September 2, 2019: Pawtucket, Red Sox part ways with dramatic extra-inning win

The Pawtucket Red Sox were supposed to have one final season in 2020 – one last go-round to honor the deep-rooted connection between the Boston Red Sox and the city in northern Rhode Island before their half-century of affiliation ended. Pawtucket had hosted Boston’s Triple-A affiliate since 1973 and was home to its Double-A team from 1970 through 1972.

Unfortunately for fans in Pawtucket, the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 forced the cancellation of minor-league baseball at all levels. The departure of the “PawSox” for a brand-new ballpark in Worcester, Massachusetts, announced in August 2018,1 took effect before the 2021 season. The Pawtucket-Boston linkup that sent three managers2 and stars such as Jim Rice, Wade Boggs, and Nomar Garciaparra to Fenway Park ended without ceremony.

Those fans who attended the final game of the 2019 season at Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium got to enjoy a dramatic farewell to their team – even if they didn’t realize at the time just how final it would be. An extra-inning thriller ended in the home team’s favor, giving Pawtucket its 3,479th and final victory as a Red Sox affiliate.3

The PawSox hadn’t distinguished themselves in 2019. Entering their final game, they sat in sixth and last place in the International League’s North Division with a 58-81 record, 17 games behind division-leading Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, an affiliate of the archrival New York Yankees. Manager Billy McMillon’s leading contributors included outfielder Rusney Castillo, team leader in hits (128) and RBIs (64), and lefty starter Kyle Hart, who led the staff in wins with 9. PawSox fans also saw numerous big leaguers pass through on rehabilitation assignments that season, including Brock Holt, Mitch Moreland, Dustin Pedroia, and 2018 World Series Most Valuable Player Steve Pearce.

Pawtucket faced the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, a Philadelphia Phillies affiliate with a comparatively short history – just over a decade. The IronPigs, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, sat one place ahead of Pawtucket with a 66-73 record, nine games out of first. Key players on manager Gary Jones’s club included catcher Deivy Grullón, the team leader in home runs (21) and RBIs (77), and starting pitcher Cole Irvin (6-1, 3.94 in 17 games). Grullón, Irvin, pitcher Nick Vincent, and veteran utilityman Phil Gosselin received call-ups to Philadelphia just before the season’s end.4

The last starting pitcher in Pawtucket history was 25-year-old right-hander Teddy Stankiewicz, Boston’s second-round pick in the June 2013 draft from Seminole State College in Oklahoma. Stankiewicz ended the season with a 6-7 record and 3.85 ERA in 24 games, all but one of them starts. His win total tied him for second on Pawtucket’s staff with fellow starter Erasmo Ramírez.

The IronPigs countered with 24-year-old lefty Damon Jones, an 18th-round draft pick of the Phillies in 2017 from Washington State University. Jones shone in Class A and Double A in 2019, but struggled in Triple A, ending the season with an 0-1 record and 6.62 ERA in eight starts at Lehigh Valley. On average, Jones walked almost seven batters and struck out almost nine for every nine innings he worked in Triple A. He made his big-league debut with the Phillies in 2021.

On a sunny, 76-degree day, 5,049 fans turned out to bid the season goodbye – though one news story suggested the real turnout was significantly less than announced.5 The PawSox wore camouflage promotional jerseys.6 Jones and Stankiewicz swapped zeroes for 3½ innings, though each team had chances to score. The IronPigs put runners in scoring position in the second and fourth innings, while the PawSox stranded a runner on third in the second inning.

Pawtucket broke through in the fourth. Third baseman Bobby Dalbec walked and took second on a wild pitch, and catcher Óscar Hernández drove him in with a ground-rule double to left field. Stankiewicz left after four shutout innings, with a relay race of relievers taking over from there.

Pawtucket made it 2-0 in the fifth on center fielder and leadoff hitter Cole Sturgeon’s eighth homer of the year, hit to right field. Sturgeon had singled to lead off the bottom of the first but was erased on a double play. The IronPigs’ pitching staff had not been notably prone to giving up round-trippers during 2019: They surrendered 179 that season, not far above the league average of 174. Sturgeon’s homer, though, served as a harbinger of what was to come.

Lehigh Valley pulled within a run in the seventh inning, as a single, a hit batsman, and a walk by PawSox pitcher Tanner Houck loaded the bases with two out. Reliever Bobby Poyner walked third baseman Maikel Franco to force in a run before getting right fielder José Pirela to line to Sturgeon for the third out.

The visitors pulled ahead against Poyner in the eighth. First baseman Austin Listi led off with a walk, and catcher Rob Brantly hit his sixth homer of the year, to right field, to give the IronPigs a 3-2 lead. But Sturgeon, leading off the bottom half, greeted reliever J.D. Hammer with another home run on a 3-and-0 count to tie the game at 3-3.

Neither team could get much going in the ninth. Pawtucket – the site of professional baseball’s longest game, the 33-inning marathon between the PawSox and Rochester Red Wings in 1981 – was treated one last time to extra innings.

As per a rule adopted in 2018 at all levels of minor league baseball,7 each team began the 10th inning with a runner on second base. IronPigs designated hitter Matt McBride led off with a strikeout. It was the last at-bat of McBride’s 14-season pro career, which had included parts of four seasons in the majors with the Colorado Rockies and Oakland A’s. A native of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, he’d been a hometown fan favorite as a part-time player with the IronPigs in his final two seasons.8 Second baseman Raul Rivas followed with a single to right field, scoring bonus runner Brantly for a 4-3 Lehigh Valley lead.

