Homer History: Shane Robinson's postseason blast no one saw coming

In our Homer History series, writers re-tell the stories of memorable home runs from their perspective. In this installment, Yahoo Sports MLB columnist Tim Brown remembers the game in which little Shane Robinson came up big for the Cardinals against the Dodgers in the 2013 postseason.

The best home run is the one you never saw coming. The best home run challenged everything you thought you knew about the game and then everything you knew, if anything, about science. The best home run rose up from the actual intentions of a 5-foot-9, 165-pound outfielder and landed in the seats – on a hop, technically – because the game isn’t always settled in the moment of contact.

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Maybe not the best home run, exactly. But certainly among the most charming, and on a short list of the least predictable, and precisely why this particular home run has settled into my heart as one of happiest collisions of bat, ball and career I’ve witnessed.

Maybe you’ve not heard much if anything of Shane Robinson. Well, you and about 50,000 people at Dodger Stadium that night in October 2013.

There wasn’t much reason to know him. Robinson was an about-to-be-29-year-old fourth-ish outfielder (with Allen Craig) on a St. Louis Cardinals roster with outfielders Matt Holliday, Carlos Beltran and Jon Jay. Yadier Molina was their best player. Adam Wainwright won 19 games. This was Mike Matheny’s second year on the top step, Albert Pujols’ second year in Anaheim and, mysteriously, Craig’s last as a productive hitter.

Along comes Game 4 of the National League championship series, Cardinals vs. Dodgers. The Cardinals lead, two games to one, having beaten Zack Greinke in 13 innings in Game 1 and Clayton Kershaw, 1-0, in Game 2, and then were shut out in Game 3. Game 4 was pivotal – or appeared so – because Greinke and Kershaw were circling back for Games 5 and 6. Along comes Shane Robinson, the former college player of the year at Florida State and fifth-round draft pick from 2006 who’d slugged .327 in 342 big-league at-bats over parts of five seasons.

[Previously in Homer History: Bryce Harper and the home run almost no one saw]

He’d pinch-hit in the seventh inning for Seth Maness with one out and nobody on and the Cardinals ahead, 3-2. He’d face Dodgers reliever J.P. Howell, who’d allowed two home runs in 62 innings, one to Carlos Quentin and the other to Joey Votto. He’d stand three-hundred-and-some-odd feet from the left-field fence at Dodger Stadium, that might as well be a thousand-and-something, and try to redirect a ball through the infield, and try to score on somebody else’s hit, because that’s what the game called for and that’s who Shane Robinson was and that’s where the whole thing got so damned cool. Not that very many might remember, but Shane Robinson homered. He hasn’t homered in the big leagues since, in another 240 at-bats worth, and has journeyed from St. Louis to Minnesota to, as of a couple months ago, Cleveland, and back there somewhere is still the home run that reminded me, you know, this can be a helluva game if your heart’s in the right place and you just keep showing up.

The count was 1-and-0 after Howell threw a sinker. And this is where it got interesting for Robinson and Howell. See, three nights before, in Game 2, Robinson pinch-hit against Howell, got a sinker for strike one, then smoked a changeup on the outer half, which would have been his first career postseason hit except for the fact he’d pulled it foul. (He flied out on the next pitch.)

“Mabes,” Robinson told Cardinals hitting coach John Mabry the next day, “I just missed that changeup.”

“You put a good swing on it,” Mabry said.

“If I face him again,” Robinson said, “I’m gonna cheat up a little in the box.”

So as Robinson walked from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box late in Game 4, he reminded himself about the changeup. After that sinker from Howell to start the at-bat, he knew what was coming.

“I moved my back foot up maybe two inches,” he recalled more than two years later. “I don’t think [catcher A.J.] Ellis realized it. I was literally sitting on that pitch.

Howell feathered a changeup, middle-away. Robinson threw all of himself at it. Back foot came off the ground and everything. The ball shot toward left field. And Robinson, having gotten every bit of that baseball square on the bat barrel, did what you’d presume he’d do. He took off running as hard as he could.

“Inside of me,” he said, “I was going nuts.”

Howell whipped his head around. Couldn’t be. The shortstop, Nick Punto, did a half-squat, half-limbo thing, begging the ball to stay in. No. The left fielder, Carl Crawford, sidesaddle staggered back a few steps and stopped. Staggered back a few steps more. Stopped. Staggered to the wall. Looked up. Flinched. Twenty or so feet left of the 375-foot sign, that baseball clanked off the top of the wall and bounded five rows into the bleachers, and everyone stared at each other like, C’mon, while Ernie Johnson – on the broadcast – announced, “And that ball … is gone,” the lengthy pause less for effect, it seemed, than to proof-read what he was about to say.

“I wasn’t 100 percent sure,” Robinson said that night, which would explain the full-on sprint.

[Elsewhere: Check out the Dunk History series on Yahoo Sports]

He called his father, Daniel, a charge nurse at a hospital outside Tampa, and his father told him what it looked like on television, how Dodger Stadium went from loud to library, and how proud he was.

“The stage, coming off the bench in the seventh inning, after traveling,” Robinson said, “all of the elements that came into it that I think about. I was never an everyday guy there. And now the more time goes on the more I realize how difficult that was to do in that situation.”

I loved that home run. I loved it because it didn’t win the game or set a record or extend a legacy, but it did bury the dagger and it did make a guy trying like hell to survive the game want to call his dad. I loved it because they’re not all 6-foot-4 with 19-inch biceps and shady friends. Sometimes they’re a guy making himself sick on protein shakes just to maintain 170 pounds. I loved it because 25 years to the day after Kirk Gibson hit his most famous home run at Dodger Stadium, Shane Robinson stood in about the same spot and swung a bat and had himself the moment he’ll never forget.

The one nobody ever saw coming.

PREVIOUSLY IN HOMER HISTORY
- The night a hobbled Kirk Gibson broke my heart (by Mike Oz)
- Cal Ripken Jr. wowed us yet again on Iron Man night (by Lauren Shehadi)
- When Albert Pujols silenced Minute Maid Park (by Jeff Passan)
- Bill Mazeroski's great walk-off World Series winner (by Kevin Iole)
- The Big Papi grand slam that still haunts Detroit (by Al Toby)
- That time Joe Blanton hit a home run in the World Series (by Sam Cooper)
- When Jim Leyritz halted hopes of a Braves dynasty (by Jay Busbee)
- Bryce Harper and the home run almost no one saw (by Chris Cwik)

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