Major League Baseball Records for Allowing Home Runs

There are several Hall of Fame Major League Baseball players that have achieved some notoriety for all the wrong reasons, such as surrendering home runs. Of the top ten pitchers at allowing home runs to fly out of the ballpark all time, half a dozen are enshrined in Cooperstown. Robin Roberts, the career leader in allowing the long ball, served up over five hundred homers in his almost twenty years in baseball, while the single season leader, Bert Blyleven, while not a Hall of Famer, managed to eclipse Roberts' single campaign standard of 46 when he turned and saw an even fifty balls leave the grounds after he threw a pitch in 1986.

Roberts stands alone on the career homers allowed roster, with a 21 dinger cushion on the number two hurler, the long time Cubbie, Ferguson Jenkins. Roberts toiled mostly for the Phillies of the Fifties and early Sixties, leaving baseball after the 1966 campaign. He was a power pitcher with great control, with a 2.61 strikeout to walk ratio, leading the senior circuit in this statistic five times. Roberts also led the National League in giving up the long ball five times, with his 46 in 1956 the gold standard until Blyleven came along and threw his 50 in 1986, a span of thirty years. Roberts entered the Hall of Fame in 1976, a six-time twenty game winner with 286 lifetime wins.

Third behind Jenkins, who pitched for a number of squads for 19 seasons and led his leagues seven times in home runs allowed, is the knuckleballer Phil Niekro, who fell just a pair of homers short of Fergie with 482. Niekro four times was the culprit when it came to giving up the highest homer totals in a season. Fourth all time is Don Sutton, who in 23 campaigns never once was a league leader in this category, despite watching 472 men circle the bases after clobbering one of his offerings. Lefty Frank Tanana is the first southpaw on this list, as the man with the 240-236 career won-loss record allowed 448 homers in 21 seasons.