Bob Horner, the third baseman who was the No. 1 overall pick in the 1978 MLB Draft, hit a home run off a Hall of Famer in his very first major league game and spent nine seasons as the cornerstone of the Atlanta Braves’ lineup alongside Dale Murphy, died on Tuesday May 26, 2026. He was 68 years old.
The Atlanta Braves announced his death, noting they had been informed by his wife Chris. He died in Texas, where he had spent his post-playing days with his family. No cause of death was reported.
The Braves chose the framework for their tribute carefully. “Bob Horner built a career out of being first,” the team’s statement read. They were right. He was the first overall pick.
He was the first Braves draftee to go directly from the draft to the major leagues without a single day of minor league ball. He was the first Atlanta player in the modern era to hit four home runs in a single game.
A decade of firsts, built by a man with one of the most compact and powerful swings the National League saw in the early 1980s.
He is survived by his wife Chris and their sons Tyler and Trent.
From Junction City To Arizona State To The Show
Bob Horner was born in Junction City, Kansas on August 6, 1957, and became the best college baseball player in the country before he ever threw on a professional uniform.
At Arizona State, he set what were then the records for career home runs and single-season home runs, hit .357 for his career and was the MVP of the 1977 College World Series.
He was so good in college that when the NCAA instituted the Golden Spikes Award in 1978, the honor designed to recognize college baseball’s best player, the equivalent of football’s Heisman Trophy, Horner won the first one ever given.
The Atlanta Braves selected him with the No. 1 overall pick in the June 1978 draft.
They had been watching closely enough that they did not feel they needed to confirm what they already knew by sending him to the minor leagues.
He signed. He reported. He made his major league debut on June 16, 1978, exactly ten days after being drafted.
In his first at-bat as a major leaguer, he hit a home run off Bert Blyleven. Blyleven would eventually be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Horner was 20 years old and had never played a professional game below the major league level. He hit the home run and the Braves knew they had made the right call.
The Career That Built The 1982 Braves
The numbers Horner put up in his first two full seasons would be remarkable for a player at any point in his career. In 1979, he hit 33 home runs.
In 1980, he hit 35, a career high that placed him among the National League’s elite power hitters at the age of 22. Three seasons with 30 or more home runs before he turned 25. MVP votes in three different seasons.
His partnership with Dale Murphy formed the heart of the Braves lineup through the early 1980s in a way that Atlanta baseball fans of that era remember with specific fondness.
Murphy won back-to-back National League MVP awards in 1982 and 1983, a distinction that placed him among the best players in baseball for two consecutive years.
Horner was the player next to him in the order, the other threat that pitchers could not simply pitch around Murphy to avoid.
In 1982, Horner was selected as an All-Star, hit 32 home runs and drove in 97 runs. The Braves reached the playoffs that year, the only playoff appearance of the Horner era.
Injuries complicated the second half of his career in ways that the raw numbers don’t fully capture. He broke his right wrist in 1983. He fractured his left wrist in 1984.
The fact that he hit 27 home runs in both 1985 and 1986 after those injuries, that he came back twice from serious wrist fractures and continued producing power numbers, reflects the specific toughness that the people who watched him play in Atlanta remember alongside the tape-measure home runs.
He also, remarkably, never struck out more than 75 times in a season. That combination, elite power, below-average strikeouts, is the profile of a hitter with genuine contact skill alongside his raw power.
Horner was not a free-swinger who traded bat-on-ball contact for home run totals. He was both things simultaneously, which is rarer than the home run totals alone would suggest.
July 6, 1986 And The Afternoon That Nobody Forgot
On a Sunday afternoon at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium on July 6, 1986, the Montreal Expos came to town. Horner went to the plate five times. He hit four home runs.
The Braves lost the game 11-8, which is the specific footnote that baseball history tends to attach to individual performances happening inside team losses, a magnificent personal achievement on a day when the team couldn’t hold the lead.
Three of the four home runs came against Montreal starter Andy McGaffigan.
The fourth came in the ninth inning against Jeff Reardon, an All-Star closer who was one of the best relief pitchers in the National League during the mid-1980s. Horner hit it anyway.
It was the only four-home-run game in all of major league baseball during the entire decade of the 1980s.
Joe Adcock was the only other Brave to achieve the feat in the modern era. At the time, Horner became just the ninth player to hit four home runs in a game since 1900.
“It’s something you dream about but never expect to happen,” he said in his postgame interview with the Atlanta Constitution.
The Braves did not re-sign him after the 1986 season. The specifics of the parting, never fully detailed publicly, left Horner without a major league contract entering 1987.
He signed with the Yakult Swallows of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league for $2 million and proceeded to have one of the most productive single seasons by an American player in Japanese baseball history: .327 average, 31 home runs, 73 RBIs.
He became enormously popular with Japanese fans. He returned to the major leagues for one season with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1988 and retired during spring training before the 1989 season.
What Atlanta Remembers
The Atlanta Braves teams of the 1990s, the ones that produced a World Series championship in 1995 and reached the postseason in 14 consecutive seasons, are the teams most strongly associated with Braves history in the minds of a national baseball audience.
Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Chipper Jones, Fred McGriff.
For Atlanta fans of a certain generation, the teams that came before, the early 1980s Braves built around Murphy and Horner, carry a different but equally real kind of memory. They were not championship teams.
The 1982 division title was their peak, and they lost the NLCS to the St. Louis Cardinals. But they were interesting and they were powerful, and the two men at the center of their lineup were genuinely among the best players in the National League.
Murphy went into the Hall of Fame. Horner was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame as part of its first class, a recognition of what he had been before he ever played a professional game.
He never made it to Cooperstown, which is a conversation that Braves fans and baseball historians have had for decades without resolution.
He spent his final years in Texas with Chris and their sons. The Braves were informed of his death by his wife on Tuesday. He was 68 years old.
The first overall pick in 1978. The first Brave to skip the minor leagues entirely. The first Atlanta player to hit four home runs in a game.
Bob Horner built a career out of being first. And now the Braves are mourning him in a statement that begins with exactly those words, because it is the truest and most complete way to describe what he was.
