'You can't teach it': 5 masters explain how they rob HRs

Home runs have captivated baseball fans ever since Babe Ruth emerged just over a century ago, changing the game forever with his towering drives that traveled farther than anyone had seen before.

Watching a ball land over the fence can be exhilarating, especially in a big moment. But there’s something far rarer, and often even more exciting, than a home run.

“You have a chance to hit a home run every time you come to the plate,” said Eric Davis, a five-tool outfielder who launched 282 homers and stole 349 bases during a 17-year Major League career from 1984-2001.

“But on defense, you don’t know when you’re going to get a chance to rob one.”

The home run robbery. As kids, we saw our Major League heroes pull it off on TV, and we emulated them in the backyard. In our daydreaming, it all seemed so smooth and effortless. The spectacular was obtainable in our imagination, and when outfielders like Ken Griffey Jr. -- perhaps the greatest home run thief of them all -- made it look easy, it emboldened us all the more.

But the reality isn’t so simple. In fact, it’s the opposite.

“There’s just so much to it,” said six-time Gold Glove Award-winning right fielder Mookie Betts. “You can’t teach it.”

Maybe it can’t be taught. But it certainly can be done, and therefore explained. So we asked five great outfielders, past and present, to do just that. Each offered his own twist on this fine art, showing that there is no single, perfect method for pulling off one of sports’ most thrilling feats.

Here is how each master thief would approach his craft:

Eric Davis: You’ve gotta dunk on ’em
Believe it or not, Darryl Strawberry never hit 40 or more home runs in a season during his 17-year MLB career. And he’s still upset about why he didn’t finish with exactly 40 in 1987.

That’s because on May 5 that year at Shea Stadium, Strawberry had a homer to center field stolen by one of his best friends in the world.

“We still talk about it,” Davis said with a laugh. “He’s still angry because he finished with 39.”

Davis, who had the power and speed to hit 46 homers and steal 99 bases over 162 games between June of 1986 and June of ’87, was also a tremendous center fielder, winning three Gold Glove Awards from 1987-89. On this night, it was his vertical leap that led to one of the great home run robberies of all time.

Strawberry crushed a sixth-inning pitch from Reds right-hander Ted Power that seemed destined to land over the wall in center. Davis knew right away that this was going to be one of those rare moments, a point in time where all the elements align for a chance to bring a baseball going over the fence back into play for an out.

As he drifted toward the wall, Davis began the rough triangular calculation every outfielder must undertake in the four to six seconds the ball is typically in the air.

In an oversimplified nutshell, it involves the trajectory and speed of the baseball, the ever-shrinking distance the outfielder is from the wall and the speed at which the outfielder is traveling.

“If you look at schematics, it has to be perfect,” Davis said. “It depends on where you’re playing at that particular time. On the one where I robbed Darryl, I looked at the wall twice and gathered myself to go up -- I had the time to do that because that’s how high he hit it. Then you can see me stutter-stepping. That’s the rhythm to rebounding. I just took my basketball ability to the baseball field.”

Davis was a star basketball player at Fremont High School in Los Angeles, where he also excelled in baseball and football, often playing against Strawberry’s Crenshaw High School teams. His leaping ability was off the charts, and this was one of several times he was able to showcase it during his career.

After his stutter steps, Davis leapt straight up.

“I didn’t use the wall to jump like some of these dudes do now,” Davis said. “I was trying to dunk on people, you know what I’m saying?”

The top of Davis’ head and nearly his entire left arm cleared the eight-foot-high wall to reel in a ball that was some three or four feet over the fence. Strawberry, standing near second base, was stunned, as were the 20,037 fans in attendance.

Tim McCarver, on the call for Mets TV that night, perhaps said it best: “Some friend!”

As incredible as that catch was, it wasn’t Davis’ most unbelievable feat when it comes to robbing home runs. That came in back-to-back games the very next month against the Cardinals at Riverfront Stadium. Davis robbed St. Louis slugger Jack Clark of a homer on June 2, and the very next day, he robbed another one. From Jack Clark. In the same spot.

“Did he do it again?!” legendary broadcaster Jack Buck exclaimed. “... I guess he is the next Willie Mays.”

If everything has to be just right to rob a homer, what do you call it when you do it on back-to-back days against the same guy in the same spot?

