(This game was played as part of The Splendid Splinter co-op project to replay Ted Williams' .406 season of 1941.)
The Yankees scored seven times in the 3rd inning and then, as if that had just been the warm-up to a cruel nine-act drama, piled on ten more in the 7th on their way to a 19-5 pummeling of the Red Sox that was also the scene of a major-league first.
Boston had a fine start to the afternoon, as Joe Cronin smacked a three-run homer off of Lefty Gomez in the 3rd to put the visitors in front, but that would be more or less the end of the good reviews for the Red Sox from this afternoon’s entertainment. Dick Newsome toed the rubber in the bottom of the inning with his newfound lead and proceeded to put the first two Yankees aboard via a walk and a single; when Gomez then dropped a bunt with the intent of moving the runners over, Newsome hesitated and threw late to third looking to get the force, loading the bases with no one out. Two walks and a single to the next three batters tied the score, and Joe DiMaggio untied it with an opposite-field grand slam. Seven NY batters up, seven NY runners in. Newsome got the final two outs of the innings, perhaps due to Yankee exhaustion more than anything else, and the clubs swapped 5th-inning runs to make the score 8-4 heading into the final three frames.
Ted’s RBI single in the top of the 7th pulled Boston to within what seemed like a distant three runs, and then Jack Wilson came on to pitch the bottom of the inning for the visitors. Joe Gordon doubled and Phil Rizzuto singled to start it off against the new arm, and George Selkirk then hit a pinch-hit three run home run to put NY into double digits. It didn't get any better for Wilson from there - single, hit batsman, Tommy Henrich double for two runs, and a two-base wild pitch before a slight hiccup for the Yanks as Joe D took a third strike. A walk and a single sent Wilson packing and brought on Dickman, who whiffed Gordon, but Rizzuto kept the line moving with an RBI single. All of which brought the pinch-hitter Selkirk to the plate for the second time in the inning, and for the second time he drove a three-run shot into the RF stands - the first time in major-league history that a batter has hit two home runs in the inning in which he entered the game as a pinch hitter. New York scored again in the 8th, but fell one run short of twenty on the afternoon in an embarrassing defeat for the BoSox.
(After an hour of searches and Stathead queries, I’m pretty sure that Selkirk’s feat - two homers in an inning by a batter entering the game as a pinch-hitter in that inning - has never been accomplished in the history of real-life major-league baseball. It’s an odd record-keeping quirk that only the first HR would actually count as a pinch-hit home run; baseball-reference records the second at-bat in situations like this as having position “other” since the batter is no longer really a pinch-hitter after having officially entered the game in his previous plate appearance, and will never actually assume a defensive position.)
Ted today: 2-for-3, R, RBI, 2 BB
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| Ted reaches base four times, but the Sox get trounced |
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