Kirk Gibson's 1988 World Series Home Run - Aftermath

Aftermath

The home run was included as a finalist in a Major League Baseball contest to determine the sport's "Greatest Moment of All-Time." For years after the fact, it was regularly used in This Week in Baseball's closing montage sequence. An edited audio of Scully's 1988 call has been used in 2005 post-season action, in a TV ad featuring a recreational softball game, with a portly player essentially re-enacting that entire moment as he hits the softball over the right field fence to win the game. It was in competition on ESPN's SportsCenter for the Greatest Sports Highlight of All-Time.

The fate of the ball itself is unknown. According to Gibson, a woman sent him a picture of the bruise on her leg where the ball hit her, although no one has yet come forward with the ball. In fiction, a court struggle over the ownership of the ball was the primary plot of the June 29, 2011, episode of TNT legal drama Franklin & Bash.

Near the end of the Major League Baseball season in the fall of 2011, Chevrolet began airing commercials for their Diamond & Dream's Program, a giveaway designed to help the youth in their communities around the country. Prizes included a makeover for their baseball field. The commercials showed selected little league baseball players acting out some of baseball's greatest moments in history. One of them being Kirk Gibson's famous home run from the 1988 World Championship run of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The young boy acting out this moment could be seen running the bases, doing the same fist pump motion that Gibson was seen doing during his famous run around the bases.

The structure, tone, and overall style of Ernest Thayer's famous poem "Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888"—first published in 1888 and "the single most famous baseball poem ever written" according to the Baseball Almanac—was adapted by Michael J. Farrand in 2000 to create "The Man Who Gave All the Dreamers in Baseball Land Bigger Dreams to Dream" about the Gibson home run, but this time reversing the infamous outcome. This adaptation appears at the Baseball Almanac. Farrand's choice of poetic model was prompted by the observation of Mike Scioscia, then the Dodger catcher: "It was 'Casey at the Bat,' except this time Casey hits a home run." For his part, Gibson said: "It really was not that bad a pitch, and I put an ugly swing on it." In the words of the poem . .

Eck winds, curls, and releases the ball, all without a hitch

Gibby’s swing is something ugly, an army-wristy stab

His wrenching follow-through suggests he won’t survive the jab.