The history of Duane Kuiper’s forgotten home run in a Giants uniform

The story of longtime Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper’s lone MLB home run has long been a part of Bay Area lore, even if he hit it for Cleveland.

Every year on Aug. 29, the clip of the second baseman’s only home run is played on NBC Sports Bay Area, and it’s usually brought up that his longtime broadcast partner and friend Mike Krukow hit five career homers despite being a pitcher. The Giants have even given out a bobblehead of Kuiper in his red Cleveland uniform from the night of the homer.

This week, both Krukow and Kuiper are finalists for the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award, given annually to honor excellence in broadcasting. And while some of the most diehard Giants fans might think they know everything about their beloved duo, there are some things that have remained mostly secret.

One of those things? Kuiper actually hit two homers in a Giants uniform. They just happened in games that didn’t count. The first came in 1984, when the Giants played an exhibition game at Stanford.

The second? That came a full decade later … inside San Quentin State Prison. 

This is the story of how Kuiper, Krukow and a team of Giants Fantasy Campers went inside the walls of one of the most famous active prisons in the world for a day to play some baseball.

Back in 1993, Rev. Earl Smith was serving as both the chaplain for the San Francisco Giants and for San Quentin when he got the idea to build a baseball field inside the prison walls. In his memoir “Death Row Chaplain,” Smith wrote that he hoped baseball could be used as a vehicle to cool the prison’s racial tensions and be a key part of the rehabilitation process. 

Smith and some of the inmates built the field in nine months, he wrote. After holding tryouts in the summer of 1994, Smith sought out an opponent for the newly formed baseball team, which he called the Pirates. But finding a group willing to go inside the infamous facility proved challenging.

“It probably didn’t help that visiting players were informed by guards at the arrival gate that the [prison] administration wouldn’t negotiate for their release in a hostage situation,” Smith wrote.

Smith was close with then-KNBR host Ralph Barbieri, who brought Smith on to his radio show one day to discuss the San Quentin team, and advocate for an opponent. 

As luck would have it, Kuiper happened to be listening to the airwaves that day and immediately had an idea. Both Kuiper and Krukow had coached a few times at Giants Fantasy Camp, an annual weeklong baseball-playing experience where regular citizens can pay to get a taste of the big league life. 

It is through those camps that Kruk and Kuip met Kristen Collishaw, who was the Giants’ program coordinator at the time and had been running Fantasy Camp for a few years. This is where the story gets personal: Collishaw is also my godmother, and Kruk and Kuip have also known both of my parents, Michael and Angie Simon, through Fantasy Camps over the years. (Yes, both — my mother played college softball at Cal Poly and played at several Fantasy Camps. That’s a story for another time.) 

“There were always enough guys, and women like your mom, that were good enough that if you put the good ones together, you could put together a pretty good team,” Kuiper told me in a phone interview last month.

To pitch his idea, Kuiper called Collishaw, who was known by her maiden name Lichau at the time. She recalled to SFGATE that she was on board right away with the idea that the Fantasy Campers should be the ones to face off with the San Quentin Pirates. It “didn’t even probably take three days” to get a team together to head up to Marin County to play, she said; the group included Giants chief legal officer Jack Bair, my father, and Krukow and Kuiper as coaches. (One notable person declined: My mother, who was pregnant at the time, with me.)

By the time the scheduled game came around, actual MLB games were on hold. On Aug. 12, 1994, the players went on strike to push back against the owners’ desires to implement a salary cap. After a month without a breakthrough, MLB canceled its postseason and World Series on Sept. 14.

It meant that the San Quentin game on Oct. 8 was suddenly the only ballgame in town, a note that was mentioned in write-ups of the game in both the Marin Independent Journal newspaper and in San Quentin’s prison news outlet, the San Quentin News. (My father exchanged letters with the prison journalist shortly after the game to get his write-up, and still has a copy to this day.)

For many of the Fantasy Campers, it was the first time they had ever stepped foot inside of a prison or jail. That wasn’t the case for Krukow, whose father was a captain in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. 

“I had some expectation as to what I was going to get,” Krukow told me last week. “But all of those things did not prepare me for what we actually got.”

What they got was entry through the large iron doors into the oldest prison in California, one that predates the Civil War. “It took a little while to feel like we were playing a baseball game and you just weren’t in the prison,” said Michael Simon, aka my dad. “It’s a very haunting place.”

