September 19, 2011: Jacoby Ellsbury hits inside-the-park home run as Red Sox rout Orioles

On September 19, 2011, Boston Red Sox center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury hit the last Red Sox inside-the-park home run at Fenway Park for nearly 14 years. It happened in the seventh inning against the Baltimore Orioles, and it sparked a seven-run inning that turned a close game into an 18-9 rout.

It was a Monday night. There were 10 games left on the Red Sox schedule, and they were in second place in the American League East Division, 4½ games behind the New York Yankees. Boston had lost 11 of its past 15 games, including a 6-5 loss to the Orioles in Monday afternoon’s opener of the split-admission doubleheader, a makeup of a May 17 rainout. The Red Sox led the Tampa Bay Rays by two games in the AL wild-card race. The last-place Orioles were 29 games out of first place and 14½ games behind the fourth-place Toronto Blue Jays.

The 7:11 P.M. Red Sox-Orioles game drew another sold-out crowd in excess of 37,000.1 The starters were right-hander John Lackey for Red Sox manager Terry Francona and lefty Brian Matusz for Buck Showalter and Baltimore.

Before the game was over, the starting pitchers combined had given up 17 base hits and 14 runs. Lackey gave up three runs to the Orioles in the top of the first. Matusz gave up four in the first, with third baseman Jed Lowrie’s three-run homer to left field doing the most damage.

Lackey pitched around a single for a scoreless second. Matusz didn’t make it through the bottom of the second; he gave up another run, then was relieved by Chris Jakubauskas, the first of a parade of seven Orioles relievers. An inherited runner scored on Jakubauskas’s watch.

Nolan Reimold hit a two-run single in the Orioles third, cutting the Red Sox lead to 6-5, but Boston batters wasted no time in bouncing back, scoring five runs in their half, all charged to Jakubauskas, though two were runners inherited by new reliever Jason Berken. It was Boston 11, Baltimore 5 after three innings. 

Lackey kept doling out runs, too. Nick Markakis tripled in one in the fourth, and they got two more in the fifth. Scott Atchison relieved Lackey. The Orioles got another in the top of the sixth when Vladimir Guerrero doubled in Markakis – the 2,580th hit of Guerrero’s career, leaving him six behind Julio Franco’s major-league record for Dominican-born players – making it 11-9.2 Reliever Franklin Morales gave up the two-bagger, with Guerrero thrown out at third trying to stretch his hit into a triple.

Though the Red Sox drew three walks, they paused in the hitting – without a hit in the fourth inning through the sixth .

It was still a two-run game when Ellsbury came to bat leading off the bottom of the seventh. Pitching was Jeremy Accardo. On a count of 2-and-2, Ellsbury hit the ball into the triangle in Fenway Park’s right-center field.

Playing center was Orioles rookie Matt Angle. He cut back to get the ball but it struck the edge of the Red Sox bullpen near the 420-foot mark and caromed off toward straightaway center, traveling quite a distance as it skittered along the edge of the wall. Both Angle and right fielder Markakis chased it down, Angle picking it up and throwing in. He hit the cutoff man, who threw home, but the speedy Ellsbury had never paused and he crossed the plate standing, as the ball took one bounce before being gloved in front of the plate by catcher Craig Tatum.

It was the first Red Sox inside-the-park home run at Fenway Park since Kevin Youkilis hit one against the Cleveland Indians in May 2007. It turned out to be the only inside-the-parker of Ellsbury’s 11-season big-league career.

“When I hit it, I was hoping it would go out,” said Ellsbury after the game. “But once I saw it hit the wall, I saw it carom, and I thought I had a pretty good shot at getting an inside-the-park home run.”3

Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun noted that it was the second inside-the-park home run Accardo allowed in 2011: “Tampa Bay’s Evan Longoria did it at Camden Yards in June.”4

The next six Red Sox batters all reached base, too. Marco Scutaro singled. So did Adrian Gonzalez. And so did Dustin Pedroia, driving in Scutaro. Clay Rapada replaced Accardo and walked David Ortiz, the only batter he faced. The bases were loaded. Brad Bergesen replaced Rapada. Jed Lowrie reached on an infield single, scoring one.

Next up was Boston left fielder Conor Jackson. He hit a grand slam into the seats atop the Green Monster. It was 18-9, Red Sox. The home run was the last homer Jackson ever hit, and the runs batted in the last of his seven years in the majors. His 2011 season was his last.

There was no more scoring in the game. Boston’s Matt Albers had struck out the only two batters he faced, taking over from Morales in the seventh. Michael Bowden pitched the eighth and ninth for the Red Sox and Kevin Gregg pitched the bottom of the eighth for Baltimore. None were smooth innings, but it was just the left-on-base totals that were built up. The Orioles left seven in all and the Red Sox left nine.

