Jake McCarthy turned baseball upside down with his inside-the-park home runs.
The last time a major league player hit two leadoff inside-the-parkers in the same season, Polaroid photography had not been invented and drive-in movie theaters did not exist.
Edd Roush accomplished the feat in 1929 for the New York Giants. Edd had a twin brother, Fred. Now he shares an identical stat line with McCarthy.
“There have been a lot of games, a lot of players, a lot of stuff that has gone on,” McCarthy said, “so to do something like this is very humbling.”
The triple was once considered the most electric play in baseball. McCarthy turned it up to 11, twice rumbling 360 feet around the bases as his career has done a 180-degree turn in his first season with the Rockies.
It would be easy to dismiss this accomplishment as a happy accident, the result of overzealous Pirates center fielder Jake Mangum and the Jackson Pollock design of the Giants’ Oracle Park.
It would also be a mistake.
McCarthy is in scoring position when he walks into the batter’s box because of his caffeinated energy and unique speed and aggressiveness shaped by the football fields of Scranton, Pa.
Before his speed-racer routine with the Rockies, McCarthy ran for 6,080 yards and scored 80 touchdowns in high school. In his senior season, he was ranked among the state’s top backs along with Saquon Barkley, Miles Sanders, and Josh Adams.
“My area was great for football. And the lore has grown that somehow I was better than Saquon,” McCarthy said with a laugh. “I look at that All-State team that had those backs and Micah Parsons. It was like 15 NFL guys and me. So, that’s pretty cool.”
McCarthy left football, but football never left him.
He could have played both sports at the University of Virginia, but focused on baseball because he needed more reps and wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, Joe (South Carolina), and Joe Jr. (UVA).
“The one school that really wanted me for football was Penn State,” McCarthy said. “But I seem to remember that Saquon did pretty well there. I think I made the right decision.”
Sure, and led the Eagles to a Super Bowl championship. But did he ever orbit 120 yards on the diamond in 14.45 seconds like McCarthy?
What he has done is as wild as anything Rockies fans have ever seen.
“I was jumping up and down and pumping my fist when he got the second one. I live for this stuff,” said Jayson Stark, national baseball writer and recorder of all things weird and wacky for The Athletic. “There are not enough opportunities for great athletes to remind us what great athletes they are. When a baseball lands on a patch of grass, and that guy starts flying around the bases, it is breathtaking.”
McCarthy’s first came on June 20 at Coors Field. He opened the game against Pirates’ flame-thrower Paul Skenes. On a 2-1 count, the 28-year-old lined a 95-mph fastball into center field. Mangum made the wrong decision, diving to his left as the ball missed his glove and scooted to the wall.
Suddenly, McCarthy was back in high school, taking a handoff for the Scranton Knights with his head still and knees high.
“He has good balance, really quick first few steps,” said former Broncos Super Bowl 50 star and prep coach C.J. Anderson after watching McCarthy’s football highlights along with other Colorado legends.
McCarthy touched first base and began sprinting like Tom Cruise in the canal scene in “Mission: Impossible II.” The ball was down — “It was right in front of me, so it was like ‘OK man, letap get going ‘” — so he had no choice. The throttle opened and there was nothing but daylight in front of him, kind of like 2014 when he scored 30 touchdowns.
“His 10-yard stride is an A,” said Phil Bravo, former state championship coach at Monarch High School, whose teams ran the ball down opponents’ throats. “His vision is A-plus, plus. The way he runs on a lean, that is something that is hard to teach.”
Perhaps the most impressive thing about McCarthy’s inside-the-parkers was his ability to shift rounding second base. Imagine a Ferrari locking into sixth gear. On the first one, McCarthy flipped off his helmet and ran like the wind flowing through his brown mane.
“He is every bit as quick as his stop-and-start is fast. You can tell he has really good instincts. The way he moves, he looks like someone who played in the backyard growing up and played multiple sports,” said Cherry Creek football boss Dave Logan, who boasts 13 state crowns with four different schools. “If you sent his tape to a college coach, they would immediately want to know who he was. You might not know how good the competition is, but seeing him put his foot in the ground and pull away from guys tells you all you need to know.”
The approach to third base is what separates excitement from the kind of highlight no one will forget.
Is the coach losing his mind and waving like an aircraft marshaller? Make no mistake, for Up with Purple to happen, a green light is required.
Ellis Burks remembers the moment.
He clubbed the first inside-the-park home run in Rockies’ history on April 15, 1994, at Mile High Stadium. It came against Montreal Expos left-hander Jeff Fassero and … well let Burks pick it up from here.
“The place was packed with (47,213 fans). I hit the ball down the line and it caromed off the wall in a weird way,” said Burks as his future teammate Larry Walker skied to the Mile High Stadium, Elevation 5,280 Ft. sign on the right-field wall, but could not make the catch. “I saw (Don Zimmer), the third base coach, signaling with his left arm, and I knew I had to keep going. I can still see the crowd going crazy as I ran across home plate.”
McCarthy did not get off as easily.
His pair of inside-the-parkers required slides, even if neither play ended up close. The second at San Francisco came on a 94-mph fastball from right-hander Trevor McDonald on the game’s second pitch. McCarthy smoked a shot to the vortex in center field, the ball bouncing in front of the 415-foot marker as Jung Hoo Lee failed to track it down and fumbled it on the hop.
“I figured it was going to bounce over the fence. Then I saw Andy Gonzales waving me home, and it was, ‘Here we go again.’ You just hope not to get thrown out,” said McCarthy, who was hitting .301 with 10 home runs and 53 RBIs through his first 83 games this season. “But I trust him.”
McCarthy is the type of athlete who inspires belief. When Anderson viewed McCarthy dropping his shoulder on defenders, he appreciated “his physicality and sting.” McCarthy admits that running around the bases that far, that fast, is a shock to the system.
“Of course I am warmed up,” said McCarthy, aware that no Rockies have hit three inside-the-park home runs in a season. “But you don’t expect to go 0-100 (mph) that early in the game.”
So much has to happen for an inside-the-parker to happen. And they are becoming harder because of positioning, leading to, as Stark explained, “the league experiencing historic lows for doubles and triples to the point where people inside the game have discussed creating rules to legislate where outfielders can stand.”
By any measure, the inside-the-park home run is an outlier. But so too were McCarthy’s football numbers of 351 yards in a game and 2,105 in a season.
You can call it a fluke. The Rockies call it Jake.
“I feel like I play with intensity. I always try hard. I am not good enough to not give it my all. The speed part of football definitely carries over,” McCarthy said. “Listen, I have to find slug (percentage) wherever I can. I will take as many cheap home runs as possible. It has been cool. Why stop at 2?”
Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.