Catcher Hernández was Pawtucket’s bonus runner in the bottom half. Lehigh Valley’s fourth pitcher, Josh Tols, had worked the ninth and came out again for the 10th. Starting at the bottom of the Pawtucket lineup, Tols struck out right fielder Michael Osinski looking on a 3-and-2 count and got second baseman Deiner Lopez to foul out to first.

That brought home-run hero Sturgeon to the plate as Pawtucket’s last hope. Sturgeon watched as Tols delivered two balls, then two strikes. On the fifth pitch, Sturgeon drove the ball high and hard to right field for his third homer of the game, a walk-off shot that sent the PawSox into history as 5-4 winners.

Sturgeon had accounted for four of his team’s six hits and four of its five RBIs. He was the first Pawtucket player to hit three homers in a game since Mike Lowell in 2010.9 At the time Lowell did it, he was 36 years old, in the final year of a 16-season professional career, and playing a few rehabilitation games in the minors. Sturgeon played independent baseball in 2020 and 2021, then signed with the Minnesota Twins, splitting 2022 between Double A and Triple A.

Tols took the loss, while Domingo Tapia, who had pitched the 10th for Pawtucket, earned the win. Pawtucket players returned to the field after the game to toss souvenirs to fans remaining in the stands.10

Pawtucket had been slated to open its 2020 season on April 9 against the Syracuse Mets.11 Officials planned an expanded promotional schedule for the final season, including alumni appearances and charitable activities.12 Instead, the city’s pro baseball connection ended prematurely, and Rhode Island baseball fans had to content themselves with the memories of four International League championships, the legendary “Longest Game” of 1981, and countless pleasant nights at McCoy Stadium.

The final victory wrapped up a series of milestone wins for the team. The original Pawtucket Red Sox of the 1970 Eastern League won their first game – both of them, actually, sweeping Manchester in an Opening Day doubleheader on April 25, 1970.13 When the team ascended to Triple A, Pawtucket won its first game at that level, a 10-inning, 6-3 defeat of Richmond on April 13, 1973.14 The PawSox’ highest-profile game, the 33-inning marathon in 1981, ended in their favor, 3-2. And thanks mostly to Cole Sturgeon, the city bowed out of affiliated minor-league baseball as a winner as well.

Near the end of 2021, Pawtucket officials announced plans to tear down the empty, almost 80-year-old, city-owned McCoy Stadium and build a new public high school in its place.15

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources and photo credits

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for general player, team, and season data.

Neither Baseball-Reference nor Retrosheet provides box scores of minor-league games. Information on play-by-play action, unless otherwise noted, was taken from a game summary and box score posted on milb.com and accessed January 27, 2022. https://www.milb.com/gameday/ironpigs-vs-red-sox/2019/09/02/575859#game_state=final,lock_state=final,game_tab=box,game=575859

Image of 2019 Choice Pawtucket Red Sox card #25 downloaded from the Trading Card Database. Photo of McCoy Stadium main gate taken by author on August 18, 2019, about two weeks prior to the final PawSox game there.

Notes

1 Jon Chesto, “Whole New Ballgame: PawSox in Worcester,” Boston Globe, August 18, 2018: A1. The subheadline of this story dates the Boston-Pawtucket relationship to 1973, the year Boston moved its Triple-A farm team from Louisville, Kentucky, to Rhode Island – excluding the city’s three previous seasons as home to Boston’s Double-A affiliate.

2 Darrell Johnson, Joe Morgan, and Butch Hobson managed in Pawtucket before taking the reins in Boston.

3 This win total includes Pawtucket’s three seasons as a Double-A Red Sox affiliate. Pawtucket teams lost 3,610 games over the same period.

4 “McBride Helps Secure 5-3 Win Over PawSox,” Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call, September 2, 2019: C4.

5 Alex Speier, “Beginning of a New Era,” Boston Globe, July 13, 2020: C1.

6 James M. Ricci, The Pawtucket Red Sox: How Rhode Island Lost Its Home Team (Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2022): 15.

7 Andrew Mahoney, “Major Changes to Minor League Baseball,” Boston Globe, March 15, 2018: C4.

8 The Lehigh Valley region includes the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton, Pennsylvania. The IronPigs play home games in Allentown, which borders Bethlehem. In addition to growing up in Bethlehem, McBride also attended Lehigh University in the city. When he reached the big leagues in 2012, McBride was the first former Lehigh player to reach the majors since Paul Hartzell in 1976.

9 “Sturgeon’s Three Homers Give Pawtucket Season-Ending Win,” Providence Journal, September 2, 2019. Accessed online January 28, 2022. https://www.providencejournal.com/story/sports/pro/2019/09/02/pawsox-5-ironpigs-4-10-innings-sturgeons-three-homers-give-pawtucket-season-ending-win/3993607007/. This story also includes a photo of the PawSox’ camouflage jerseys.

10 Speier.

11 “Sturgeon’s Three Homers Give Pawtucket Season-Ending Win.”

12 Speier.

13 Eastern League standings as printed in the Elmira (New York) Star-Gazette, April 26, 1970: 1D.

14 Associated Press, “Name’s Different, but Result’s Same – Pawtucket Wins,” Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail, April 14, 1973: 1B.

15 Patrick Anderson, “$300M Pawtucket High School Proposed to Replace ‘Sadly Vacant’ Mccoy Stadium. What We Know,” Providence Journal, December 19, 2021. Accessed online January 28, 2022. https://www.providencejournal.com/story/news/2021/12/19/pawtucket-ri-mccoy-stadium-location-new-high-school/8954187002/. The high-school plan received approval in November 2022. Peter Abraham, “Orioles Looking to Take Next Step – Playoffs,” Boston Globe, November 13, 2022: C2.