Larry Dierker’s 18th Birthday
September 22, 1964
The day Larry Dierker broke into baseball by striking out the great Willie Mays the first time they faced each other.
At some point in the not-too-murky-distant past, a Houston sports jockey named Craig Shemon did a mid-day live air interview with Larry Dierker over local AM radio station 1590 about the time that one of our great franchise icons broke into the big leagues as a pitcher on his 18th birthday, September 22, 1964.
The interview for radio also was recorded with a video too so we able to watch them have this conversation at Shemon’s broadcast desk.
18-year-old Larry Dierker struck out the great Willie Mays in their first meeting of that game, bronzing forever both the need and justification for remembering this lopsided contest between the classic Giants and the fast-fading Colt .45 identity of the Houston expansion club. ~ A virtual “kid” coming of age had just struck out the legendary “Say Hey” kid from Alabama by way of Coogan’s Bluff.
If only we shall someday find a film of the actual moment it happened ~ Dierker fanning Mays ~ what a treasure that shall be.
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In the meanwhile, here are the box score of the game and the brief Dierker interview. We are lucky enough to have these items, and even more fortunate that destiny long ago played a hand in making the gifted athlete and wonderful human being that is Larry Dierker – a big part of us – as a leader in the Houston baseball community. Without Larry Dierker, things never could have been as great on the positive side of Houston’s growth from 1962 into World Series championship status in 2017 – and hungry for more.
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The Box Score ~
| Baseball Almanac Box Scores
San Francisco Giants 7 Houston Colt .45s 1 |
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| Game played on Tuesday, September 22, 1964 at Colt Stadium | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Game played on Tuesday, September 22, 1964 at Colt Stadium | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Dierker YouTube Interview Link ~
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Bill McCurdy
Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Pecan Park Eagle
The Pecan Park Eagle 
July 23, 2018 at 1:36 pm |
It’s interesting that Larry faced a Giants lineup that included another future Astros manager, Hal Lanier.