Happy Birthday: Dale Long - Feb. 6, 1926

Today we celebrate the birthday of Dale Long, who had a brief tenure with the Yankees, but more prominently owns a piece of an all-time MLB record long with Don Mattingly and Ken Griffey Jr.

Back in 1986, on the 30th anniversary of Dale Long setting the MLB record for consecutive games hitting a home run, he said of his eight-game streak, “Someday somebody will break it, and they'll forget me. It's there to be broken. They break ‘em all the time.”

Well, 38 years since Long said that, no one has done it yet. The Yankees’ Don Mattingly tied it in 1987, and Ken Griffey Jr. tied it in 1993, but eight straight games remains the record and Long - an otherwise nondescript player who hit 132 home runs during a 10-year career that included stints with the Pirates, Browns, Cubs, Giants, Senators and Yankees - still has his name attached to the feat.

Long signed his first pro contract out of high school as an 18-year-old in 1944 and it took him 11 years to finally stick in the majors with the Pirates as he bounced from team to team, two of those years spent in the Yankees’ system with Single-A Binghamton and Triple-A San Francisco.

In 1951, Pirates’ general manager Branch Rickey asked Long to give catching a try, and what was noteworthy about that is Long was left-handed, and left-handers had played the position only a handful of times in the long history of the game. Long, thinking perhaps this was his long-awaited ticket to the majors, did as he was told in an exhibition game in San Diego.

“I knelt down to give the sign to some new kid who could really blaze that ball,” Long said. “In my head, I called for a curve. But I put down one finger for the fastball instead. I’m squatting there, looking for the curve and, whoosh, here comes the fastball. The only thing I could do was reach out and catch it with my bare hand. Pretty soon, I went to the Browns on waivers and went back to first base.”

He had a brief callup to Pittsburgh in 1951 before going to St. Louis where he also had a quick look (44 games in all), but then didn’t get another chance until 1955 when he was back with the sad sack Pirates who hadn’t won a pennant since 1927 and hadn’t finished better than fourth in the eight-team National League since 1944.

During his time in the minors he hit 161 home runs and drove in 776 runs, and that first full season with Pittsburgh Long was a revelation as he led MLB with 13 triples and hit 16 homers with 79 RBI. And then in 1956, he enjoyed the best season of his career as he hit 27 homers, drove in 91, and set the baseball world ablaze by doing something Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds never did, and only two others in history have even matched.

The home run streak began on May 19 against Jim Davis of the Cubs and it continued with homers off Ray Crone and Warren Spahn of the Braves, Herman Wehmeier and Lindy McDaniel of the Cardinals, Curt Simmons and Ben Flowers of the Phillies, and finally, Carl Erskine of the Dodgers on May 28 at Forbes Field, after which he was given a standing ovation that caused a pause in the game.

The next day, the Pirates gave Long a raise and he signed a new contract that bumped his salary from $14,000 per year to $16,500.

Long had 14 homers when the streak ended, but he he hit only four in his next 49 games and just 13 in the last 114 games, at one point going through a dreadful 2-for-54 slump as the Pirates sank to their customary spot near the bottom of the standings.

“I don’t know what it is with me,” he said in the midst of his slump. “Sure, I got a little tired by all the things that suddenly began happening to me when I hit those eight homers in a row, but I can’t blame my slump for that. I still think most of my troubles came from the fact that I was trying to hit the ball 900 miles. I should have been satisfied with those 390-foot jobs.”

He was traded to the Cubs in 1957 and had twice hit at least 20 homers, then went to the Giants in 1960 and later to the Yankees where he hit three homers in 26 games, then made three plate appearances in the 1960 World Series against his old Pirate teammates. After getting selected by the new Senators in the 1960 expansion draft, he was traded back to the Yankees in 1962 and played sparingly until he was released in August 1963.

His time in New York yielded seven homers in 81 games and his name was lost to history until Mattingly tied his record in 1987.