Matty and Three Finger Take a Bow Together

Matty and Three Finger Take a Bow Together (1916)

A July trade had made Christy Mathewson Cincinnati's manager after a career spent entirely with the Giants. He promised one more start, against Mordecai Brown, on Labor Day in Chicago, and over 17,000 came. The Cubs' owner handed each man a bouquet of roses, the old rivals posed hand in hand, and then both got hit hard. Brown allowed 19 hits, Mathewson 15, and neither left. Cincinnati won 10 to 8. Neither man ever pitched in the majors again.

Houston Finally Gets One (1962)

The expansion Colt .45s lost their first 17 games against the Phillies. On September 4, before 4,537 people at Colt Stadium, Bob Bruce beat Cal McLish 4 to 1 in the 18th and final meeting of the year, and the Phillies managed four hits. It kicked off the first winning month the franchise ever had.

Struck Out From the Bench (1978)

Doe Boyland's first big league at bat came as a pinch hitter with the game tied in the seventh. Skip Lockwood ran the count to 1 and 2, then left with a sore shoulder. Joe Torre went to lefty Kevin Kobel, and Chuck Tanner countered with Rennie Stennett for the lefty Boyland. Stennett got strike three, and by rule the strikeout went to the man who started the at bat. Boyland said he had dreamed of that moment for years and never imagined striking out on two strikes while sitting down.

The Eraser Comes Out (1991)

In 1961 Ford Frick ruled that Roger Maris's 61 homers would be listed apart from the 154-game mark. No asterisk was ever printed, but everyone believed in one. On this day a committee chaired by Commissioner Fay Vincent voted to give Maris the record outright. The same meeting redefined a no-hitter as nine or more hitless innings in a complete game, and 50 no-hitters disappeared, among them Harvey Haddix's 12 perfect innings in 1959. Maris had died in 1985. His son said the asterisk had only ever existed to take something from his father.