May 6, 1950: Ted Williams continues homer spree, sparks Red Sox to another blowout win

Ted Williams went on a bit of a homer-hitting spree over a 2½-week stretch early in the 1950 season. He homered twice on April 30 (both of them three-run homers), hit six more from May 2 to 13, and had another two-home run game on May 16.

Twelve more homers followed in June. By midseason, Williams had 25 home runs and 83 runs batted in. But he broke his elbow in the All-Star Game and wasn’t able to start again until September 15. He still finished the year with 97 RBIs – just three short of 100 – despite playing in only 89 games.

Williams’s Boston Red Sox team homered six times on May 6 against the Chicago White Sox at Fenway Park. Williams’s home run over the left-center-field wall was the first of the six, as they battered the White Sox, 11-1. Every one of the 12 runs scored in the game was produced by a home run.

After the game, Luke Appling of the White Sox declared that Fenway’s left-field wall should be outlawed. “That fence is disgraceful. It’s all right with the fans if the home team is doing it. But it’s a bad park and it’s why those Red Sox lose the pennant when everybody thinks they’re a cinch to win. They get 61 wins out of 77 [home] games last year and still lose.”1

Besides Williams, Birdie Tebbetts hit two homers for the Red Sox and Vern Stephens, Dom DiMaggio, and Bobby Doerr each hit one. The Williams home run was a three-run shot that was the game-winner, giving the Red Sox all the runs they needed to win.2 For the White Sox, the lone run came courtesy of a solo home run by Gus Zernial halfway up in the net in left. Chuck Stobbs more or less cruised to victory, allowing only four hits.

It was a Saturday afternoon game. The White Sox came in with a record of 3-7. The Red Sox were 11-7, having not encountered all the rainouts the White Sox had. A day earlier, Boston had won the series opener, 5-2, as Williams’s seventh-inning home run off Billy Pierce put the Red Sox ahead to stay.

Joe McCarthy was in his last couple of weeks as Red Sox skipper before being replaced by Steve O’Neill. He left the game ball in Stobbs’s locker. The 20-year-old right-hander Stobbs had broken in with the Red Sox in 1947, months after his high-school graduation. Stobbs had been 11-6 in 1949. This was his third start in 1950; he was 1-0.

Jack Onslow was the White Sox manager, though he, too, was replaced before too long. Onslow selected Ken Holcombe as his starting pitcher. After spending several years in the minors, Holcombe had pitched for the New York Yankees in 1945. He was 3-3, mostly in relief, with a 1.79 ERA. Other than a few innings for the Cincinnati Reds in 1948, he spent most of the intervening years with Sacramento in the Pacific Coast League. It was his first start with the White Sox after a two-inning relief appearance on April 30.

Stobbs retired the three Chicago batters he faced in the top of the first. Holcombe, on the other hand, saw the first four Red Sox batters reach base and three of them score. Dom DiMaggio led off with a single to center field. Johnny Pesky walked.

Ted Williams hit a three-run homer – to left field. It “disappeared over the wall high above the 379-foot mark in left-center,” reported the Chicago Sun-Times.3 The wind was cited by more than one newspaper as having aided the ball to carry.4 It was Williams’s sixth homer of the season and the 271st of his career.

Vern Stephens followed Williams with a single to right, but Holcombe was able to secure outs from the next three batters.

The leadoff man for the White Sox in the second inning was left fielder Zernial. He hit a home run to the screen above the left-field wall, near the center-field light tower. It reduced the Red Sox lead to 3-1. Stobbs proceeded to load the bases, walking third baseman Hank Majeski and giving up a single to the second baseman, Cass Michaels. After a popup caught by Doerr at second base, shortstop Chico Carrasquel walked. But then Stobbs struck out Holcombe and got center fielder Jim Busby to fly out to his counterpart in center, DiMaggio.

