I was there that day, my then girlfriend and I had arrived a little late and scalped tickets in the lower deck, behind 1st, for $10. Awesome display by everyone, balls flying everywhere. The really impressive shots were by Juan Gonzalez and Frank Thomas, hitting these screaming lasers into the stands in left.

Gonzalez hit a ball off the facing of the 3rd deck, out in left center. I had tickets for the 1st game back after the break and was actually sitting up in that section and it was maybe even more impressive to get that perspective. A long damn way away from home plate.

One of the most fun days I've ever had in a mlb stadium.

But that was most likely STEROID-FUELLED!!! Don't you feel betrayed that your fun was somehow not real?

Practice? We puttin' up plaques cuz of what a guy did in practice? We puttin' up plaques for what guy did practicing for a practice?

I think it's unbelievably impressive that Griffey could hit a baseball to the precise spot where there was a plaque with his name on it.

I was working for the Orioles that day, in the scoreboard box. I was one of the guys who was responsible for posting the IBM Tale of the Tape distances. If you don't know better, you might think that because of the association of the high-tech IBM with the HR distances, it's all done scientifically. In fact, we had a chart of the park with distances to certain spots and we estimated how far the ball went based on where it landed.

JuanGon was easily the most impressive of the bunch that day. Yes, Griffey's apparently hit the Warehouse, but Lord knows how far Gonzalez's shot would have gone had there not been a 3rd deck in the way.

I wasn't there that night, but early in 1994 I was at a Sunday afternoon game in April where the Orioles were 3 runs ahead of the Mariners going into the top of the 8th. Jamie Moyer loaded the bases with nobody out to bring up Griffey, and Moyer was replaced by a lefthanded batting practice pitcher named Brad Pennington.

First pitch: a wild pitch that made it a 2 run game.

Second pitch: Griffey hit a home run so goddam long that the entire Camden Yards hardly even knew how to react (shocked silence? loud booing? respectful admiration?) , although it eventually settled on just booing Pennington out of the game and back to the minors. That turned out to be the last pitch he threw in the Majors all year, thank God.

And right then I turned to my wife and said "that motherfucker is the best player I've ever seen, bar none. Better than Mantle." And at the time that didn't seem like all that ridiculous an exaggeration. Griffey is one of the greatest "what might have beens" in history. To bad he came down with that Pete Reiser syndrome.

"that ############ is the best player I've ever seen, bar none. Better than Mantle."

That quote is awesome.