September 7, 1974: Orioles pitchers set AL scoreless innings record in Cleveland

The Baltimore Orioles fell to fourth place in the six-team American League East Division on August 28, 1974, eight games behind the first-place Boston Red Sox. Loser of six of their last seven games, and 20 of their last 34, Baltimore had a record of 63-65. The Orioles had never been under .500 this late in the season during Earl Weaver’s tenure as manager.1

Baltimore won its next four road games before returning home to face the Red Sox in a Labor Day doubleheader on September 2. The Orioles won both games by the same score, 1-0. Ross Grimsley bested Boston in the opener, and Mike Cuellar won the nightcap. After an offday,2 Jim Palmer shut out the Red Sox, 6-0, to complete the sweep. Boston dropped into a first-place tie with the New York Yankees. Third-place Baltimore trailed the leaders by only two games.

After another offday, the Orioles traveled to Cleveland for a five-game series. In Friday’s doubleheader, Baltimore again won a pair of low-scoring shutouts. Dave McNally won the first game, 2-0, holding the Indians to three singles. In the second contest, a makeup of a May rainout, Cuellar allowed five singles in the 1-0 win.

Baltimore’s five consecutive shutouts set an AL record, one short of the post-1900 National League record of six by the 1903 Pittsburgh Pirates. The Orioles’ 46 consecutive scoreless innings were one inning less than the AL mark of 47 innings, recorded by the 1948 Indians. The 1903 Pirates held the NL record with 56 consecutive shutout innings.3

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Baltimore pitching coach George Bamberger. “It looks almost like each guy who goes out there doesn’t want the guy who pitched the last game to get the best of him.”4

Grimsley (16-12 with a 3.15 ERA) looked to extend Baltimore’s streaks when the teams met the next day for a Saturday afternoon game. The 24-year-old left-hander had been traded to the Orioles the prior winter after three solid seasons with the Cincinnati Reds.5

Cleveland’s starting pitcher was 35-year-old right-hander Gaylord Perry. Perry had won the AL’s 1972 Cy Young Award after spending his first 10 years in the big leagues with the San Francisco Giants.6 He entered the game with an 18-9 record and a 2.31 ERA in his third season with the Indians.

With 9,890 spectators at Cleveland Stadium on a partly sunny, 70-degree afternoon,7 Grimsley retired the first six Cleveland batters on five groundouts and a strikeout to break the AL record for consecutive scoreless innings.

Perry kept the Orioles off the scoreboard in the first two innings, allowing only a single while recording three strikeouts, but Baltimore scored a run in the third. Enos Cabell walked. Cleveland catcher Dave Duncan fielded Mark Belanger’s bunt in front of the plate but his throw to second was not in time to force Cabell, putting runners at first and second. Rich Coggins bunted past a diving Perry for a single, loading the bases. Paul Blair’s fly to center scored Cabell.8 Perry escaped further damage when Bobby Grich grounded into a double play.

Grimsley set the Indians down in order in the bottom of the third on a groundout and two strikeouts, and Baltimore added an unearned run in the top of the fourth. Tommy Davis singled to center and took second on Earl Williams’s sacrifice bunt. On a hit-and-run play, Don Baylor singled into the hole between third and short. When the ball glanced off shortstop Frank Duffy’s glove for an error, Davis scored for a 2-0 Orioles lead.9

Cleveland threatened in the bottom of the fourth. A one-out walk and a double by George Hendrick put runners at second and third. Hendrick’s double was the first extra-base hit yielded by Baltimore’s staff in 71 innings. (Opposing batters had hit 38 singles during that stretch.10) Grimsley kept the scoreless streak alive with a strikeout and a fly out to center.

Neither team scored in the fifth or sixth inning. Grimsley pitched around a one-out double in the fifth and a one-out single in the sixth, extending the scoreless streak to 52 innings.

With two out and none on in the top of the seventh, Perry walked Belanger, who stole second. He scored on Coggins’ pop single to right,11 making the score 3-0 in Baltimore’s favor.

Buddy Bell hit a two-out double in Cleveland’s half of the seventh inning, but was stranded there when Grimsley got Oscar Gamble out on a fly to right. In the bottom of the eighth, a one-out walk and a wild pitch put a runner at second. Grimsley got the next two batters on his seventh strikeout of the game and a groundout. The scoreless streak now stood one inning short of Pittsburgh’s 1903 record.

Grimsley faced the heart of Cleveland’s lineup in the bottom of the ninth. Not only was the scoreless innings streak on the line, but if he could keep the Indians from scoring, Baltimore would record its sixth shutout in a row, tying the Pirates’ consecutive-shutout record.

Hendrick led off the inning with a double to left-center. Charlie Spikes hit a 400-foot home run into the lower left-field stands,12 and suddenly, with the score now 3-2, the Orioles had more to worry about than setting pitching records.

Weaver brought in right-hander Bob Reynolds to face John Ellis, a right-handed batter. Ellis hit a bouncer through the middle. Belanger, who in 1974 received the fourth of his eight career Gold Gloves at shortstop, barehanded the ball on the run.13 His throw to first nipped Ellis on a close play.

Ellis thought he beat the throw and argued vehemently with first-base umpire Nick Bremigan. Ellis was ejected after throwing his helmet. Cleveland manager Ken Aspromonte was tossed next after throwing his cap to the ground in protest. Duncan then threw towels out of the Cleveland dugout, earning him the third ejection of the inning.14

Weaver, claiming that Cleveland was required to immediately announce lineup-card replacements for the ejected Ellis and Duncan, lodged an official game protest. The umpiring crew maintained that that was not needed until the Indians took the field if the game went into extra innings.15 Weaver’s protest was moot after Reynolds retired the next two Cleveland batters, securing the Orioles’ 10th win in a row, 3-2.

