July 29, 2021

By Neil Munro

Canadian Baseball Network

I was video-streaming the July 25th game featuring the Reds and Cardinals and witnessed both Tyler O’Neill and Joey Votto collect home runs in the first inning of the game.

Of special interest in this contest was the fact that both O’Neill (Maple Ridge, B.C.) and Votto (Etobicoke, Ont.) were batting clean-up for their respective clubs. I was hopeful that one or both Canadian sluggers would collect more home runs in the game, but it was not to be. In the end, O’Neill may have had the last laugh in that the Cardinals picked up an 8-6 win.

Later on, I noticed that Abraham Toro (Longueuil, Que.) hit the game-winning two-run home run for the Houston Astros to propel them to a 3-1 win over the Texas Rangers that same night. This got me wondering as to how often three different Canadian ball players hit home runs on the same day. What may also be surprising about those July 25th contests is that one of the Canadians going deep was not Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (Montreal, Que.). His 2021 season is so impressive that we now note the occasions when he does not hit a home run.

In counting days in which three Canadians (at least) hit home runs, I did not include dates on which three home runs were hit because a player had a multi-home run game. This actually happened a few days later when Votto clubbed two homers and Toro hit another two-run home run. This was Toro’s first at bat (he pinch hit) for his new team in Seattle after he was acquired in a four-player swap with the Astros. That’s a pretty sure way to get a warm welcome from your new teammates.

In order to uncover the days in which three different Canadians hit home runs, it is essential to first determine exactly what constitutes a “Canadian” and perhaps more surprisingly, what constitutes a home run.

To begin with, any player born in Canada is automatically a Canadian for our purpose here. In addition, there are several more players with dual citizenship who will count as Canadians as well. Players like Freddie Freeman (who once played for Canada in the World Baseball Classic to honour his late mother, who was born in Toronto), Mark Teahen and Kevin Reimer. This trio certainly has collected their share of home runs and will add significantly to the final count. This also includes several pitchers like Chris Reitsma (raised in Calgary) and Jameson Taillon (currently in the starting rotation with the Yankees). However, since neither Reistma nor Taillon have ever hit a home run, their inclusion will not add to the count.

As well, players like Jimmy Archer (born in Ireland) and Reno Bertoia (born in Italy) who fashioned careers as regulars, are counted here. In a sense they are “more Canadian” than batting stars such as George Wood (a veteran of 1,280 big league contests), who was born in Pownal, P.E.I., but moved to Boston as a young child. Archer and Bertoia moved to Canada as youngsters and honed their baseball skills in Canada.

There are still minor discrepancies as to the actual birth place of a few players that may have been born in Canada and not in the USA (from the early decades). However, this usually only applies to ball players who saw very limited action at the big-league level and who never hit any home runs. So, by my count, since 1876, there have been 258 major leaguers born in Canada and another 12 that I have listed as Canadians, for a total of 270. It’s still not such a daunting task because more than half of these players never connected for a single home run.

Casual fans may think that it is pretty clear when a batter has actually hit a home run. While this is true today, we are examining the records of players back to the 1876 season, and this has not always been so evident. In the dead-ball era (1876 to 1919) almost half of the homers hit were of the inside-the-park variety. In the early decades of the game, when the outfields were often in terrible condition, many of the “home runs’ resulted from fielding miscues. The scorekeepers of the day also exhibited a clear home town bias on judgement calls (on deciding on a hit or an error). If the local batting hero had hit the ball in play, it was routinely ruled a base hit on a fielding miscue, especially if he was chasing a batting title. On the other hand, opposing sluggers were regularly denied base hits on close calls.

Furthermore, for most of the first decades of MLB, a batter was not given credit for a game-winning home run if fewer bases were actually required for the winning run to score. For example, a batter hitting a go-ahead homer to win the game by driving in a teammate perched at second base, would just be credited with a double. Researchers have tried to correct past rule discrepancies to conform to a systematic format in recent years, but many inconsistencies still persist.

In looking for days where three Canadian players hit homers, one must take into account the number of Canadians who were genuine home run threats and the number of Canadians on major league rosters at any given time. In the dead ball era, very few sluggers could manage as many as 20 home runs in a single season. In fact, between 1876 and 1919, the 20-home run plateau was attained on just six occasions (four or them coming in 1884 under special circumstances). This year there may be as many as 150 major league players hitting 20 or more home runs. The graph below shows the number of players with 20 or more home runs each year since 1920. The lone player indicated for 1920 was Babe Ruth.

Certainly, events such as expansion, the steroid era, player strikes and COVID have had a significant effect on home run production over the years but the trend is very clear. And so, Canadians also benefitted (or were hurt) by these factors. The graph also indicates pretty clearly where we will find the likely game candidates in which three Canadians hit home runs.

Since there have been well over 250,000 baseball contests to check for our three Canadian home run hitters, it may seem that ferreting out these instances creates a mystery reminiscent of the plot in an episode of CSI. This task has been made substantially easier by using the SABR home run log. This invaluable research tool has recounted and tabulated all of the home runs ever hit in MLB history. And the details included are plentiful including the name of the opposing pitcher, the location, the number of runners on base and the inning when hit.

