Who was the only person in MLB history to hit two inside the park home runs in one game?

Answer 1

I don't know, but I seriously doubt that there was only one. Yes, an inside-the-park home run is rare, but it didn't use to be. In the early days of baseball, the dimensions and requirements of baseball fields were not standardized to the degree they are today. Some fields were huge. Others were a lot bigger to left field than to right, or vice versa. Many were not level, but sloped. Some had OBSTACLES, like train tracks, statues, or even trees. Some had no "fences" at all, and therefore the ball never technically left the "field of play", no matter how far it was hit. In these conditions, it was very easy for a batted ball to get "lost", or to roll away to some remote part of the field where it took a long time for a fielder to retrieve it. In the meantime, the batter was running the bases, and could easily make it 360 feet in the amount of time it took for a fielder to retrieve (or find) the ball. So, "inside-the-park" home runs were, if not quite common, certainly not very rare. So it does not seem very likely to me that ONLY ONE player ever hit more than one of them in the same game. But I may be wrong. On the other hand, if you limited your question to the "modern era" of baseball, then I would find it believable that only one player ever did it. According to Baseball Almanac, a player has hit two inside the park home runs in a game 51 times and one player, Tom McCreery of the 1897 Louisville Colonels, hit 3 inside the park home runs in a single game. Since 1939, this has only occurred three times; Hank Thompson of the New York Giants in 1950, Dick Allen of the Chicago White Sox in 1972, and Greg Gagne of the Minnesota Twins in 1986.