What elevates a home run from being merely an exciting baseball moment, to an iconic baseball moment? There are many factors involved, and these factors elevate certain homers in a way that doesn’t always seem to make purely rational sense. Carlton Fisk’s Game 6 homer in 1975 didn’t end the World Series, and it wasn’t even hit for the team that won the World Series. And yet, it is far more iconic than Joe Carter’s 1993 homer, which did both.
The fact is that iconic moments are born of a number of different dynamics, including the people involved, the stakes, and the aesthetics of the homer itself, amongst other factors.