Chuck Cecil is a former Brookings Register columnist and a current member of the Brookings County Historical Society.

Ted Williams, later a Boston Red Sox player and Major League Baseball Hall of Famer, hit the longest home run ever in Brookings. 

No one measured it. No one alive today can take you to the exact location of home plate at long-gone Hillcrest Field, now Hillcrest Park. And no one has measured other home runs since then at either that field or the city’s other diamonds.

 Plenty of people saw it happen in 1938. With fewer Sunday distractions then, grandstands at baseball games were always full and fans were rowdy. 

 Alvin Ponto, one of the famous baseball Pontos, who lived and farmed south of Brookings, played in that game. He took time in 1976 to jot down his remembrances of baseball in the county and area and he mentioned William’s homer. His remembrances are in the Brookings County Museum Archives. 

Ponto was playing right field for the Brookings Cubs that sunny day in 1938.

Brookings’ Dutch Thornton started things off with a home run. Two more Brookings runs put the locals on top 3-2 by the seventh. A Minneapolis Miller runner was on base. Then Williams, age 20, came to bat. 

Colman’s famous pitcher Gary Hertz had just relieved Cub Stu Holdhusen, who was also a Jackrabbit baseball great. Home plate was somewhere south of what is today the horseshoe pitching court, maybe around where the nice new pickleball courts are today. 

 Williams swung at a Hertz pitch, connected solidly and sent one almost straight west into right field and over the head of right fielder Ponto.

“It was the hardest hit ball I ever saw in my life,” Ponto remembered. Fans figured it must have been 40 feet in the air as it cleared the outfield fence and landed a few feet east, near where the swimming pool is today. 

The Cubs lost the game, 4-3. 

 Another famous professional baseball player who pitched at the Hillcrest diamond in those days was Hall of Famer LeRoy “Satchel” Paige

Ponto wrote that organized baseball in Brookings got started in 1904, although earlier games were played in town, as well as in fields and cow pastures throughout the county. Nearly every county town, and even some townships, had baseball teams. 

The Brookings City team was called the Reds until 1934. During the Great Depression, the team’s uniforms were near tatters. A collection was taken downtown, and a hat was passed at games. But times were tough. Not much was raised, so someone wrote to the Chicago Cubs, and Brookings got a deal on a used set of old Cubs uniforms.

With one proviso.

The city had to name its team the Cubs because that was what was stitched on the donated uniforms. 

 And today, baseball fans root for the Brookings Cubs. 

Chuck Cecil is a former Register columnist and longtime newspaperman. He now serves on the board of the Brooking County History Museum.