As player with Astros, Bob was one in a million
The whole thing started with a baseball junkie counting runs on his new $80 electronic calculator, which had eaten up about a week’s takehome pay from his job as a radio newscaster in Connecticut.
It gained steam and became a big-deal promotion for Major League Baseball, with luminaries Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial and Ernie Banks talking it up. There was a countdown in every ballpark, a command center in Rockefeller Center and spotters on the telephone from every game, vital in the days before instant messaging and Twitter.
Companies such as Tootsie Roll and Seiko were sponsors.
And it ended in a home run sprint — yep, you read that right — with the run counter in every active ballpark sitting on 1.
Houston’s Bob Watson stepped into quirky baseball history when he touched home plate at Candlestick Park.
Forty years ago today, on May 4, 1975, Watson scored what was then counted as the millionth run in baseball history, running in from second base on a three-run homer hit by Milt May, 99 years and 12 days after a fella named Wes Fisler of Philadelphia’s National League club scored the first one in the history of the majors.
Halfway across the country, only a few moments after May swung, Davey Concepcion of the Reds homered and dashed around the bases at Riverfront Stadium.
“I got to third base and our bullpen was right behind third and the guys were saying, ‘Run, run, run!’” recalls Watson, who had worked a walk against John Montefusco. “I think I beat Concepcion by like a second and a half.”
“I was the million and one,” Concepcion says, laughing. “I was flying around the bases, but I didn’t have time to score before Bob. I think I missed by eight yards.”
Still, Concepcion originally thought he had done it and, he says, he and the Reds celebrated at the plate. “Then somebody said I came up short,” he laments now.
Just before those home run trots turned into sprints, both Chris Chambliss of the Yankees and the Twins’ Rod Carew had a chance to score the millionth run, according to news reports. But both were thrown out at the plate.
There was much at stake besides just a slice of oddball lore — publicity, a Seiko watch worth $1,000, a million Tootsie Rolls and a million pennies that would go to a baseball charity. There was even a contest for fans to predict who would score and when; the winner would get the candy and the pennies, too.
Folks were curious, recalls Ellen Gordon, now the chairman and CEO of Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc., and the promotion generated lots of television and print coverage. “We got a lot of attention out of it and it just seemed to fit in with Tootsie Roll,” Gordon says now.
DiMaggio drummed up support for Tootsie Roll’s backing by uttering this much-reported phrase when someone wondered why the candy company was involved: “I ate my first Tootsie Roll when I was six.”
And teams wanted one of their own to score the fateful run, too, says Marty Appel, the baseball author who was the Yankees’ media relations director at the time. “We were hoping it was us,” Appel says. “We weren’t winning pennants then and it would’ve been a nice moment.
“I think there was a higher level of interest in it than you might expect. It somehow got people’s interest.”
There was, for instance, a countdown in the Daily News and stories speculating on how it’d be scored. One particular story in The News wondered whether players would try to steal home to do it. It was headlined: “Will Million Be a Steal?”
Little did a 23-year-old re