“He pitched a great game,” Weaver said of Grimsley, “and got good fielding, but he made one little mistake and it cost him.”16

Grimsley described the pitch that Spikes hit to end the shutout streak. “He swung and missed so bad at my first two changeups that I figured I might just as well throw one more. Looking back, I think maybe he set me up for it. He was waiting for the same pitch and I threw it.”17

Weaver also had high praise for Perry. “Gaylord is tough. … We got some squeegies off him, and he helped us by walking two men.” Both walks, the only ones issued by Perry, scored.18

Grimsley claimed he did not feel any extra pressure to pitch a shutout. “I thought about it a lot in the first two innings because I knew we were close to the American League record” for consecutive scoreless innings, he said. “But once I got past that I really didn’t think too much about it. It was in the back of my mind I guess, but I didn’t concentrate on it.19

Baltimore’s shortstop admitted that with the streak on the line, the game felt like a mid-October World Series game. “I think we were all bearing down a little more,” said Belanger. “No one wanted to be the one to screw up in the field and cost the team a run.20

“I’d liked to have seen my guys get the record,” said Weaver, “and I’d like to see them pitch nothing but shutouts the rest of the season. But the big thing is to keep winning.”21

Cleveland manager Aspromonte had favored the Orioles to win the division even when they were struggling earlier in the year. “They’ve got a solid club. … I called them a sleeping giant all season, and now the sleeping giant is waking up.”22

The next day Cleveland scored two runs in the first, a run in the second, and a run in the third and beat the Orioles, 7-4. The loss left Baltimore one game behind the Yankees and Red Sox, who were tied for first place.

The Orioles won 18 of their next 23 games, including their final nine games of the season, to finish in first place (91-71), two games ahead of New York (89-73) and seven ahead of Boston (84-78). Baltimore lost the best-of-five AL Championship Series to the defending World Series champion Oakland A’s, three games to one.

As of the end of the 2023 season, the 1974 Orioles and the 1903 Pirates still held the AL and NL records, respectively, for consecutive shutouts and scoreless innings.23

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Mike Huber and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources 

The author accessed Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for box scores/play-by-play information, player, team, and season pages, pitching and batting game logs, and other data:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE197409070.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1974/B09070CLE1974.htm

Notes

1 The Orioles were 43-37 when Weaver was named manager in the middle of the 1968 season, and went 48-34 the rest of the year. In winning three straight AL pennants from 1969 to ’71, the team hadn’t been under .500 since April 11, 1969. In both 1972 and 1973 Baltimore was last under .500 in early June.

2 Peter Gammons, “Sox Go to Bat on Off Day; Then It’s Moret vs. Palmer,” Boston Globe, September 3, 1974: 28.

3 Russell Schneider, “O’s Win, but Shutout Skein Ends,” Cleveland Plain Dealer,” September 8, 1974: 50. The 1948 Indians’ shutout streak ended at four on August 21 in Cleveland against the Chicago White Sox. Hall of Famer Bob Lemon took a 2-0 lead into the top of the ninth inning, but the White Sox scored three runs to win the game.

4 Ken Nigro, “Oriole Sweep Runs Shutout String to 5,” Baltimore Sun, September 7, 1974: 25.

5 The Orioles received Grimsley and minor-league catcher Wallace Williams for outfielder Merv Rettenmund, infielder Junior Kennedy, and minor-league catcher William Wood. Grimsley posted a 37-25 record for the Reds from 1971 to 1973, and was 2-1 in the 1972 World Series vs. the Oakland A’s.

6 The Indians obtained Perry and shortstop Frank Duffy from the Giants in exchange for pitcher Sam McDowell on November 29, 1971.

7 “Cloudy and Warm,” Cleveland Plain Dealer,” September 7, 1974: 37. Cleveland’s home attendance in 1974 topped one million for the first time since 1959. The Indians were first, second, or third all of July and for the first three weeks of August. On August 18 they were 60-56 and in second place, 3½ games behind Boston. It was the first time since the league was split into divisions in 1969 that Cleveland was in contention that late in the year. Cleveland was 67-67 heading into the weekend series with the Orioles, 2½ games behind third-place Baltimore and 4½ games out of first place. The Indians finished 1974 in fourth place with a 77-85 record.

8 Lou Hatter, “Birds Win 10th in row, but Shoutout String Is Cut,” Baltimore Sun, September 8, 1974: 29.

9 Hatter.

10 Hatter.

11 Hatter.

12Schneider, “O’s Win, but Shutout Skein Ends.” Spikes led the 1974 Indians with 22 home runs and 80 RBIs.

13 Hatter.

14 Schneider. Bremigan was in his first year of what would be a 15-year career umpiring in the AL. His only other ejection during 1974 was in July when he tossed California’s Bobby Valentine for throwing his helmet while arguing a called third strike.

15 Hatter.

16 Ken Nigro, “Birds Felt Shutout Pressure,” Baltimore Sun, September 8, 1974: 29.

17 “Birds Felt Shutout Pressure.”

18 Schneider.

19 Nigro, “Birds Felt Shutout Pressure.”

20 Nigro, “Birds Felt Shutout Pressure.”

21 Schneider.

22 Schneider.

23 The 1995 Orioles pitched shutouts in the last five games of the season to tie the AL record, but their consecutive scoreless innings streak was stopped at 46 when they gave up a run in the second inning of the club’s 1996 opening game.