Many of the early-to-mid 20th century baseball stories that speak to the greatness of its stars border on fantastical (Babe Ruth calling his shot, for instance). They can't be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but because the players involved established themselves as all-time greats, they're believable enough.
Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry’s moon-landing home run is another example. But the former Giants star's story isn't believable because his talents — it actually gained steam because of how terrible Perry was in the batter’s box.
For the uninitiated, the general framework of Perry's story, whether you buy it or not, is this: In the early '60s, a reporter named Harry Jupiter (seriously) was shooting the breeze with Giants manager Alvin Dark during a batting practice. Jupiter said something to Dark about Perry someday smacking a homer in a game, to which Dark is alleged to have responded with some variation of, "A man will land on the moon before Gaylord Perry hits a home run." A few years later, on July 20, 1969, a man did land on the moon, which was announced to the ballpark crowd in San Francisco. Within the hour, Perry blasted his first career home run.
Perry's moonshot happened many decades ago, but is once again being invoked on social media. Why? For one, it was recently the 52nd anniversary of the moon landing. And two, Jeff Bezos flew in the direction of “space” on Tuesday — technically just the edge of it — which set off an entirely different social media conversation about the ethics of a billionaire space race, as well as how prescient Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” poem still is today.
Here's Perry's recollection of the moonshot story (while donning a Giants cap!) in 2016.
It’s not hyperbole to call Perry's unlikely home run one of the wildest coincidences in sports history. What are the chances that a terrible batter hits his first career homer under the joking circumstances that someone laid out years prior?
That exact question leads us to another: did any of this — meaning Dark's prediction and the timing of the eventual home run (we are not questioning the moon landing) — actually happen as described?
Internet buzzkill Snopes asserted in 2002 that the answer is no. Back then, the fact-checking website rated the story as a “legend” (a kinder way of saying it’s unprovable) because of the inconsistencies with which it had been retold up to that point, as well as the lack of specificity from people at the batting practice in question.
One of the inconsistencies Snopes cited was from a Perry retelling in which he incorrectly stated the year that manager Alvin Dark allegedly made his batter box joke. In the 1984 book "Strike Two" by former umpire Ron Luciano, Perry said Dark's joke was from 1968, four years after Dark had been fired as manager. The other purported inconsistences were various folks misattributing the famous Dark quote to Perry himself. That lesser issue seems to have fixed itself, as more recent retellings have properly given Dark credit for his moon-landing-before-home-run call.
As for the lack of specific details, Snopes cited a San Francisco Chronicle report from 2002 (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of one another). 33 years after the home run happened, Dark said the following: “It was just an expression. I saw in the newspaper that he hit the homer. Then I saw his quote a couple of days later about me being right.” That was apparently not enough of an acknowledgment for Snopes, as they wrote that Dark was “curiously vague about his prediction.” (Dark died in 2014.)
Another idea Snopes introduced was that Dark's joke could have been made-up after the fact, adapted from an Associated Press article about Perry's surprising homer.
All of the above, taken together, is enough to develop a deeply cynical take that Perry's story is just an urban sports legend. But nearly two decades since the Snopes report, most of the major details from the figures who were present have remained the same. It was Jupiter chatting with Dark and the rest of the Giants at batting practice early in Perry's career, year unknown, but sometime between '62 and '64. It was Dark who made the quip about Perry hitting a homer after someone lands on the moon. And we definitely know the homer itself in '69 came off of Dodgers pitcher Claude Osteen.
And, since the Snopes article came out, the "legend" has gotten some supplementary support from former Giants right-hander Bob Bolin. “We were just sitting around the (batting) cage,” Bolin told MLB.com in 2019. “It was pitchers’ batting practice, and Gaylord was trying to hit one out. Somebody was talking about Gaylord hitting home runs, and Alvin just said, 'There’ll be a man on the moon before he hits a home run.'”
The only tweaks in these recent retellings have come with regards to the year of the batting practice. A Sports Illustrated story from 2019 said “sources differed” on whether it was 1962 or 1963. Perry, who once mistakenly said it was in 1968, later assessed it was 1964, which the Cut4 ran with in its write-up from 2017.
The confusion over the year of Dark's quip is probably deeply annoying to the nitpicky fact-checking community, but it’s the kind of innocent mix-up that’s rather understandable. A not-so-outlandish reading of the whole situation is that Perry, after hitting the first home run of his career, saw the newspaper write-up of the game the next day and remembered a time his former manager made a strangely relevant joke at his expense during the early stages of his career — then over the decades, other parties to Dark's joke weighed in to confirm its authenticity.
Maybe that's not enough for you. Fine! You can still dismiss this story outright. But realize that doing so is essentially accusing Perry and Dark of making up what happened, then convincing Bolin to join in on The Big Lie — which is pretty dang sinister.
Besides, the reason this story is making the rounds is in part because multiple insanely wealthy individuals decided to flaunt their money, live out the dreams of many star-eyed people here on Earth, and destroy the romanticism of humans reaching the final frontier. Any space-related cynicism should be reserved for the fake space cowboys, not a story where an athlete did something remarkably cool.
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The moonshot story of Giants' Gaylord Perry was labeled a 'legend' by Snopes. Is that fair? - SF Gate
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