Willie Stargell Stats

1 - Willie Stargell crushed one home run on June 25, 1971, it hit a seat in Section 601, and it was the longest home run ever hit at Veterans Stadium (half credit to Jim Bunning). Only two other players would hit a home run into the 600 level, the upper deck, at the Vet (before it closed), Butch Huskey (Section 638) & Ruben Rivera (Section 638). The spot where Stargell's ball landed was marked with a yellow star with a black "S" inside a white circle until Pops passed away, the white circle was then painted black.

2 - Willie Stargell hit two home runs out of Dodger Stadium. Yes, out of of the Stadium, and he was the first player to ever do so. The first home run was a 507-foot rocket off Alan Foster on August 5, 1969, that landed initially in the middle of the tin roof covering the pavilion in right-field, then bounced over and out of the ballpark — it is the longest home run hit at Dodger Stadium. The second blast was "only" 470-feet, taking off on May 8, 1973, Andy Messersmith served up the tater, and it also completely cleared the right-field pavilion. The only other two players who have hit a home run out of Dodger Stadium since 1973, Mark McGwire and Mike Piazza.

4 - Willie Stargell hit three home runs in a game four times in his career. Only four other players at the time of his retirement had at least four three-homer games: Johnny Mize (6 times), Ernie Banks (4 times), Lou Gehrig (4 times) and Ralph Kiner (4 times).

5 - Willie Stargell had five extra-base hits on August 1, 1970, tying the single-game Major League record. Pops had three doubles and two home runs that day.

6 - Willie Stargell hit four home runs into the upper deck of right field at Three Rivers Stadium including the longest home run in the history of the Stadium. Before Three Rivers closed, six total home runs made it to the upper deck, four by Stargell.

8 - Willie Stargell wore number #8 his entire career and it was retired by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1982.

11 - Willie Stargell went deep eleven times in April 1971, tying him with six other players for the National League record of home runs in the month of April. The mark was tied several times after Pops set the record, until Albert Pujols broke it when he went deep 14 times in 2006.

15 - Willie Stargell hit at least 20 home runs in fifteen different seasons, including 13 consecutively, 1964 through 1976.

17 - Willie Stargell went 17-for-54 in his World Series Stats, a .315 career batting average. Willie Stargell was the seventeenth player elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

18 - Willie Stargell hit seven home runs that cleared the roof in Forbes Field. In it's sixty-one year history, eighteen homers cleared the 86-foot high right-field roof, seven by Stargell.

25 - Willie Stargell had twenty-five total bases during the 1979 World Series, the record for Most Total Bases in a 7-Game Series still to this day.

30 - Willie Stargell hit thirty home runs before the 1971 All-Star Game and 1973 All-Star Game (in case you wondered why he went those two particular seasons).

39 - Willie Stargell was thirty-nine years old when he won the Most Valuable Player Award in 1979, the oldest in history to earn that honor at that time.

81 - Willie Stargell was ranked eighty-first by The Sporting News when they released their list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players in the history of baseball.

200 - Willie Stargell was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988, 199 legends had been enshrined before him, Pops went in alone that year making him Hall of Famer number two-hundred.

296 - Willie Stargell hit two-hundred ninety-six home runs hit during the 1970s, the most by any player in the big leagues across that entire decade. Second place went to another pretty solid slugger, Reggie Jackson, he had 292.

535 - Willie Stargell attempted to knock the cover off the ball on May 20, 1978, instead it set the record for the longest home run - five-hundred thirty-five feet - hit at Olympic Stadium. Montreal Expos pitcher Wayne Twitchell gets half-credit for the record and the Expos commemorated the blast by painting the seat where the ball landed gold.

599 - Willie Stargell was loved by all five-hundred ninety-nine big league players when he played, our source is Joe Morgan who said at Stargell's funeral service, "When I played, there were 600 baseball players, and 599 of them loved Willie Stargell. He's the only guy I could have said that about. He never made anybody look bad and he never said anything bad about anybody."