Krukow added, “You could feel the ghosts, there’s no doubt about it.”

Kuiper said seeing the ballpark, complete with a well-manicured field and a set of bleachers, “took my breath away, because when you think of a prison, you don’t think of a baseball park.”

Barbieri, the KNBR host, coached the Pirates, and Krukow and Kuiper coached the Giants. Collishaw and another female Giants employee were also in attendance. Collishaw told me that she didn’t think anything of her presence in the maximum-security men’s prison until the guards gave the two women white painter’s suits to wear in an attempt to downplay their femininity.

“Once we got in the yard and were sitting on the bench, we realized there was a reason they didn’t want us in anything girly,” Collishaw told SFGATE.

The game began after an inmate played the national anthem on an electric guitar; Independent Journal reporter Dave Albee wrote the musician “did his best Jimi Hendrix impression.” Smith’s memoir lays out the ground rules at San Quentin’s ballpark: Any fly ball that landed in the Native American reservation in right-center was an automatic home run. The “wall” in center field was actually just an orange traffic cone. And the umpires for the day were going to be clearly biased in favor of one team, because they were also inmates.

The game itself was mostly a normal baseball game — though Smith wrote that it was interrupted twice by emergency sirens that prompted everyone to drop to the ground. 

Bair, who was pitching for the Giants, took a measured approach. He had previously interned for the public defender’s office in Dallas, Texas, and thus had been inside a correctional facility plenty of times before, he told me. That knowledge helped shape his pitching plan for the day. 

“I didn’t want to hit somebody. I had it in my head, ‘You just don’t throw inside.’ I didn’t trust my control well enough to pitch high and tight,” said Bair, who allowed one run in his one inning of work. “I was really trying to throw the ball over the plate or on the outside of the plate and keep it low — which is probably not a bad strategy for pitching, anyway.”

My dad still has the box score, which he dug out for me last month. It shows the teams trading runs in the early innings before the Pirates took the lead thanks to a two-run third and three more runs in the sixth. The Giants made it close in the eighth with two runs to cut it to 7-4 before my dad took the mound for his lone inning of pitching, dancing around two errors to keep it a three-run game headed to the ninth.

That’s when Kuiper went to the plate to pinch-hit. It had been nearly a decade since Kuiper’s last MLB game, and he’d famously ended a 12-year MLB career with just one homer. (Because his two-run bomb at Stanford came in an exhibition game, it didn’t count in his official career total, though it was memorialized in the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle and in a Sports Illustrated piece on Kuiper’s lack of power a month later.)

More than 10 years later, Kuiper was back in a Giants uniform, this time in a prison. He was on the receiving end of some chirping from the inmates, whom Kuiper said “certainly knew I only hit one home run.” Kuiper said he looked for a pitch inside and “cheated like crazy.” 

On the swing, he “got both cheeks into it,” according to Krukow, to send it over the right field wall for a homer.

“It was awesome,” Krukow told SFGATE. “If you know Kuip, you can’t even be in awe. You kind of come to expect that kind of stuff from him.”

Krukow pinch-hit after Kuiper, but he struck out. He remembers the Pirates pitcher being ecstatic over getting him to strike three.

“You’d have thought he’d closed out the last out of the World Series,” Krukow said. “It meant more to him, to that team, to have struck out an ex-big leaguer. It was amazing how much that whole day affected these guys in such a positive way.”

The next two batters after Krukow grounded out, ending the game as a 7-5 win for the home team.

The game was the first of many that the San Quentin Pirates would play against teams from outside the prison walls, with Smith writing they would eventually play up to 40 games a year. The team eventually changed its name to the Giants when the MLB team donated some uniforms, a name that has stuck to this day. 

That first game, though, still stands out. Whenever my family drove by the prison, my father would tell me about the two games he played inside the walls. When I asked him about it again for this story, he called the experience “eye-opening and thought-provoking.”

Even for Krukow and Kuiper, who each had decades of big league experience, the day they spent inside San Quentin playing the sport they love is a day they cherish. 

“That ballpark and this team was their life,” Krukow said. “It was really unbelievable to see how baseball affected these guys. You never expect to find a team that loves the game more than you do. And I honestly could say that this game of baseball meant more to them than it did any of us. It was their life.”

Kuiper added, “Everybody, win, lose or draw, had an experience that would be one of their most unique experiences of their life if they truly love baseball. I remember driving home thinking, ‘You know what? This was a great day.’”