As a result, all that had to be done in the search was to copy the individual home run logs for all Canadian batters with at least one home run in their career and sort the final data collection by date. As you will imagine, it certainly helps to use a spreadsheet for this task. The final count shows that Canadians have hit 3,505 home runs through the games played on July 28, 2021.

However, there was still a problem with sorting the games with home runs by date. On occasions when a doubleheader was played, the date is listed as 1988-07-21(1) or 1988-07-21(2) (for example) to indicate the particular game of the doubleheader. Unfortunately, Excel does not recognize that 1988-07-21 and 1988-07-21(1) was actually the same date on the calendar. In any case, after a significant amount of rearranging dates by cutting and pasting, I was able to complete the count.

I started the search by examining the records of players performing in the first few decades of MLB history. While some of the best Canadians (at least in terms of length of playing time) performed in the 1880’s, their home runs were few and far between. Typically, the league leader in home runs did not even reach double figures before 1920. The early “record” for home runs hit by a Canadian (up until the 1936 season) was 14, held jointly by Tip O’Neill (Woodstock, Ont.) and George Wood (Pownal, PEI). Both accomplished this record in 1887. The first time that as many as two genuine Canadian sluggers were contemporaries happened in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, when Jeff Heath (Fort William, Ont.) and George Selkirk (Huntsville, Ont.) played. However, almost all of the other Canadians playing at that time were pitchers, and no such games were uncovered.

Pete Ward (Montreal, Que.) was a power hitter for the Chicago White Sox in the 1960’s, but almost all of the other Canadians playing at that time were pitchers. Terry Puhl (Melville, Sask.) was an outstanding outfielder for Houston for more than a decade, eventually winding up his career in 1991, but he was essentially a singles hitter (playing in a ball park that dramatically reduced home run production in any case). His single-season high was the 13 home runs he hit in 1980. As well, there were few other Canadians even playing part-time as contemporaries, so still no instances in my search were to be found.

Larry Walker (Maple Ridge, B.C.) was the next Canadian slugger that homered on a regular basis, as he routinely posted 20- and 30-home run seasons in the 1990’s. However, it wasn’t until 1997, when Matt Stairs (Fredericton, N.B.) blossomed as a home run threat that there were a number of days when they both homered, to possibly be joined by a third batter. It was only when Corey Koskie (Anola, Man.) debuted in 1998 that there was a real likelihood of a three-home run day. The first instance of three Canadians connecting happened on June 19, 1999, when Walker, Stairs and Koskie all connected.

As indicated, pitchers rarely if ever contribute in adding to the three-HR day count, but amazingly, one such contest did occur. Eric Gagne (Mascouche, Que.) managed to hit just one home run (as a batter) in his career. In fact, he rarely got to come to the plate as he was primarily a relief ace. But his lone home run came on June 3, 2001, when Walker and Stairs also connected. This marked the second such occasion for three Canadian sluggers.

Of course, the hey day for Canadian sluggers has been the last 20 years in which all-stars such as Justin Morneau (New Westminster, B.C.), Jason Bay (Trail, B.C.), Votto, Russell Martin (Montreal, Que.), Freeman and a cast of lesser-known stars regularly posted impressive home run outputs. This is when the vast majority of 3-player home run days occurred.

I had thought that a couple of dozen such games must have occurred but I was quite surprised by the final tally. Counting the recent games in which Votto, O’Neill and Toro went deep, there have been 41 instances in which three different Canadians hit at least one home run, and there were two days in which four different Canadians blasted homers.

These four Canadian HR contests happened on July 10, 2008 and September 22, 2012. In the first instance, Votto, Morneau, Martin and Mark Teahen (Canadian citizen) turned the trick. On the second occasion, Bay, Taylor Green (Comox, B.C.), Michael Saunders (Victoria, B.C.) and Freeman registered home runs. On the days on which three Canadians homered, there were seven different times in which one of the three players hit two home runs.

I also learned that I had missed a very recent instance of three players hitting homers in that O’Neill, Toro and Freeman turned the trick on July 17 of this year. I was also curious if one of the instances might have happened when a Canadian belted three homers in the same game. Individual Canadians have homered in a single game nine times in all, with Walker and Votto accomplishing the feat three times each, while Morneau and Saunders turned the trick once and of course, Guerrero had a three-home run game earlier this year.

On the same day of Walker’s third three-home run game, which was June 25, 2004, Bay also launched a home run, and when Morneau belted three home runs in a game (July 6, 2007), Martin also went deep. So those two contests might be added to the tally of four home runs on the same day by Canadians. On the other three-home run occasions, Walker, Votto, Saunders and Guerrero had the glory all to themselves.

With the retirement of Morneau, Martin, and Bay and Votto’s declining production in recent seasons (though he has now homered in five consecutive games), there has been a shortage of home runs hit by Canadians. Fortunately, with Guerrero blossoming into a superstar, and O’Neill and Toro looking more and more like legitimate home run threats (and Votto’s apparent recent return to his former greatness) we should be able to count on many more games with three Canadians going deep in the near future.