Dinger Damage

Baseball's costliest clouts

Last Week
Albert Pujols (below) crushes a homer at Busch Stadium that hits a McDonald's ad in leftfield, busting the I in BIG MAC. The next day the letter is still out; the team puts up a sign that reads, OUCH! MY I.

1998
Mark McGwire puts a hole in a billboard at the old Busch Stadium with a 545-foot shot to dead center. The team covers the hole with a four-foot Band-Aid.

1946
Bama Rowell of the Boston Braves breaks the Bulova clock atop the rightfield scoreboard in Ebbets Field, the hit that served as the inspiration for Roy Hobbs's light-busting shot in The Natural. Bulova had promised a free timepiece to anyone who hit the clock; they finally present the 71-year-old Rowell with his watch in 1987.

c. 1930s
Jimmie Foxx of the Philadelphia A's hits a shot that breaks a seat in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium. It wasn't his only long drive at the park. Years later New York ace Lefty Gomez says, "When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, he found a baseball that Jimmie Foxx hit off me in 1937."

PHOTO

DAVID E. KLUTHO (PUJOLS)