Reginald Martinez Jackson loved to hit a baseball. in the spring of 1972 the star right fielder for the reigning American League Western Division champion Oakland Athletics lived to hit. He was twenty-five years old, stood six feet tall, and weighed 204 pounds. Heavily muscled—he had been a running back at Arizona State—he boasted seventeen-inch biceps and twenty-seven-inch thighs.
There was no one in baseball, Jackson believed, who could do as many things as well as he could. He had only a fair batting average, but he hit with great power and ran with surprising speed for a big man. Baseball Digest would feature Reggie on the cover of its June issue, along with Pete Rose and Willie Mays, and declare the ’72 season to be the start of baseball’s Jacksonian Era. “This Will Be His Year!” the magazine proclaimed.
Prior to a 2009 World Series game against the Philadelphia Phillies in Yankee Stadium, Reggie held court on the field with a group of writers. He talked about hitting, about hitting in the clutch, about how he had loved to hit the ball—“that little white sum-bitch,” he used to call it. in July 1971 Jackson smashed one of the longest home runs in history when he connected with a pitch thrown by Pittsburgh’s Dock Ellis in the All-Star Game. the ball was still rising when it struck one of the light standards on the roof of Tiger Stadium, 520 feet from home plate.
Nbc Radio color commentator Sandy Koufax was impressed by what he had witnessed: “It looked like Dock got the breaking ball up just a little bit to Reggie Jackson and, I mean, he hit it hard. I don’t know when I’ve seen a ball hit as hard as that one. That would have gone out at the airport.”
In his first weekend in the majors late in 1967, Jackson blasted five balls . . .