June 2, 1952: Don Lenhardt hits walk-off grand slam for Red Sox, gets traded hours later

Don Lenhardt did a lot of moving in five major-league seasons. He played for five American League teams from 1950 to ’54 and had two stints with both the St. Louis Browns and Boston Red Sox.

He played in 30 games for the Red Sox during the first couple of months of the 1952 season. In one eight-game stretch, Lenhardt had two very big days at Boston’s Fenway Park. On May 26 he drove in five runs to beat the New York Yankees, 6-3.

On June 2 he hit a grand slam to beat the Chicago White Sox in the 10th inning.

The very next day, he was traded to the Detroit Tigers, part of a nine-player deal.

After June 1, five teams were bunched together atop the AL standings. The Cleveland Indians were on top, but just one game ahead of Boston and 2½ above the fourth-place White Sox. The Yankees were 3½ games back. Chicago had beaten the Red Sox, 7-3, on Saturday, May 31, and lost, 3-2, on Sunday. The Monday afternoon game was the rubber match. It drew fewer than 5,000 paid but added more, as it was ladies day.

Starting for manager Lou Boudreau’s Red Sox was Willard Nixon, 1-0 for the season, while 0-4 Ken Holcombe started for Paul Richards’ White Sox.

The 29-year-old Lenhardt was in left field, batting third. He entered the game with a .300 batting average, 6 homers, and 20 RBIs. With Ted Williams rejoining the Marines in May 1952 for service in Korea, Lenhardt was one of four Red Sox – along with Vern Stephens, Clyde Vollmer, and Billy Goodman – to have started in left in Williams’s absence.1

Neither pitcher allowed a run for the first four innings. Chicago had three hits off Nixon but hit into two double plays.

In the top of the fifth, the White Sox got on the board. Catcher Sherm Lollar led off with a double off the left-field wall. Lenhardt perhaps had not played the carom as well as he could have – at least one sportswriter said that Lollar “might have been held to a single.”2 An infield fly followed, but shortstop Chico Carrasquel singled to right field and Lollar scored. Two groundouts ended the inning.

The Red Sox didn’t score; after five, they had a total of two singles, one of them by Nixon.

In the bottom of the sixth, the Red Sox came close to tying it up after Dom DiMaggio hit a one-out double to center field. Second baseman Goodman singled to center, but DiMaggio hesitated between second and third – unsure if the ball was going to get caught – and was thrown out at home plate after pouring it on and trying to score. Goodman took second on the play, but Lenhardt grounded out, 6-3. The score remained Chicago 1, Boston 0.

It was in the seventh that the Red Sox pulled even, despite more baserunning misadventure. Shortstop Stephens led off with a walk. Right fielder Vollmer doubled and Boston had runners on second and third with nobody out. Rookie Jimmy Piersall ran for Vollmer, to put a much faster man on second base.

Walt Dropo hit a ball back to Holcombe, who threw to third, trapping Stephens in a rundown. Lollar tagged out Stephens as Piersall took third, and Dropo made it to second. With first base open, Fred Hatfield was walked intentionally.

Carrasquel attempted to start an inning-ending double play on catcher Del Wilber’s grounder to short. His toss to second beat Hatfield for an out, but Hatfield, as the Chicago Tribune reported, “knocked the ball from [second baseman Nellie Fox]’s fingers” when he reached the bag. After Piersall scored the tying run, Dropo tried to score from second, but “Fox retrieved the ball and his throw to Lollar beat Dropo.”3 It was a double play, but the Red Sox run counted. All three outs in the inning came on Lollar’s putouts at home.

In the top of the eighth, Nixon walked third baseman Héctor Rodríguez, a 31-year-old native of Cuba appearing in what turned out to be his only American or National League season – but the other three White Sox all made outs. The Red Sox got a one-out single by DiMaggio, and he was sacrificed to second by Goodman, but Lenhardt hit into another 6-3 out that ended the inning.

Boston Herald writer Arthur Sampson felt that Lenhardt’s former manager Richards, “who has registered public scorn of his ability as a ball player, had deliberately attempted to humiliate him” by twice pitching to him with a man on second and first base open.4

Neither Nixon nor Holcombe let a runner reach base in the ninth inning and the game went into extra innings.

The White Sox regained the lead in the top of the 10th. With one out, Carrasquel singled to left. Richards had Holcombe sacrifice Carrasquel into scoring position. Fox singled into left and gave the White Sox a 2-1 edge. Lenhardt overran the ball in his haste to scoop it up; the ball “slip[ped] right under him,” observed the Boston Globe, which allowed Fox to take second.5 Lenhardt was charged with an error, but Rodríguez flied out to Hatfield at third.

In the bottom of the 10th, Holcombe put the first Boston batter on base by hitting Hatfield with a pitch.6 Wilber failed on two bunt attempts but singled to left field and Hatfield went first to third. The Red Sox had the tying run on third with nobody out.

