find video footage of the Grace and Brogna homers, but neither were described as having traveled particularly far in contemporaneous game stories.
Of all the home runs Dipoto gave up in Denver, to lefties and righties, Baseball Reference's home run log only describes four of them as having gone out to right field, which is the only part of the stadium where a homer could have reached the purple row. Two of those homers belonged to Eric Karros, and one to Jeffrey Hammonds. I suppose it is possible, though highly unlikely, that one of those right-handed hitters took Dipoto deep to the very top of the opposite-field upper deck.
Further complicating matters is that I can only find one box score in which Dipoto surrendered a home run in the Rockies' stadium while Jeff Reed was catching. Reed is the most vivid character in Dipoto's story—he stops a 10-pitch at-bat to come to the mound and convince Dipoto to throw Lankford a changeup that he otherwise never threw—but the homer that Reed was on the field for doesn't seem like the one Dipoto described. Reed came into a July 19, 1998 game between the Dodgers and Rockies as a pinch hitter in the bottom of the seventh inning, and then was behind the plate in the top of the 10th when Karros hit one out to right-center against Dipoto. That was a three-pitch at-bat; the game stories make no mention of the distance it traveled.
The only other possibility I can think of is that the home run was hit during a preseason exhibition game at the Rockies' stadium. Based on newspaper and Getty Images archives, I was able to confirm that the Rockies scheduled preseason exhibitions in their home stadium in three of the four seasons that Dipoto was on the roster. They played the Royals in 1997, the Mariners in 1998, and had a game against the Red Sox snowed out in 1999. I couldn't find any trace of an exhibition game taking place in Denver leading into the 2000 season, but that doesn't mean that such a game, possibly against the Cardinals, didn't happen. A complicating factor with that theory, however, is that Jeff Reed was no longer on the Rockies' roster heading into the 2000 season. Funnily enough, the entire 1998 exhibition game against the Mariners can be found online. Dipoto entered the game in the ninth inning, put a man on, and then gave up a short, opposite-field home run to Ricky Cradle.
I sent an email to Dipoto and the Mariners PR department, asking if they could share more details about the Lankford home run. If such a home run really was hit against live pitching, even in an exhibition game, it deserves further appreciation.
As for Lankford, he did hit at least one big home run in Denver. On May 19, 1996, he hit a dinger off Mark Thompson that went out to right field and traveled a reported 483 feet. I'd suggest that maybe this is the homer Dipoto remembers, despite the fact that he was playing for the Mets at the time.
