The unmatched majesty of Glenallen Hill’s Wrigley Field rooftop homer
It’s one of baseball’s most famed YouTube-ready highlights. Chicago Cubs slugger Glenallen Hill smashes a homer that sails over the Wrigley Field stands, over the street and on to the roof of the building across the way. Of this visually arresting feat of power not seen before or since, Yahoo Sports’ Tim Brown asks: Would you even want to know how far it went?
Video Transcript
TIM BROWN: Glenallen Hill would tell you the flight of that 2-0 sinker that day was the result of a grown man with a bat in his hand pretty sure he was going to get a 2-0 sinker. Simple as that. Short swing, flat finish, then the sound.
[CRACK OF THE BAT]
My expectation always, he'd say, was to create a sound that could be heard in the stadium. On May 11, 2000, 20 years ago today, Glenallen Hill, of 186 career home runs, of looming size and few words, of an infamous bout with imaginary spiders, hit a home run at Wrigley Field that carried over the ivy, over the left field bleachers, over West Waveland Avenue, into to the roof of a five-story yellow brick building. They called it 470 feet, 500 feet, more. He's called it 700 with a hint of a smile.
There have been longer home runs. There are more famous home runs hit by more famous players. But Wrigley field opened in 1914, five years after the building across Waveland went up. And no one ever had hit a ball on that roof. No one has since.
So like the big league home runs that land in rivers and bays and upper decks, like the backyard home runs that land in the hedges and neighbors' yards and over the railroad tracks, the magic is not in what the tape measure says. Rather the magic is in putting a ball where one's never been before. The magic is in the sight of watching it go, and in that sound it makes, heard from here to the top of that building way over there.
[CRACK OF THE BAT]
- Out of here.
- Oh, my gosh.
- Onto the roof.
- He hit it on the roof. He hit it onto the roof across the street. I have never seen that. On top of the building. Even he admired that.