The Pecan Park Eagle

Post WWII MLB Homers? Nobody Did It Better Than Ralph Kiner.

Way earlier than any of our wildest thoughts that players could actually consume or rub on  substances that would enhance their abilities to mash a baseball from here to kingdom come, there was a fellow named Ralph Kiner, doing it better than anyone else in his MLB era, and doing it as a member of a club that even then was regarded as one of the doormats of big league baseball, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Kiner was one of the great heroes of us kids in the minor league boonies because we mainly only heard or read of his explosiveness through the little information we got in our local papers or through the more detailed stories that came our way through The Sporting News. To add to the Kiner intrigue, he also happened to be one of those rare 1950 Bowman cards that was hard to find. The day I finally found a Kiner card in a routine package buy at Haenel’s Groceries helped send a rumble through or little corner of Pecan Park. Kids with more than one nickel to spend descended upon the store in search of their own Kiner – and in the wild hope of also picking up a maverick Musial or Williams card that might have also slipped out of the factory and into our hungry hands with the rare appearance of the Pirate prodigy.

Prodigy he was.

From 1946 through 1952, Ralph Kiner of the Pirates either led or tied for the National League lead in homers in seven consecutive seasons, and sometimes even coming close as a threat to Babe Ruth’s single season record with this line of these straight annual totals: 23, 51, 40, 54, 47, 42, and 37. Kiner’s 40 homers in 1948 tied him with Johnny Mize for  the MLB lead. That happened a second time in 1952, when Kiner tied Hank Sauer for the big league front line in long balls. On four other occasions (1947, 1949, 1950, and 1951), Ralph Kiner led the big leagues in home runs all by himself.

The Pirates traded Ralph Kiner to the Chicago Cubs early in the 1953 season. H continued to hit home runs through the 1955 season, but never lef the league again. He retired from his ten season MLB career (1946-1955) with 369 career home runs and a respectable career batting average of .279. His production highlights also included an NL RBI title in 1949 and slugging average titles in 1947, 1949, and 1951. He also led the NL in walks in 1949, 1951, and 1952, and also took the On Base Percentage crown in 1951.

Ralph Kiner was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1975. It was a much deserved individual honor for a guy never got close to a winning team season or a World Series without coming up with a ticket. To those of us who grew up as kids without eyes to see him play, we could only imagine him as a man who swung a bat that contained all the power of a jack-hammer. Given the dream-cloud high arch that the better mike men would tell us about over the radio when Kiner unloaded a blast, we could imagine these hard hit balls as they took flight into the blue.

Funny thing is – some of our fondest childhood baseball memories are the game radio scenes that only played out in our minds through good descriptive broadcasting and our own willingness to let these games unfold across the courses of our boundless imaginations.

Ralph Kiner, now 88, was once one of the really big stars in this theatre of the mind. And on this beautiful first full day of a new spring in 2011, I can only hope that he is doing well.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Kiner!