August 5, 1966: Ron Santo’s bat provides all the offense in Cubs’ victory over Giants

The Chicago Cubs and their fans didn’t have much to cheer about in 1966. Under first-year manager Leo Durocher, the Cubs finished last in the 10-team National League, providing an unintended twist to Durocher’s preseason observation that “we aren’t an eighth place ballclub, believe me.”1

On August 5, however, All-Star third baseman Ron Santo gave 11,160 fans at Wrigley Field plenty of thrills when he hit two home runs and drove in all of the Cubs’ runs in a 4-3, 10-inning victory over the San Francisco Giants.

The Giants had just taken three of four games from the New York Mets, good for a first-place tie with the Pittsburgh Pirates and a 64-45 record entering the series against the Cubs. Chicago, by contrast, had been in 10th place ever since they lost to the Pirates on April 28. Despite beating the Atlanta Braves twice in three games during their previous series, the Cubs had a 34-72 record going into the Giants series. They had lost 10 of 11 games to San Francisco so far in 1966.

Santo broke a scoreless tie with his 24th home run of the season in the second inning. The next batter, Ernie Banks, was hit by a pitch by Bob Bolin, who entered the game with a 6-6 record and a 3.24 ERA as a solid third starter behind Giants stars Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry.2 Byron Browne singled to left to put two on with no outs, but Randy Hundley hit into a double play. The next hitter, Don Kessinger, walked before the Cubs starting pitcher, Bill Hands, grounded out.

Hands, whose 4 1/3 scoreless innings of relief in the season’s third game had made him the only Cubs pitcher with a win over the Giants so far, began the Friday afternoon game with two scoreless innings. Then Hal Lanier and Ollie Brown singled to begin the third inning, and Bolin walked to load the bases.         

Tito Fuentes gave the Giants a 2-1 lead with a single that scored Lanier and Brown. Cal Koonce replaced Hands after Fuentes’ hit and retired Jim Davenport, Willie McCovey, and Jim Ray Hart to quell the uprising.

Neither team scored in the next 5½ innings. Bolin retired the Cubs in order in the third, fifth, and eighth innings. Koonce held the Giants scoreless for five innings and allowed only one hit, a double by Jesús Alou in the fourth. The Giants missed a scoring opportunity in the eighth when Fuentes greeted Koonce’s replacement, 23-year-old first-year Cub Fergie Jenkins, with a leadoff single. After Davenport flied out, Kessinger took center fielder Adolfo Phillips’ throw and doubled Fuentes off first. McCovey tripled, but Hart grounded out to end the threat.

In the ninth, with Jenkins still on the mound, pinch-hitter Willie Mays – whose 529 career home runs left him just five behind Jimmie Foxx for second place all-time behind Babe Ruth3 – reached on third baseman Santo’s one-out error. Ollie Brown and Lanier flied out to keep the score 2-1 in the Giants’ favor.

Since Santo’s second-inning home run, he had gone hitless in two at-bats and committed an error. But he tied the game by homering off Bolin to start the Cubs’ ninth. After Bolin brushed him back, Santo “got up, dusted himself off, then hit the 1-and-1 pitch into the left-field bleachers, tying the score with his 25th home run of the season,” sportswriter Harry Jupiter recounted.4

The Giants went ahead 3-2 in the 10th when the 22-year-old Fuentes homered off Jenkins, his third home run of the season. Davenport grounded out, but Jenkins walked McCovey and Hart, ending his outing at 2 2/3 innings. The Cubs’ new hurler, Arnold Earley, threw a wild pitch that advanced the runners to second and third. Earley avoided further trouble when Haller flied to center for the third out.

Heading to the bottom of the 10th, the Cubs were again three outs from defeat. Pinch-hitter Lee Thomas singled and was replaced by pinch-runner Joey Amalfitano. Reliever Frank Linzy was brought in to replace Bolin. Phillips’ bunt single advanced Amalfitano to second, and Glenn Beckert’s groundout sent him to third and Phillips to second.

Giants manager Herman Franks could have brought in left-hander Bill Henry to face Billy Williams, but Franks decided to walk Williams intentionally. The move backfired when Santo sliced a single to right-center field. Amalfitano and Phillips scored, and the Cubs had a 4-3 win.

Santo finished 3-for-5 with all four RBIs and two runs scored. Teammate Byron Browne added three hits in four at-bats. Fuentes had three of the Giants’ seven hits and drove in all of San Francisco’s runs. Even though he pitched only a third of an inning, Earley, who had been called up from the minors a week earlier and was making just his third appearance in a Cubs uniform, picked up his first win of the season. He had been acquired in a trade with Atlanta on May 29. Bolin had a no-decision despite pitching nine innings. His replacement, Linzy, sustained the loss.

