What’s the greatest home run in MLB history? There’s a bracket for that…
I promise I’ll do a college basketball newsletter next week, but I’ve got a fun baseball topic to get to first.
A month or so ago, the great Joe Manniello invited me to be part of a panel creating a “Greatest Home Runs” bracket. That bracket was revealed last night and first-round voting starts tonight, so make sure to get your votes in!
If you’ve never heard of Joe, give him a follow on Twitter. He’s a talented headline writer for Newsday, an enthusiastic sports fan, and a master of puns. If there was a Hall of Fame for coming up with puns, he’d be a first-ballot inductee.
For the past year or so, Joe has been making brackets about everything — best Super Bowls, best HBO characters, best Billy Joel songs — to entertain us all during the pandemic. He runs them through polls on Twitter, and thousands of people vote in them. It’s always interesting to see how they play out.
The idea for the “Greatest Home Runs” bracket came after Hank Aaron died back in January.
I had a blast working with Joe and the other panelists to determine which home runs would be part of this bracket and how they would be seeded. It was initially supposed to be a bracket of 32 home runs, but there were so many good ones that we upped it to 64.
The most enjoyable part of the process, though, was working through the regions and seeds. The way Joe builds these brackets, the regions and seeds are used to set up fun match-ups from start to finish.
We’ve got a first-round matchup pitting A-Rod’s 3,000th hit vs. Jeter’s 3,000th hit, a potential second-round match-up pitting Kirby Puckett’s 1991 World Series Game 6 home run (called by Jack Buck) vs. David Freese’s 2011 World Series Game 6 home run (called by Joe Buck), a potential third-round match-up pitting Roger Maris’ No. 61 vs. Mark McGwire’s No. 62, and so on and so on.
You can view the whole bracket here, and I’d love to hear how you would fill yours out. My Final Four would be Maris, Mazeroski, Brosius and Gibson, with Mazeroski beating Gibson in the final.
Bonus for Yankee fans
Working on this bracket really made me feel nostalgic about all of the great Yankees home runs I’ve seen in my lifetime. About 25 percent of the bracket is made up of Yankee homers, but there are at least a dozen more I suggested that ended up on the cutting room floor.
So I put together my own list of the top 28 Yankee home runs since they started their streak of 28 straight winning seasons in 1993, complete with the video clips of each one. If you’re a Yankees fan, you’ll be ready for the season to start as soon as you finish reading/watching.
Baseball season starts Thursday, and most teams are planning to allow limited amounts of fans into stadiums.
I’ll really feel like life is back to normal when I can enjoy a beer and a hot dog under the sun at Yankee Stadium. But, for now, watching the “Greatest Home Runs” bracket play out on Twitter will suffice.
Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed this newsletter. If you have thoughts and feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Every newsletter will be posted to this website, so you can comment there. You can also email me directly at this address.
If you stumbled across this newsletter during your web travels, sign up here!
