Claim:   Pitcher Gaylord Perry's manager once said, "They'll put a man on the moon before he hits a home run," and years later Perry hit his first home run minutes after Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface.

Status:   Undetermined.

Examples:   [Collected on the Internet, 2001]

In 1963, baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry remarked, "They'll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run." On July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Gaylord Perry hit his first, and only, home run. "They'll put a man on the Moon before he hits a homerun" — Giants manager Alvin Dark in 1964, about his feeble-hitting pitcher Gaylord Perry. Perry would collect his first homer on July 20, 1969, minutes after Apollo 11's lunar module touched down on the Moon.

Origins:   Gaylord Jackson Perry was a lanky 6'4" right-handed pitcher from North Carolina notorious for his furtive (and often not-so-furtive) use of the spitball (and the Vaseline ball, and the KY Jelly ball) decades after baseball had banned it. In a 22-year major league career spanning the years from 1962-1983, Perry and his "hard slider" racked up 314 wins and 3,534 strikeouts as Perry won 20 or more games in a season five times, hurled a no-hitter in 1968, and became the first pitcher to win the Cy Young award in both leagues. Gaylord Perry's achievements on the pitching mound earned him a spot in baseball's Hall of Fame in 1991.

Today's legend deals not with Gaylord Perry the pitcher, however, but Gaylord Perry the hitter — specifically, the coincidence that after someone said there would be "a man on the moon before Gaylord Perry hits a home run," Perry did just that — socking a homer the very same day Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface. Did this really happen, or was it merely an amusing anecdote of the "improbable event will take place 'when man walks on the moon'" variety (the basis of at least one other well-known legend) someone invented after noticing the date of Perry's first home run?

Just from the two examples cited above, this claim exhibits the hallmark of an urban legend: different versions with contradictory details. Was the taunt about Perry's not hitting a home run uttered by his manager, Alvin Dark, or by Perry himself? Was it said in 1963 or 1964? Was Perry's 20 July 1969 homer notable for being the "only" home run of his career, or was it merely his first? And did he hit it "minutes after Apollo 11's lunar module touched down," or "a few hours after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon"?

The home run itself is easy to verify: Gaylord Perry, while playing for the San Francisco Giants, did indeed swat the first home run of his career on 20 July 1969, in the third inning of a day game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. (This was not the only home run he hit in the majors, though; he ended his career with a total of six round-trippers.) Although the exact time of Perry's first homer was not recorded, it came in the bottom of the third inning of a two-hour, twenty-minute game that began at 1:00 PM PDT, so it probably occurred between 1:45 PM and 2:00 PM, which would place it within minutes of Apollo 11's historic touchdown on the lunar surface at 1:40 PM that afternoon. (Neil Armstrong did not become the first man to set foot on the moon until several hours later, stepping off the lunar module at 7:56 PM that evening.)

The difficult part to verify is whether anyone — Perry himself or someone else — indeed made a comment that compared Perry's power-hitting capabilities to the possibilities of man's landing on the moon. Superficially, this might be considered a bit improbable, as Perry was not a bad-hitting pitcher for his time, and his batting averages in his first two seasons (1962-63) were a quite respectable .231 and .222, making it unlikely that he would have been described as "feeble-hitting" in 1962 or 1963. (In 1964 he lived up to that description, though, as he managed only three hits over the course of the entire season for a paltry .054 average, a poor showing even for a pitcher.)

From the examples cited above, our choices about where to investigate the "who said this?" aspect of the legend begin with Gaylord Perry and Alvin Dark, the latter the manager of the Giants team with whom Perry began his major league career in 1962. We quickly narrow our options by noting that Perry himself attributes the quip to Alvin Dark, as related in the 1984 book Strike Two by former umpire Ron Luciano:

Pitchers may not remember every home run they give up, but they certainly remember every one they hit. Usually this requires only a very short memory.

Gaylord Perry's first major league home run was a historic one. He was with Alvin Dark's San Francisco Giants in 1968. "I was taking batting practice one afternoon and I was just hitting line drives, I mean line drives. Harry Jupiter, a sportswriter, was watching me and said to Alvin, 'You know, that guy has some power.'

"Alvin laughed. 'Let me tell you something,' he said. There'll be a man on the moon before he hits a home run.'

"So a year later I was pitching against the Dodgers when we got the news that Neil Armstrong had stepped on to the surface of the moon. I came to bat about twenty minutes after that, against Claude Osteen — and hit my first major league home run."

This account sounds like everything we could need to mark this one true: an involved participant providing names, dates, and even small details (e.g., Perry did indeed hit his home run off the Dodgers' Claude Osteen). One problem, though: Alvin Dark was no longer manager of the San Francisco Giants in 1968. He'd been fired by the Giants after the 1964 season and was managing the Cleveland Indians in 1968; since the Giants and Indians played in different leagues, Dark would not have had occasion to be standing around the batting cage offering remarks to a sportswriter at a regular-season Giants game any time after 1964.

Well, perhaps the basics are true but Perry was mistaken about the year or misremembered some other details. Unfortunately, no other source corroborates the story. If Alvin Dark made a disparaging remark about Perry's hitting to sportswriter Harry Jupiter, we haven't found any evidence that Jupiter noted it in his column, and while Dark himself doesn't deny the story, he didn't exactly provide a wealth of detail when asked about it in June 2002:

Long before the DH and interleague play created [a] midyear shift in rules, Perry joined the Giants as a rookie in 1962. He was peppering pitches in batting practice one day when Examiner reporter Harry Jupiter mentioned Perry's impressive swing to manager Alvin Dark. Dark scoffed, saying, "Man will land on the moon before Gaylord Perry hits a home run."

Fast forward to July 20, 1969, and a Giants-Dodgers game at Candlestick Park. The public-address announcer informed the crowd that Neil Armstrong had set foot on the moon. Soon thereafter, on that same historic day, Perry hit a homer to center field off Claude Osteen — the first of his career.

"Alvin was right," Perry said later, "but only by an hour."

Dark, who was managing the Cleveland Indians in '69, noticed the extraordinary timing of his former pitcher.

"It was just an expression," Dark recalled earlier this month of his man-on-the moon remark. "I saw in the newspaper that he hit the homer. Then I saw his quote a couple of days later about me being right."

Much as we'd like to push this one across the finish line, this account doesn't quite get us there. It adds yet another year to the equation (1962, when Perry hadn't yet had a chance to demonstrate how well or poorly he could hit in the major leagues) and makes Alvin Dark sound curiously vague about his prediction (i.e., Dark doesn't say so much that he remembers making the remark as he does that he recalls reading about it in the newspaper after Perry finally hit a home run). Maybe this tale is true, and the memories of the participants, as often happens, have become fuzzy over time. Or maybe, as also often happens, this tale was made up after the fact, but it's such a good story that the participants now remember it as something that really happened.

Last updated:   20 July 2005

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  Sources:

    Kroichick, Ron.   "Pitchers at Plate — Few Hits, Many Tales."

    The San Francisco Chronicle.   14 June 2002   (Sports; p. 1).

    Luciano, Ron.   Strike Two.

    New York: Bantam Books, 1984.   ISBN 0-553-05049-4   (p. 279).

    Los Angeles Times.   "Dark Was Right, But Just Barely."

    8 October 1987   (Sports; p. 2).