Jim Flinn was 10 years old when he witnessed a Frank Howard home run that stuck with him forever. Decades later, he emailed The Washington Post's Jesse Dougherty, hoping to learn whether his memory matched reality.
This memory of a Frank Howard home run, vivid and bright, will live in his mind forever. But is it true?Jim Flinn emailed Jesse Dougherty, The Washington Post's Nationals beat writer, asking for his help in solving a baseball mystery. Inside Jim Flinn’s memory, May 11, 1969, is a web of fuzzy details, a kaleidoscope of greens and grays, aside from the moment that couldn’t be more clear.
So here was Flinn, urging me to find Howard and others who were in Sick’s Stadium that afternoon. It was bat day. That’s how Jim and his brothers, Stephen and Dan, convinced their dad to take them. They would get a cheap toy, and their father would save money on gear for the playground. Everybody won.Jim remembers that they were late and that Dan, the youngest, rode on his dad’s shoulders to avoid paying for a fifth ticket.
, and his teammates and opponents can still see many of them, soaring into orbit, as if the 6-foot-7, 255-pound Howard was able to shrink stadiums with his bat. Bosman, once Howard’s roommate, mentioned one blast Howard clocked off Tommy John at RFK Stadium in 1966, then another off Mickey Lolich that sailed clear out of Tiger Stadium in 1968. Hannan, the Senators’ starter, spent seven whole minutes recalling Howard homers in great specifics yet didn’t remember a moonshot in Seattle.
“No, I don’t recall that one,” he said, knocking the question aside. “But I do remember the one he hit to left-center. My god.” “When you see something special, it has an impact,” said Stephen Flinn, Jim’s brother. “And I can’t think of any other image from my childhood that really stands out in that way.”
“I had to know.” That’s what Jim repeated when asked why he emailed, why he collected every scrap of that day, why he felt the need to reconstruct a play from 52 years ago, a homer against a one-off team that left for Milwaukee after that season.
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