Baltimore’s first baseman Chris Davis had three hits in the game. So did Boston’s Ellsbury, Scutaro, Gonzalez, and Pedroia. The only Boston batter without a hit was catcher Jason Varitek, who walked once and struck out four times.

The win went to Atchison, making him 1-0 in his 15th appearance of the season. The loss was charged to Matusz, who dropped to 1-8. Lackey had a no-decision; he finished the season 12-12.

The Red Sox lost their next four games and six of their final eight, finishing the season in third place, seven games behind the Yankees and one behind Tampa Bay, which claimed the wild-card berth on the season’s final day. The Orioles finished last, 28 games back.

The 2011 season was Ellsbury’s fifth on the Red Sox. He’d broken in with the 2007 team, which won the World Series. He played in all four World Series games and hit .438. He was known for his speed. In 2008 he stole 50 bases and in 2009 he set the Red Sox stolen-base record with 70.

Ellsbury made his first All-Star team in 2011 and hit .321 with career highs in homers (32) and runs batted in (105). His 364 total bases led both leagues. He placed second in league voting for Most Valuable Player, drawing 242 points to Detroit pitcher Justin Verlander’s 280. (Verlander had been 24-5 with a 2.40 ERA.) Ellsbury did win both a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger award.

Speed is not the only thing contributing factor to an inside-the-park home run. Sometimes it is just circumstance. Boston’s Bill Buckner had an IPHR at Fenway Park in the fourth inning on April 25, 1990. The 40-year-old Buckner, his early-career speed long since sapped as a consequence of a 1975 ankle injury, was in his final season in baseball. His hit to right field glanced off the glove of Angels right fielder Claudell Washington, whose momentum toward attempting the catch caused him to topple headfirst into the right-field seats, while Buckner circled the bases, the ball loose and left behind him on the warning track. Buckner made it with ease.5

“[Washington] came out of the stands with hot dog and mustard all over him, and the ball came in with mustard on it,” Buckner recalled in the book Cubs Forever. “I made it around the infield in about two minutes.”6

Times have changed. As this author detailed in Red Sox Threads, “Hobe Ferris and Tris Speaker each had 25 IPHR’s for the Red Sox, Buck Freeman had 22, and Jimmy Collins had 21. In fact, Ferris hit nine home runs in 1903 and every one of the nine was an IPHR, the first one hit in Washington and the final eight all hit in Boston.”7

After Ellsbury’s September 2011 trip around the bases at Fenway Park, it took the Red Sox 14 years for their next inside-the-parker at home – and they hit two within months of each other during the 2025 season. Like Ellsbury’s inside-the-parker, both went to the triangle area in right-center: Wilyer Abreu’s solo inside-the-parker off Joe La Sorsa of the Cincinnati Reds on June 30 and Jarren Duran’s three-run homer off Mitch Keller of the Pittsburgh Pirates on August 31.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Jacoby Ellsbury, Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org. Thanks to Mal Allen for access to the Baltimore Sun.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS201109192.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2011/B09192BOS2011.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kv4yY9Yj3A

Notes

1 The sold-out games streak had begun on May 15, 2003 and ran until April 10, 2013 – just shy of 10 years.

2 Guerrero appeared in nine more games and retired with 2,591 career hits, which remained the record for Dominican natives until Adrian Beltré broke it in 2014. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2018.

3 Michael Whitmer, “Framework Got Them Settled,” Boston Globe, September 20, 2011: C3.

4 Dan Connolly, “First the Good News for O’s, Then Bad,” Baltimore Sun, September 20, 2011: D1, D5. The date of the Longoria home run was June 12, in the top of the eighth inning.

5 The Buckner home run was the only Red Sox run of the game in a 3-1 Angels victory. “Boston Red Sox Bill Buckner’s Inside-the-Park Home Run at Fenway Park!,” YouTube video (Courtside Seats), 0:24, accessed August 31, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlnfY5Nd-kQ.

6 Andrew Simon, “Unexpected Players Who Hit Inside-the-Park HRs,” MLB.com, July 28, 2022. https://www.mlb.com/news/most-unlikely-inside-the-park-home-runs.

7 Hobe Ferris alone hit more than the entire team has since 1963. He hit 25 for the Red Sox. So did Tris Speaker. Buck Freeman hit 22. Jimmy Collins hit 21. They all had the advantage of playing home games at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, where, Green Cathedrals reports, the center-field fence was 530 feet from home plate. On June 11, 1901, Ferris, Freeman, and Charlie Hemphill all hit IPHRs in just the one game. Bill Nowlin, Red Sox Threads (Burlington, Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 208), 442-443. For Huntington Avenue Grounds dimensions, see Philip J. Lowry, Green Cathedrals, fifth edition (Phoenix: Society for American Baseball Research, 2019), 45, 46.