Cleveland Sends One Pitcher and Leaves Him There

Cleveland Sends One Pitcher and Leaves Him There (1901)

Detroit played Sunday ball at Burns Park, past the city line where blue laws could not reach. Cleveland gave the ball to Jack Bracken, a 20-year-old rookie who six weeks earlier was pitching for an amateur club in Kent, Ohio. He was the only pitcher Cleveland used. Detroit scored in every inning but the second and kept adding: two, two, four, three, six, four. The game was stopped after seven and a half innings, 21-0. Bracken never pitched another big league season.

Thirteen Point Three (1929)

Between games of a doubleheader at Crosley Field, the Reds held a field day and put up cash for anyone who could beat the base-circling mark Hans Lobert had held for about twenty years. Evar Swanson, a rookie outfielder who had earned sixteen letters at Lombard College and played running back in the NFL, came out of a sprinter's crouch at home plate and went around in 13.3 seconds. He never made much of it. The trick, he said later, was hitting the bases right and not taking big turns.

Three Triples and a Wall (1960)

Willie Mays tripled three times at Connie Mack Stadium, the most anyone has done in a game since 1900. The third one was barely a triple at all. Center field in Philadelphia sat 448 feet away, and a ball that clears the fence in almost any other park stayed in play and made him run. The Giants won it 8-6 in eleven.

Weaver Walks (1977)

Baltimore was in a pennant race and trailing 4-0 to a first-year Toronto club headed for 107 losses. Rain had been falling since the third. The grounds crew laid a tarp over the two bullpen mounds sitting in foul ground down the left-field line, and Earl Weaver, whose left fielder had stumbled on one of those mounds the night before, told the umpires it had to go. They said no. So he took his whole team off the field and waited. Fifteen minutes later the umpires handed Toronto a win it never had to earn.