“What are the odds of that?” Davis asked. “Like a zillion to one?”

Though much of his career was derailed by injuries, Davis had several fantastic home run-stealing grabs. And for him, no defensive play beats it.

“That’s probably the epitome of outfield defense,” he said. “To rob a home run. Because everything has to be perfect.”

Jim Edmonds: Make the wall work for you
When hearing the name Jim Edmonds, many people instantly have one highlight come to mind. The play took place in Kansas City on June 10, 1997, and some argue it resulted in the greatest outfield catch ever captured on television.

Playing center field for the Angels, Edmonds raced back on a drive over his head off the bat of the Royals’ David Howard. Edmonds then launched into a full-extension dive facing the wall and made an over-the-shoulder catch.

That may have been Edmonds’ most famous grab, but when it comes to robbing home runs, his two greatest moments came within days of each other in 2004.

On July 6, Reds slugger Adam Dunn crushed a ball to left-center field at Busch Stadium. Edmonds, now with the Cardinals, went back, measured up the wall and made a tremendous leaping catch.

Nine days later, with the Cards in Cincinnati to play the Reds again, Edmonds and St. Louis closer Jason Isringhausen were having a chat about that play.

“Isringhausen said, ‘How come you don’t do that for me?’” Edmonds remembers.

The following night at Great American Ball Park, on the first pitch Isringhausen threw upon entering the game in the ninth inning, Jason LaRue smashed a ball to center. As Edmonds sprinted back, he once again used his sixth sense for stealing homers to time everything precisely, an innate ability he first showcased long before he ever stepped on a Major League field.

“For me, I think just the amount of time I spent on the field as a kid kind of just made it second nature for me,” Edmonds said. “I used to run around Cal Poly Pomona, out there on the big college field when we were kids, and I’d just run crazy catching fly balls off the bats of my friends.”

As Edmonds neared the wall after a long sprint -- he always played relatively shallow because he wanted to make plays on balls in front of him that were the result of pitchers getting soft contact -- he braced for his jump.

Unlike Davis, Edmonds wasn’t a get-back-there-and-leap-straight-up guy. He always used the wall for leverage, and to great success.

“You can’t jump as high without pushing off that wall,” Edmonds said. “I figured if I could get my foot four or five feet up the wall, then that’s the extra push you need. You just do everything you can to get as high as you can, and then when you’re in the air, you just hope for the best.”

Part of hoping for the best is hoping you don’t get hurt. Edmonds said that because the walls now are fixed in position, as opposed to the days of multipurpose stadiums in which the fences for baseball were removable for football, they’re less forgiving when trying to rob a homer.

Since the early-1990s, when retro-style ballparks became the norm as cookie-cutter stadiums aged and fell out of fashion, there’s a higher likelihood of injury when colliding with an outfield wall. The play Edmonds made on Dunn is an example -- his right side smashed against the fence as he caught the ball, though he was no worse for wear.

Another big change with the proliferation of new ballparks beginning in the early ’90s was the increase in variation of wall heights and what they're made of. In many parks, there are different heights for the wall in different sections of the outfield, as well as multiple materials from which the wall is made.

As we’ll see later, that makes for varying degrees of difficulty for the already difficult task of robbing a home run.

The wall Edmonds was contending with at Great American Ball Park was a pretty typical eight-foot-high padded fence. He got a clean jump by using his right foot to dig into it and propel him upward. He then used every inch of his reach to snatch the ball out of the air about a millimeter before it landed on the grassy hill beyond the fence.

Edmonds stuck the landing onto the warning track with a huge smile on his face, high-fiving right fielder Reggie Sanders before returning the nearly lost baseball to the infield.

“What you see in that play in Cincinnati -- the reaction -- is because of the conversation with Isringhausen the night before,” Edmonds said. “He had said it just the day before and boom, on his next batter, it happened.

“But normally, you kind of just feel like you’re doing your job. It’s just like, ‘That’s what I do.’”

Ichiro: Be daring and creative, but make the right decisions
Ichiro Suzuki was standing in right field in the top of the seventh inning of a game between his Mariners and the Angels at Safeco Field on May 2, 2005. Seattle was down, 5-0, and to the plate for the Halos stepped Garret Anderson, who already had a homer in the contest.

With all due respect to the threat Anderson posed at the plate, Ichiro’s mind was elsewhere.

