Dave Winfield is getting a statue dedication … in Alaska

The Hall of Famer once hit a monstrous homer off a Fairbanks curling club

May 1st, 2024

Matt Monagan (@MattMonagan)

During his 22-year playing career, Dave Winfield made milestones all over North America.

He made his first All-Star Game while playing in San Diego. He won a World Series in Toronto. He notched his 3,000th hit in his home state of Minnesota. He earned a Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown.

But as his peers routinely remind him, Winfield never got a statue in any one of these places. Not in his hometown of St. Paul. Not in San Diego, where fans overwhelmingly support one. Not in any of the five other cities he made his home during his decorated baseball life.

Eventually, Fairbanks, Alaska, got word of Winfield’s missing distinction: A town where a college-aged Winfield once mashed a 500-foot home run off the building of a curling club. And this week, the town announced it will be presenting the Hall of Famer with a giant bronze likeness of his own.

“As we’re talking now, when I was 18 or 19 years old, I never imagined that people would still recall, remember, document what I did,” Winfield said in a press conference on Tuesday. “To be honored like this, it’s a wonderful thing. I look forward to bringing my family to a place that really made a difference in my life.”

Yes, for a couple of memorable summers during his years at the University of Minnesota, Dave Winfield played for the Alaska Goldpanners of Fairbanks. A team, and a league, where a young Barry Bonds, Randy Johnson and Bill “Spaceman” Lee once roamed.

Winfield took pontoon planes out to secluded lakes to catch enormous pike, he lived in a small log cabin with a host family and he worked at a local furniture store — pulling lamps and chairs off the shelves for customers. That is, until, he urged the coach to place him somewhere a bit safer.

“I said, ‘Coach, man, I need an executive position,'” Winfield laughed. “‘I got a $100,000 arm,’ I remember telling him. So, the next year I went up there, I cut the grass and lined the field which was right behind the home that I stayed at.”

Amazingly, for a guy that ended up compiling more than 450 home runs and 3,000 hits in his big league career, Winfield’s college coach only saw his 6-foot-6, 200-pound star athlete as a pitcher. He wouldn’t hit at Minnesota until his senior year. But during that first summer in Alaska, after some urging from Winfield and a few great BP sessions, renowned coach Jim Dietz gave him a shot. Fairbanks is where his career “took a turn” and he became the hitter we all knew during his MLB days.

He put up some good numbers at the plate for the Goldpanners, but his most famous moment — the one depicted in the statue and still remembered in the 32,000-person town so many decades later — is a giant home run over the left-field fence. More than 50 years later, Winfield tells the story of the long ball like it happened yesterday. He was put in to hit for Bob Boone, who had been signed by a big league club.

“I was put in to pinch-hit,” Winfield recalled. “The bases were loaded. The pitcher pitching to me fell behind, three balls, no strikes. The manager for the other team walked almost to the baseline and told the pitcher, ‘Throw the ball over the plate, he’s just a pitcher!’ Shouldn’t have done that. Next ball was a fastball and it started high and left the ballpark high.”

“If you go to Google Earth and you use the measurement tool, you’ll get 480 feet,” Lance Parrish, a Fairbanks community leader who first initiated the statue idea, said. “If it hit the bottom of the curling club or hit the top, it’s over 500 feet. So, it’s somewhere between 480 and 500 feet. But the distance was never the legend. That it hit the curling club was the legend. And it was a legend. It’s the first thing that came to my mind when [Winfield] was being teased for not having a statue.

“I knew that I had to capture the energy,” Price said of his statue and the home run. “You have an inanimate object that somehow has to have this motion and energy behind it. I wanted to capture, kind of the follow-through. You know, which is the vision. That part where Dave is looking up. Like Dave said, ‘It started out high and it kept going high.’ That’s what I wanted to capture. And it was just an honor to be able to get it to that point where, when we showed it to Dave and his representative, and they said, ‘Yup, that’s it.’ Yes, home run, baby.”

The 8-foot tall, 500-pound statue will, quite appropriately, be placed near its landing spot at the foot of the still-existing Fairbanks Curling Club. There will be a special unveiling ceremony before this June’s Midnight Sun Baseball Game — a “high noon at midnight” classic that’s been played without any artificial light for the last 119 years. Winfield will be in attendance with his family and will deliver the game’s ceremonial first pitch.

“I look forward to going back to Alaska,” Winfield said. “Like I said, it was a turning point in my baseball career. An enjoyable time in my life. I look forward to this summer.”