Boudreau turned to his bench, sending in pitcher Mickey McDermott to run for Wilber and catcher Sammy White to bat for Nixon. White attempted to bunt on the first pitch, but missed, and Holcombe’s second pitch was a called strike. Boudreau then pinch-hit for the pinch-hitter, asking pitcher Bill Henry to bat for White, knowing that Henry was a faster runner and might have a better chance to foil any possible double play. But Henry swung and missed, the strikeout credited to White.

Dom DiMaggio reached on an infield single to second base, with Hatfield scoring. It was 2-2.

Goodman was up next, and Richards decided he would rather see Holcombe pitch to Lenhardt, so Goodman was walked intentionally. So far Holcombe had retired Lenhardt four times on a fly ball to left and three consecutive grounders to shortstop.

Goodman was a more experienced player and won the AL batting title just two years before, batting .354 in 1950. He was a left-handed batter, was hitting .294, and had grounded out a couple of times himself in the game, but then singled and successfully executed a sacrifice bunt.

Don Lenhardt due up. With the bases loaded and just one out, even a deep enough outfield fly could win the game.  

Boudreau called Lenhardt back and gave him some advice. “He told me to be ready for the curve. I was and I hit it,” Lenhardt said after the game.7

Indeed, he did better than hit a run-scoring fly. He’d been a White Sox player the year before. Now Lenhardt, per the Chicago Tribune, “stepped up and busted Holcombe’s first pitch high over the left field wall for his seventh homer, his second grand slam shot of the season.”8 The homer was hit over both the wall and the screen atop it.

And then he was gone. Traded the very next day. Lenhardt, Dropo, Hatfield, and Johnny Pesky were sent to the Tigers along with pitcher Bill Wight, for Hoot Evers, George Kell, Johnny Lipon, and Dizzy Trout.9

“This is rough,” Lenhardt told the Boston Globe. He and his wife were expecting a baby in July. “I don’t know whether I can move my wife to Detroit. That’s a tough break.”10

The 31-year-old Evers wound up as Boston’s most frequently used left fielder in 1952, starting 70 of the club’s 154 games. On August 14, little more than two months after getting traded to Detroit, Lenhardt was involved in another multiplayer exchange, going to the St. Louis Browns in a seven-player swap. He wrapped up his career by returning to the Red Sox for 44 games in 1954.

The June 2, 1952 Red Sox win saw them reach first place, by percentage points, as the Indians lost to the Yankees. By the end of 1952, however, the Red Sox were in sixth place, 19 games behind the pennant-winning Yankees.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Victoria Monte and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Don Lenhardt, Trading Card Database.

Sources

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

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS195206020.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1952/B06020BOS1952.htm

Notes

1 Williams had played his last game on April 30 and then shipped off to a Marine Corps air base in North Carolina. Though he had served three years during World War II, he was recalled during the Korean War despite being 33 years old and with a family. He is the only Hall of Fame ballplayer to have seen military service in two wars, and in Korea flew 39 combat missions. For more, see Bill Nowlin, Ted Williams at War (Burlington, Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 2007). Lenhardt played left field in 27 of the 41 games before his June 3 trade.

2 Joe Cashman, “4-Run Homer by Lenhardt,” Boston Record, June 3, 1952: 30.

3 Edward Burns, “4 Run Boston Homer Ships White Sox, 6-2,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1952: B1.

4 Arthur Sampson, “Red Sox Take First Place on Lenhardt Slam in 10th, 6-2,” Boston Herald, June 3, 1952: 12,

5 Clif Keane, “Sox Play Strategy to Hilt in Game-Winning Rally,” Boston Globe, June 3, 1952: 8.

6 “Hatfield didn’t make an effort to move out of the way,” wrote Clif Keane. “He LET the ball hit him.” Kaese also wrote a whole article about the hit-by-pitch. “Did Freddy try to Duck … Or, Was Hatfield Coy?” Boston Globe, June 3, 1952: 1.

7 Pres Hobson, “Sox Hit Roof on Boudreau Thinking,” Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot Ledger, June 3, 1952: 12. “But don’t give me the credit,” said Boudreau, “Lenhardt hit the homer, He deserves the credit.”

8 Burns. His first grand slam had been in the first game of the April 19 doubleheader against the Philadelphia Athletics, an inside-the-park grand slam.

9 Many of the June 3 newspapers carried the June 2 game story as well as one reporting the trade. For one good summary of the trade, on the day it was made, see Ed Rumill, “Nine Player Deal Sends Five Red Sox to Tigers,” Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 1952: 1.

10 Hy Hurwitz, “Sox Players Philosophical About Trade, Dropo Vows He Will Be Better Hitter,” Boston Globe, June 4, 1952: 20.