“The game was out of hand already,” Ichiro said through interpreter Allen Turner. “We were down quite a bit and it was in the later innings, so I knew that the fans probably weren’t too excited about the game. I was actually hoping that there would be a ball hit to me where I could do something great for them.”

As the thought crossed his mind, Ichiro took two steps back toward the fence.

“I was hoping for something that would make the game a little more exciting,” he said. “And sure enough, it came.”

Anderson belted a 2-1 pitch from Mariners reliever Julio Mateo deep to right. Ichiro turned and headed for the wall. Being smaller than the average outfielder, he couldn’t do what taller players could by leaping straight up and getting their arms over the wall.

So he had to improvise. Improvisation under these circumstances can be sensational. But there's a huge potential downside.

“The most difficult thing is that you have to be able to judge whether the ball is actually going to be over the fence,” Ichiro said. “Sometimes you’ll see where guys will climb the wall and the ball drops in front of them. That’s something you definitely want to avoid. So it’s that decision-making that is the most important in robbing a home run.

“Even if you’re a great outfielder and people think of you as a great defender, you make that one mistake by climbing the wall and it drops in front, everybody gets an image of you of that play. It’s really a huge risk you’re taking in order to do something like that.”

As he approached the fence, Ichiro had to take his eye off the ball in order to climb the wall. The footing had to be just right so he could turn his body in the appropriate direction and have a real chance to make the play. Once he was about four or five feet from it, he leaped, leading with his right foot.

His foot got the grip he needed to propel him up toward the top of the fence, where he placed his right hand to stabilize himself.

Then came an outfielder’s nightmare: when Ichiro was ready to make the catch, the baseball wasn’t where he thought it would be. This was the moment when it could’ve all gone embarrassingly wrong, where the risk-reward ratio suddenly inverted.

Ichiro, as he did so many times and in so many ways throughout his illustrious 19-year MLB career, adapted. As he was at the apex of his climb, he swiveled his upper body to the right, contorting it just enough to bring his glove-side arm back around. Just as he began his descent back to earth, he caught the ball on the backhand.

The crowd was stunned, and after being silent for much of the game, the 24,184 fans in attendance erupted to life. Ichiro got a standing ovation for his efforts -- not the first one he received in Seattle and by no means the last.

Those who attended that early-May contest may not remember the final score. But they’ll never forget Ichiro’s amazing play. As it turns out, that catch, stylistically, had its origins in a play made nearly a quarter century earlier.

“So the team I played for in Japan, the Orix Blue Wave, was called the Hankyu Braves before that,” Ichiro said. “When I was a kid, there was this left fielder on that team named Masafumi Yamamori. He made this unbelievable play where he’s literally on top of the fence with his hands and feet, and he reaches up and robs a homer.”

Yamamori’s stunning play came in 1981, at the expense of the Lotte Orions’ Sumio Hirota. In Ichiro’s catch 24 years later, you can definitely see the Yamamori influence. You can also see how the Yamamori play would have etched itself inside the mind of a young Ichrio, making an impression that went beyond the physical acrobatics involved and into the mind of the fan watching.

“Some pros think that if you don’t win, it’s not worth it,” Ichiro said. “But I don’t think that at all. I think there are fans that come out to the game, and even if you don’t win, you make a play here or there, something that’s spectacular for the fans to enjoy.

“Now, I never wanted to make an easy play look hard. I wanted to make the difficult plays look easy.”

He certainly did that more times than we can count during his incredible playing career. And it was never by chance -- it was all meticulously planned.

“It was always on my mind,” Ichiro said. “I wanted to put on a show for the fans.”

Mike Trout: Timing is everything
Mike Trout needs practice.

No, not because he’s deficient in some area of the game. Trout, widely regarded as the best baseball player on the planet for the past decade or so, needs practice to continue wowing us with jaw-dropping feats on the diamond. After all, he’s set his own bar pretty high.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when Trout says he practices robbing home runs.

“The key is during batting practice, to get a gauge in your mind of when you're going back on balls, on when to start jumping,” Trout said.

Trout has made several incredible homer-robbing catches throughout his career, but there is one that easily tops the list because of its iconic nature: an unforgettable play against the Orioles’ J.J. Hardy at Camden Yards on June 27, 2012.

