Six years before the Colorado Rockies played their inaugural season in Major League Baseball, aspiring big leaguer Joey Meyer stepped to the plate for the Triple-A Denver Zephyrs in the bottom of the seventh inning against Buffalo Bisons reliever Mike Murphy at Mile High Stadium.
With one on and two out, Meyer — who had gone deep three innings earlier and given the Zephyrs the lead on a three-run homer off future Boston manager John Farrell — got a 2-2 slider over the plate from Murphy and pummeled it out to left-center and into Mile High’s second deck in front of a crowd of about 1,400 fans.
Later that night — June 2, 1987 — city engineer Jerry Tennyson estimated a ball would have had to travel 582 feet to get from home plate at Mile High Stadium to land in the first few rows of Section 338, an area of the stadium rarely filled on baseball nights. Thirty-five years later, Meyer’s blast is still regarded as the longest verified home run in professional baseball history.
“It was something that I heard about in my childhood, the way that people heard about Babe Ruth calling his shot,” Denver baseball fanatic Tyler Maun told The Denver Post. “You just kind of heard these whispers of like — ‘Man, you should’ve seen this time when Joey Meyer hit a home run.’ It’s like a Denver baseball legend.”
Unfortunately, Meyer, who did make it to the majors but played just one full season and part of another with the Milwaukee Brewers at the end of the 1980s, didn’t watch his mammoth blast leave the ballpark because he didn’t want to show up Murphy on the mound.
“When I hit it, I knew it was a home run,” he said, “and when I hit third, [former Zephyrs manager Terry] Bevington asked me, ‘Did you see where that landed?’ I just kind of shook his hand and ran by, and everybody met me at home plate, and they were all pointing it out to me. I didn’t really watch it. But that would’ve been one I wished I had watched.”
Amazingly enough, Meyer was able to take Murphy deep again 35 years ago today when he poked an opposite-field shot into the stands for his third homer of the game on a historic seven-RBI night.
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