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In baseball parlance, an inside-the-park home run or "leg home run" is a play where a hitter scores a home run without hitting the ball out of play.

To score an inside-the-park home run the player must run, round, and touch all four bases before a fielder tags him out, the same as he would do for a double or triple. This is a rare event, generally occurring only a handful of times during any given season. The play requires both a fast base runner and often some sort of fielding mishap by the defense, or a strange bounce in the outfield. If the fielder commits an error during the act, however, the play is not scored as a home run, but rather advancing on an error. The classic situation is when two outfielders collide on their way toward receiving a ball hit to the warning track; the missed ball then bounces first off the track and then low off of the fence high and far away from the fallen fielders. Another situation is when the ball tips off of the glove of a diving fielder away from the other fielder.

Of the 154,483 home runs hit from 1951 - 2000, 975 (about one in every 158) were inside the park. The percentage has dwindled over the years with the growing propensity toward smaller parks.

• Major League - Sam Crawford - 51
• National League - Tommy Leach - 49
• American League - Ty Cobb - 46
• Major League post 1950 - Willie Wilson - 13

• Major League and National League - Sam Crawford - 12 - 1901
• American League - Ty Cobb - 9 - - 1909

• Major League and National League - Tom McCreery - 3 - 1897
• American League - 17 tied - 2
• Ichiro Suzuki is the only player to ever hit an inside the park home run in an All-Star game. He did it in the 2007 All-Star game in San Francisco, California.

• Roberto Clemente, one of the greatest outfielders in Baseball history, is also the only player in baseball history to have hit a walk-off inside-the-park grand slam.
• Jimmy Sheckard completed a phenomenal feat in 1901, hitting inside-the-park grand slams in consecutive games on consecutive days with the Brooklyn Superbas (later the Brooklyn Dodgers). Sheckard is the only person in Major League Baseball history to do so.
• Ed Delahanty of the Philadelphia Phillies, on July 13, 1896, hit four home runs in one game (itself quite a rare feat), two of them were inside-the-park home runs. This event is the only time any homers in a four-homer game have been inside-the-park.^[1]
• With his inside the park homer on June 17, 2007, Prince Fielder became the 3rd largest player to hit an inside the park home run, at 260 pounds. His homer came when Outfielder Lew Ford of the Minnesota Twins lost a ball in the roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.
• During the 2007 MLB All-Star Game, Ichiro Suzuki hit the first inside-the-park home run in All-Star game history. ^[2]
• The last to do it was Garrett Atkins of the Colorado Rockies, who did it against the San Diego Padres on Sept. 23, 2007. It was the first of his career.

An inside-the-park grand slam is the same event but, like a grand slam, features the bases loaded for an inside-the-park home run. There have been 40 inside-the-park grand slams in Major League Baseball since 1950 and only eight since 1990 (as of 2007). Honus Wagner had the most in MLB history with five.

1. ^ 4 Home Runs in One Game – Baseball-Almanac.com
2. ^ Brock, Corey (2007-07-10). Ichiro runs into record book. MLB.com. Retrieved on 2007-07-10.

• Baseball Almanac Records