Catcher Tebbetts led off the bottom of the second and he mimicked Zernial by also hitting a leadoff home run to deep left field. Tebbetts’ homer went into the net above the left-field wall. Holcombe then walked Stobbs. He got DiMaggio to fly out, but Pesky singled to right field and Stobbs went third. Onslow called for a relief pitcher, Luis Aloma, a right-hander from Havana, with only two innings of major-league experience. He got the two outs he needed: Ted Williams grounded into a 3-6-3 double play.

Stobbs retired the White Sox in the top of the third, and when Tebbetts came up to bat again in the bottom of the inning, there were runners on base. Aloma had retired the first two Red Sox batters, but an error by second baseman Michaels allowed right fielder Tom Wright to get to first base. First baseman Walt Dropo walked. Tebbetts hit a three-run homer, one that went to the “same spot” as his first one.5 Stobbs struck out, but now he had a 7-1 lead to work with.

He flirted with danger in the fourth, however, giving up a one-out double to Michaels and then back-to-back walks to catcher Eddie Malone and Carrasquel. Aloma was due up. Predictably, he was removed for a pinch-hitter, Johnny Ostrowski. Fortunately for Stobbs, Ostrowski grounded into a 6-4-3 double play.

John Perkovich was the new pitcher for Chicago. He worked the rest of the game – but it was the only major-league game in which he ever appeared. With two outs in the fourth, Williams singled to left field, but the other three Red Sox made outs.

Stobbs allowed a single in the fifth, to Appling. Another leadoff home run, the third leadoff homer of the game, was hit by Doerr for the Red Sox in their half of the fifth. The ball landed in the Red Sox bullpen in right field.

Neither side got on base in the sixth. All three White Sox who stepped into the box against Stobbs in the seventh made outs. With two outs, both Wright and Dropo singled off “Perky” in the bottom of the seventh. There were no runs.

Dave Philley reached on Dropo’s error in the eighth. Appling walked. Zernial hit into a double play. Majeski hit a popup that Stobbs caught.

With an 8-1 lead, Stobbs was the first batter up in the Boston eighth. He singled. Every Boston batter thus had at least one base hit. Every Boston batter also scored at least one run. Dom DiMaggio hit a home run over everything in left field. Pesky struck out and Williams flied out to center. Vern Stephens hit a solo home run to make it 11-1. 

Stobbs got three fly-ball outs in the top of the ninth and the game was over.

The Boston Herald’s Arthur Sampson wrote that the White Sox had at this point lost 41 of their last 48 games at Fenway Park. The Chicago Sun-Times correspondent painted a picture: “Boston – This is a place where people eat scrod and baked potato for breakfast, where smut is not permitted to rear its ugly head in literature and the drama and you can see a parade almost any day in the week. It is also a place where the White Sox should never try to play baseball.”6

It was the fourth of an astonishing 34 games in which the 1950 Red Sox scored 10 or more runs.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Ted Williams, Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS195005060.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1950/B05060BOS1950.htm

Notes

1 Clif Keane, “Fenway Left Field Fence Should be Outlawed – Appling,” Boston Globe, May 7, 1950: C-47.

2 A “game-winning home run” is defined here as a home run that provides a game’s final margin of victory, giving the winning team at least one more run than the opposing team scored. For example, if a two-run homer increased a team’s lead from 2-1 to 4-1, and it went on to win 4-3, it qualifies as a game-winning home run. (This is different from the definition of “game-winning RBI” in baseball’s official statistics from 1980 through 1988, which counted as “game-winning” the RBI that provided a winning team the lead that it never relinquished.)

3 John C. Hoffman, “Bosox’ 6 Homers Drub Sox 11-1,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 7, 1950: 82.

4 See, for instance, Hy Hurwitz, “2 Tebbetts Clouts Pace 11-1 Victory,” Boston Globe, May 7, 1950: C-46.

5 Arthur Sampson, “Hose Slug White Sox, 11-1,” Boston Herald, May 7, 1950: 55.

6 Hoffman.