Top Five All Time Yankee Home Runs

The Top 5 Include Reggie Jackson, Bucky Dent, and Aaron Boone

Aug 8, 2007

The Yankees have hit a million home runs. Here are the five best.

For the first time in his career, Reggie Jackson struggled in 1977. He was on a new team in the biggest city in the world. His manager and the team's owner were both insane. The team's captain, Thurman Munson, didn't like him one bit. And the fans acted like typical Yankee fans: wary of newcomers, especially one as boastful as Jackson, and quick to pounce all over a player who let them down.

Although Jackson played very well during the regular season, hitting .286 with 32 home runs and 110 RBI, the fans booed him mercilessly for every mental and physical slip-up. It was very similar to what Alex Rodriguez experienced in 2006, except that everyone had really bad hair.

No matter what the Yankee players and followers thought of Jackson at first, everyone fell in love with him in the sixth and final game of the 1977 World Series against the Dodgers.

In his first trip to the plate, Jackson walked on four consecutive pitches, never taking bat off his shoulder. In his second and third at-bats, Jackson homered to right and right-center on the first pitch of each at bat. So when he came to the plate in the bottom of the eighth inning, Reggie was looking to hit a record fifth home run of the Series and a record-tying third homer of the game.

On the first pitch, Charlie Hough threw him a knuckelball that was a little bit flat and Reggie crushed it. The ball cleared the center field wall and landed in the black seats, 480 feet from home plate. Reggie Jackson went from superstar to living legend with that swing.

Number 4: Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius

Games 4 and 5 of the 2001 World Series were played against the backdrop of the September 11 attacks. With the city reeling from the horror of this unthinkable violence, and teetering on the edge of potential financial disaster, New Yorkers needed a great moment in this World Series. They got two.

In the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 4, the Yankees trailed 2-0 with two outs and Paul O'Neill on second base. They were on the verge of going behind three games to one in the Fall Classic. But Arizona reliever Byung-Hyun Kim tried to throw a two-strike fastball past Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez. Tino caught up with the pitch and drilled it 420 feet over the center field wall. As he circled the bases, the New York crowd went of their rockers. Martinez had tied the game and saved the team from imminent disaster.

Fast forward to the next night. Same scenario. Yankees down 2-0. Kim on the mound trying to close it out. One man on base. Then, as Yogi Berra might say, it was deja vu all over again. Kim threw a hard fastball that Brosius connected with and drove high and far into the left field seats. For the second straight night, New York was rescued by a last chance home run. Kim was devastated; he almost collapsed on the mound.

The Yankees won the game on an RBI single by Alfonso Soriano in the bottom of the 12th inning.

Number 3. Bucky Dent Breaks Boston's Back (October 2, 1978)

Bucky Dent was not a home-run hitter. In 12 seasons as a major leaguer, Dent hit only 40 home runs. But on October 2, 1978, Bucky's season and life would forever change; and it was all due to a home run.

he hit a grand total of 40 in 12 years in the major leagues - his place in the annals of baseball has been secured by his three-run homer that gave the Yankees a 3-2 lead in the 1978 AL East division playoff game with their archrivals, the Red Sox.

With a fierce wind blowing out to left field, Dent connected with a hanging breaking ball thrown by Boston's Mike Torrez, and hit a fly ball to left that would just clear Fenway Park's Green Monster (310 feet from home plate), giving the Yankees a one-run lead.

The Yankees went on to win the game 5-4 and the division title, thus upholding the Sox's so-called Curse of the Babe. Since the event, Red Sox fans have held a great deal of animosity toward Dent, and have given Dent a very profane nickname, usually printed for public consumption as "Bucky (Bleeping) Dent" or reduced to a middle initial as Bucky "F" Dent

Number 2. Chris Chambliss (October 14, 1976)

The Yankees had not been in a World Series in twelve years. Entering the bottom of the ninth inning in the final game of the 1976 American League Championship Series, the Bronx Bombers found themselves tied with the Kansas City Royals. If they could score just one run, they would return to their first Fall Classic since mantle and maris were active players. If not, they would be forced to play into extra innings and risk going home for the off-season.

First Baseman Chris Chambliss led off the inning, and smashed the first pitch offered by Kansas City reliever Mark Littell over the right-center field wall, winning the pennant for the Bombers and touching off bedlam at the Stadium.

Thousands of fans vaulted over the dugouts and walls and celebrated on the playing field. It was pandemonium. Chambliss reached second, then dodged hordes of fans in trying to reach third, then proceeded to make a beeline towards the safety of the clubhouse as the area around home plate and much of the field was covered by a mass of humanity.

Some time later Chambliss was escorted back out onto the field to touch home, or at least the area where it had been. The game and Series were over and the Yankees had reached the top of the AL once again while the Royals were sent packing for a long, cold off-season in Kansas City.

Number 1. Aaron Boone

Just five outs away from losing the American League pennant, the Yankees rallied from a 5-2 deficit to tie Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS in the bottom of the eighth inning.

Neither team was able to muster a run in the 9th or 10th innings. Yankee reliever Mariano Rivera held the Sox scoreless in for three straight innings, but was beginning to tire, and Manager Joe Torre knew that sending him out for a fourth stanza could be perilous.

Then Aaron Boone led off the bottom of the inning against Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, a knuckleballer who was having a marvelous series, winning Games 1 and 4, and holding Boone hitless in both games.

With the count 1-0, Wakefield fluttered a knuckleball that zigged when it probably should have zagged and the ball hung over the fat part of the plate for a split-second too long.

Boone took a vicious cut and conected, drilling the ball into the left-field stands to win the game and send the Yankees by the Red Sox and into the World Series. The ball disappeared into a wild sea of fans as the Yankees jubilantly ran onto the field, and waited for theit hero to cross to home plate.

As Wakefield slowly made his way towards the stunned Red Sox dugout, where starting pitcher Pedro Martinez sat in an apparent trance, Rivera raced to the pitcher's mound, collapsed upon on it, and hugged it like it a best friend he hadn't seen in years.

As the loudspeakers blared out Franks Sinatra ( "I want to wake up in a city that doesn't sleep, and find I'm king of the hill, top of the heap ") Boone reached home plate and disappeared beneath a mass of teammates at home plate.

"You always emulate these moments in your backyard," Boone later said. "I still can't put the into words ... I'm floating ... Just to have had this opportunity ... It's humbling. This game humbles you all the time in good ways and bad ways. Lately, it's been humbling in a bad way. That's how it is."

Doused in champagne in the uproarious Yankees clubhouse, Boone paused and said, "When I joined the Yankees, this is the kind of thing I wanted to be part of. The perfect ending."

The copyright of the article Top Five All Time Yankee Home Runs in Baseball is owned by James Lincoln Ray. Permission to republish Top Five All Time Yankee Home Runs in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.