Carson McCusker is a man who is defined by his height—80 inches, to be exact, but who’s counting? If someone knows the name Carson McCusker, they know it because he’s 6-foot-8. He’s tied for the tallest hitter in MLB history, and only eight pitchers have ever been taller.

For an exceptionally tall person, it’s hard to have the fine motor control needed to succeed in baseball. That McCusker ever made the big leagues is an accomplishment in itself, even if it was brief, and with his intentions to play baseball in Asia after his release from Minnesota, it’s unclear that he will ever don an MLB uniform again.

But even if that doesn’t happen, it did happen. He had 30 big-league plate appearances. He was no Moonlight Graham, no 2021 Drew Maggi. He got his moment in the sun, regardless of how short that moment was.

And he earned it. He did it the hard way. McCusker went undrafted in 2021 and signed with the Tri-City Valleycats of the independent Frontier League. Thousands of men choose to try to keep the dream alive with a couple of years playing in front of a couple of thousand fans every couple of nights, somewhere in rural America.

Really, McCusker’s story is a piece of Americana legend. He was a larger-than-life, Paul Bunyan-like character who did one thing well—hitting the ball a country mile—hoping he could hit it just far enough to get a chance. He left his arid town out west—Sparks, Nevada—to enroll at a community college in Folsom, California (yes, where the county prison of Johnny Cash fame lies), before transferring to Oklahoma State. After his draft disappointment, he found himself in Upstate New York, playing indy ball, trying to put one over the Adirondacks to get his shot.

McCusker’s dream was eventually realized.

Each year, several players are purchased out of independent baseball by some MLB team, and stashed away in some low-level affiliate. McCusker joined the Single-A Fort Myers Mighty Mussels in 2023 as a 25-year-old, nearly four years older than the average player at the level, both he and the Twins hoping that he could hit just enough moonshots off opponents who couldn’t legally drink to justify moving him up the ladder. 

And Baseball’s Paul Bunyan kept marching, hitting enough tape-measure shots to go from Folsom to Stillwater, from Troy to Fort Myers, from Cedar Rapids to Wichita before finally arriving in the Twin Cities by the end of 2024. It’s remarkable, really, that the mountain of a man was able to scale four levels of minor-league baseball in just over a calendar year, two years after every team passed on drafting him at least 20 times.

But once you’re in St. Paul, you’re almost in Minneapolis.

Blast after blast, the big dude dinged enough dongs to put himself on the radar for a call-up. But even the best stories need a little luck. He got his call in May 2025, because of a rash of injuries to Minnesota’s outfield, less than two years after he was first plucked out of the Frontier League. He had his shot.

It was a narrow one—perhaps too narrow a shot for a man of his frame.

In his first stint with Minnesota, he received six plate appearances across nine games, finally achieving his first hit. It didn’t land in the parking lot, merely a blooper into right field, minutes before being demoted back to Triple A. But the lid was off. He’d seen one fall in a big-league stadium. Maybe, next time, the towering home runs would come.

Few opportunities to hit those bombs materialized for the man whose future relied so heavily on them.

In mid-September, after much of the Twins’ talent had been sent off to teams with playoff dreams that Minnesota no longer had, McCusker was given the green light on a 3-0 count, and he uncorked that long swing of his.

With men on first and second, the ball flew off the bat to dead center at 102 miles per hour, soaring through a windy Minnesota night sky—and fell to the earth 402 feet later, directly in front of the 403 sign on the outfield fence.

Just inches from becoming one of just a few thousand players to hit an MLB home run, the Kid Who Only Hit Homers’ fly ball was knocked down and died on the track, marked F-8 like any other. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and there’s no fanfare for almost leaving the yard.

But that’s as close as he ever got. The man who is nearly ubiquitously defined by his height came up inches short of doing what every little boy dreams of doing someday.

It’s heartbreaking.

And it’s beautiful.