With one out in the first inning, Hardy drove a Jered Weaver pitch deep to center. Trout, who was playing in his first full Major League season, knew he had a chance to do something special as he ran back toward the fence. But, as hard to believe as it might be given Trout’s all-world talent, he was hoping for a chance not just to rob a homer, but to earn his keep.

“Jered Weaver was on the mound, a veteran pitcher,” Trout said. “I was just trying to earn his respect as a young kid growing up.”

Wrap your head around that: Mike Trout trying to earn respect. But he, just like every other player in Major League history, has been there. In this instance, not only did he earn Weaver’s respect, but by the end of the season he was considered a serious AL MVP candidate, finishing runner-up to Miguel Cabrera.

But before winning the AL Rookie of the Year Award, before winning three MVP Awards and before being considered the best player in the game, Trout was rapidly approaching the center-field wall at Camden Yards with an eye toward establishing himself in the big leagues.

For Trout, the art of the home run robbery boils down to, more than anything else, one specific element.

“It’s all about timing,” Trout said. “A lot of people jump a little too late and get jammed up on the wall.”

Trout’s jump was not only on time, but it gave us one of the most aesthetically pleasing robberies in recent memory. He went seamlessly from his sprint into a leap, as Hardy’s shot was more of a line drive than a high fly ball, not affording Trout more time to measure everything up.

It was almost like Michael Jordan, the way Trout paused in midair ever so briefly but long enough that it was perceptible to the naked eye. He met the ball at the exact right time, snaring it while his left side collided with the fence. His body from the chest up was above the top of the Southwest Airlines sign on the wall when he made the snow cone catch.

Trout has since robbed several home runs in epic fashion, including one he specifically mentioned as a favorite: his catch to rob the Mariners’ Jesús Montero in Anaheim on Sept. 26, 2015, when he got his right foot into the wall and used his right hand to grab the top of it before reaching out on the backhand to grab what would surely have been a homer.

But the catch in Baltimore is Trout’s signature defensive play. And it didn’t just happen by accident.

“I think just going through your progression during BP helps,” he said.

Practice makes perfect. Even for Mike Trout.

Mookie Betts: ‘Pure instinct’
Pitchers appreciate home run robberies for obvious reasons. But sometimes there’s a little extra appreciation involved. Take, for instance, the case of Rich Hill, who was working on a two-hit shutout for the Red Sox against the Orioles at Fenway Park on Sept. 25, 2015.

With two outs in the ninth inning, Orioles slugger Chris Davis belted Hill’s 116th pitch of the game deep to right field. The right fielder was a 22-year-old Betts, playing in his first full Major League season.

Betts immediately turned to his right and started heading for the warning track, his eyes widening as he began “the calculus.”

“Timing up your steps early enough is key,” Betts said. “It’s very hard to do. I would say a majority of it is just pure instinct.”

As Edmonds said, you’ve also got to know your wall. In right field at Fenway, the wall in front of the bullpens is five feet high. The relatively short stature of the fence there presents unique challenges. Perhaps the toughest is the fact that there’s no safety net when you leap -- you could very well land on your head in Boston’s bullpen.

As he neared the wall, Betts turned his body around and took four stutter steps, bracing for the jump. And all bets were off.

“Once you get back there, you’ve gotta decide,” Betts said. “Are you gonna jump off one foot or two feet? Are you gonna jump into the wall or are you gonna jump and try to reach over the wall? Your jump is gonna depend on your timing.”

As the lower left side of his body hit the wall, Betts reached up and made an incredible catch. His impact with the wall caused him to flip over onto the bullpen side, but in a move indicative of his raw strength, he used his right hand to grab the fence on the field side to stop his momentum and pull himself back onto the warning track.

All while holding on to the baseball to end the game, giving Hill his first complete game in nearly a decade. It is Betts’ favorite home run robbery of the many he has on his lengthy Major League resume.

Many ways to make this breathtaking play
As you can see from the five examples above, there is more than one way to make a spectacular grab to steal a home run. There are several overlapping points of emphasis, of course -- timing, leaping ability, creativity, adaptability, fearlessness and instinct are among them.

But therein lies the beauty of this unparalleled baseball play: the diversity of players and methods that culminate in a heart-stopping moment unlike any other experienced on a baseball diamond.

MLB.com Angels beat reporter Rhett Bollinger contributed to this story.