By Ryan Dahn
They called him the “Professional Hitter.” A backhanded complement, yes — but they were not wrong about his bat. When he connected with a fastball or a hanging slider with that gawky swing of his, boy, that ball would soar off his bat like no other.
Generously listed at five-foot-nine, 200 pounds, he never tried to hide his sole goal at the plate. “I’m not going to lie,” he once said, the night he hit his most famous bomb. “I try to hit home runs and that’s it.”
Virtually unknown to casual baseball fans, he played for twelve different big-league teams, sharing the record with three others. Cast off for damaged goods dozens of times, he now holds the record for most pinch-hit home runs in MLB history, with 23.
Matt Stairs retired last week at age 43, after nineteen seasons in the big leagues. He will never be inducted into the sacred halls of Cooperstown. Instead, the Professional Hitter will go down in history as the greatest journeyman hitter of all time.
When he went undrafted in 1989 — overlooked, as he would be his entire career — the Montreal Expos signed him as a second baseman, envisioning the rotund Stairs as a gritty middle infielder who would scatter singles across the outfield, leg out a dribbler or two, and maybe steal a few bases. All notions to this effect were disabused by the time he reached Triple-A. By age 28, Stairs had toiled in the minors for seven years, been to Japan and back, and been a member of three major league organizations — yet he had only seen action in 58 big-league games.
Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski claims that Stairs’ batting revelation came one day when he woke up in Edmonton with a legendarily bad hangover. Stairs simply looked down and swung that day, the story goes, as he was so sick he could do nothing else. That day he connected for four hits and a grand slam.
Gone were visions of the scrappy middle infielder. Enter the Wonder Hamster.
Called up for good by the Oakland Athletics in 1997, Matt Stairs the slugger smashed 27 bombs, posting an excellent .969 OPS. After Mark McGwire was traded in the middle of the 1997 season, Stairs’ squat body assumed McGwire’s beefy spot as the premier power hitter in the A’s lineup, a sight that must have shocked many old baseball hands. The perfect Moneyball player, Stairs did not have the toned physique, the beautiful swing of a traditional power hitter. He looked like a beer hockey player — which, to be sure, he was during the off seasons — like Joe Six-Pack, not one of the most feared hitters in the league. All Stairs was able to garner for his career 38-homer season in 1999 was a measly two votes in the American League MVP voting, good for 17th place, right behind Omar Vizquel.
Believing him to be past his expiration date, the A’s traded Stairs to the Chicago Cubs after a disappointing 2000 season, in which Stairs batted .227.
Thus began Stairs’ life as a baseball mercenary, a home-run-bat for hire.
Stairs hit bombs for many legendarily bad teams of the 2000s. 16 with the 106-loss 2002 Brewers, 20 with the 87-loss 2003 Pirates, then two-and-a-half years (and 46 dingers) with the woeful Kansas City Royals. In 2006 he played for three teams after being sent to Texas at the 2006 trade deadline and later being picked up on waivers where by Detroit. In 2007 with Toronto, Stairs saw 406 at-bats due to many injuries. He responded by rejuvenating his career, hitting 29 dingers and batting .289. The Blue Jays offered him a two-year deal in response. Toronto designated him for assignment on August 28, 2008, and the Phillies picked him up two days later, one day before the waiver trade deadline.
Suddenly, after toiling on horrendous teams for eight years, Matt Stairs found himself on a contender. As the Phils caught the Mets in the National League East for the second year in a row, Stairs warmed himself to the notoriously fickle Philadelphia fans through a series of clutch hits and home runs. A local Phillies blog quickly had T-Shirts printed up reading “In Case of Emergency, Use Stairs” which became common attire at Citizens Bank Park.
For the first time in eight years, Stairs was in the playoffs. His moment would in Game 4 of the 2008 National League Championship Series, with the Phillies leading the series 2-1.
With the score tied at 5 in the top of the eighth inning, Stairs entered the game. Battling his way to a 3-1 count, he took the same ungainly swing he had taken since that nightmarishly hungover day in Edmonton, putting his head down and aiming for the outfield fences, gambling that Dodgers closer Jonathan Broxton would throw him a fastball.
The heater came as predicted, an upper-nineties bullet from the young flamethrower, and Stairs turned on it as he had so many times in his career, sending it ten rows deep into right field, giving the Phillies a 7-5 lead that they would never relinquish, and unbelievably, implausibly, making Matt Stairs a postseason hero. “[G]etting your ass hammered by guys [in the dugout] — there’s no better feeling than that,” he said after the game.
The Dodgers would never recover from the blast, losing that night and two days later, going out quietly in five games. The Phillies would go on to win the World Series for only the second time in franchise history.
The Phillies brought back Stairs in 2009, but the magic was gone. He batted only .194 off the bench for the Phils, hitting five home runs, managing only one single during the 2009 World Series. Nevertheless, he will never have to buy another beer in Philadelphia.
After spending 2010 with the Padres, the Nationals invited Stairs to spring training this year, where he barely made the team. The old beer leaguer struggled from the onset in 2011. Hitting only .154 with zero home runs — “Let’s face it, I sucked this year,” he said of his performance — last week the Nationals designated him for assignment. Instead of trying to catch on with a potential MLB record 13th team, Stairs finally decided to hang up his cleats. Poetically, he ended his career with the same franchise he began with. He will retire with 265 homers, the most home runs ever hit by a player who played for more than ten different teams.
In another world, another universe, Stairs might be entering Cooperstown in 2016 on the back of 500+ home runs. Stairs was not called up for good until he was 28, and did not receive 500 big-league plate appearances in one season until the 1998 season, when he was 30. Most baseball players peak in their mid to late 20s — we will never know how many bombs Stairs could have hit if the Expos had not been convinced he was a second baseman. Perhaps Stairs’ name would be next to Frank Thomas’ — little squat Stairs next to The Big Hurt himself! — as one of the heaviest hitters of the 1990s.
In this world, though, Matthew Wade Stairs will go into history as the greatest journeyman slugger of all time.
I've read a lot of Matt Stairs articles in my life time. More than any three men should. But this by far is the best. I even own the "Use Stairs in Case of Emergency" T-Shirt. I became a Stairs fan for a very odd-yed-apropros reason. I'm a Chicago South Sider, and my dad had season tickets for the Sox, 1st row behind homeplate. Better seats than the mayor. He'd give the premier games, like Yankees, Red Sox, Cleveland (in those days) to others, and let us kids go see the lower place teams. We were kids, we just wanted to go to the games. Throughout my childhood, in several different uniforms, i always used to remember one man, and his gloriously pint stature wearing a grey uniform and occupying the visitors on deck circle. It was Stairs. Though he was not necessarily a "Sox-killer" I made up in my mind he was. Because he'd always be at the ballpark, whether he was with the Tigers, the Royals, Rangers, A's, ... and so on. Then I learned about his career, and about the man himself. He's my favorite kind of hero. A quiet, humble, unassuming hero. Cheers to Matt Stairs.
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