Going into the 1975 MLB season, baseball realized it was on the cusp of scoring run number 1,000,000. Now whether that was true or not isn’t officially known because records weren’t exactly kept too well in the late 1800s, but considering baseball would score 1,000,000 runs at some point, why not turn it into a promotion? With the help of the watch company Seiko and the chocolatier Tootsie Roll, that’s just what happened. Who would score the Millionth Run???
Tuesday, September 8th at 6:40p – Andrew Painter v Hayden Wesneski (R)
Citizen’s Bank Park – Philadelphia, PA
Wednesday, September 9th at 6:40p – Cristopher Sanchez v Hunter Brown (R)
Thursday, September 10th at 1:05p – Zack Wheeler v Cristian Javier
Two contests were to be held simultaneously. Fans could predict who would score the lucky run and win $10,000. Would this be divided up among all fans who won or would it be a lottery of winners? Who knows! The other contest was for the players. The lucky winner would receive a Seiko watch, $10,000 for charity, and 1 million tootsie rolls. In order to keep things official, counters were put in every MLB stadium to tally up all the runs live.
Going into the 1975 season, MLB calculated that 997,513 runs had been scored so it wasn’t going to take too long to get to the magic number. On May 4, the tally was up to 999,969. It was the day and everyone was aware. Shocking by today’s standards, the players were very aware of the mark and were all vying to be the guy to make history.
The day was a Sunday, so there was a full slate of early games beginning at 1p. The games we care about for this story though were going on in Cincinnati with the Reds playing the Braves and in San Francisco where the Giants were playing the Astros. The Giants/Astros game was actually moved up and started early due to a rainout the previous night. Over in Chicago, Claudell Washington of the A’s scored run 999,999 against the White Sox and all the counters were down to their last number.
In San Francisco, the Astros’ Bob Watson took a walk and stole 2nd base bringing Milt May to the plate. At the same time, Dave Concepcion was hitting for the Reds. At almost the same moment, both May and Concepcion hit homeruns. Knowing that anything could be happening anywhere in baseball at the time while also having no idea of each other, both Watson and Concepcion ran home as fast as possible. Apparently, Watson beat Concepcion to run number 1,000,000 by just 12 seconds.
Bob Watson was thrilled to get his watch. The rest of the prize though, not so much. You may be wondering what was so bad about receiving $10,000 to give to charity. Well, for some reason, the cash was not given to him in, well, cash. Instead, he received 1,000,000 pennies!!! He donated the change to charity, but who does that? As for the 1,000,000 Tootsie Rolls, you are probably thinking his kids had to be excited about that one. Nope, they were allergic to chocolate. He had to donate the chocolatey bounty to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America.
Ridiculous.
Photo: It’s AI generated. I don’t like doing that, but there was no good picture available for this one.
Sources: Big Hair and Plastic Grass by Dan Epstein and The Athletic
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