The Cubs remained in the cellar the rest of the season and finished 59-103, 36 games behind the pennant-winning Los Angeles Dodgers. One game in September drew only 530 fans to Wrigley Field. The Giants came in second despite a 93-68 record. San Francisco was in first place as late as September 1 but trailed Los Angeles by 1½ games at the conclusion of the regular season.    

Despite the Cubs’ lack of success, the 26-year-old Santo had a banner year in 1966, batting .312 with 30 homers and 94 RBIs. He also had a club-high 8 triples, 8 sacrifice flies, 95 walks, 302 total bases, and a .538 slugging percentage. “But we were awful on the field that year and we knew it,” he said. “It was an embarrassment, particularly when you consider we were behind two expansion teams, the Astros and Mets.”5

Nevertheless, the young Cubs remained hopeful. “But losing all those games under Leo left us undaunted; we knew we would get better, and Leo was the man to take us out of the basement,” Santo said. “Leo really wasn’t crazed during that difficult 1966 season when we lost all those games. He must have seen what others were seeing in the organization: that this was a team that was going to contend in a couple of years.”6

Santo was just as sharp in the field as he was at the plate in 1966. The Cubs’ captain received his third Gold Glove and set an NL record for third basemen with 391 assists, breaking his own record of 374 set three years earlier. “His style on both offense and defense is similar,” sportswriter Jerome Holtzman said. “He’s aggressive and simply figures that no ball is going to get by him.”7

Santo also recorded a 28-game hitting streak in 1966 that was interrupted by a fractured cheekbone suffered when he was hit by a pitch by Mets hurler Jack Fisher in the second game of a doubleheader on June 26. After missing just a week of action, Santo returned to the lineup on July 4. He extended the hitting streak to 27 games when he went 3-for-4 off the Pirates’ Vernon Law in the first game of a doubleheader. In the second game, he singled in his third at-bat to extend the streak to 28 games, a club record that stood for 23 years.8 During the streak, Santo batted .360 with 8 homers, 3 triples, 2 doubles, 25 runs scored, and 21 RBIs.9 It was the longest hitting streak in the major leagues since Ken Boyer’s 29-game streak for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1959.10

“I was starting to become a consistent hitter. To me, that’s a true test of whether someone has made it in the major leagues,” Santo reflected years later. “Many players can get hot for a couple of weeks then slide; doing it day in and day out is a better barometer.”11

Author Peter Golenbock said Durocher taught the young Cubs like Santo how to win and be like pros in Durocher’s early years as Cubs manager. “After joining the Cubs [in 1960], Ron Santo’s play, as much as any other player’s, defined a ten-year period when the Cubs fought and scrapped and played exciting, aggressive baseball,” Golenbock added.12

In 1967, Durocher’s second year at the helm in Chicago, the Cubs’ .540 winning percentage was their best since they won the NL pennant in 1945. They went on to have six straight winning seasons, from 1967 through 1972, their longest such streak since they topped .500 14 seasons in a row, from 1926 through 1939.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Harrison Golden and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Ron Santo, Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources listed in the Notes, the author used Baseball-Reference.com, Newspapers.com, PaperofRecord.com, Retrosheet.org, and the spring edition of the 1967 Chicago Cubs Official Roster Book.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN196608050.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1966/B08050CHN1966.htm

Notes

1 Ron Santo with Randy Minkoff, Ron Santo: for Love of Ivy (Chicago: Bonus Books, 1993), 52.

2 The Giants’ Marichal and Perry provided a formidable pitching duo that season. Marichal led the NL with an .806 winning percentage thanks to a 25-6 record with a 2.23 ERA, while Perry finished 21-8 with a 2.99 ERA.

3 Mays passed Foxx by hitting his 535th career homer against Ray Washburn of the St. Louis Cardinals on August 17.

4 Harry Jupiter, “They Don’t Scare Santo,” San Francisco Examiner, August 6, 1966: 30.

5 Santo with Minkoff, Ron Santo: for Love of Ivy, 59.

6 Santo with Minkoff, Ron Santo: for Love of Ivy, 52.

7 Jerome Holtzman, “Mays Ten-Year Gold Glove Champion,” The Sporting News, November 5, 1966: 24.

8 National League Rookie of the Year Jerome Walton compiled a 30-game hitting streak in 1989.

9 Chris Roewe, “Santo’s Swat Skein, 28 Games, Best in Majors Since 1959,” The Sporting News, November 26, 1966: 40.

10 Roewe, “Santo’s Swat Skein, 28 Games, Best in Majors Since 1959.”

11 Santo with Minkoff, Ron Santo: for Love of Ivy, 54.

12 Peter Golenbock, Wrigleyville: A Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), 359.