May 3, 1939: Ted Williams records first career game-deciding RBI in Red Sox win over Cleveland

Over the course of his career, which included games in four decades, Ted Williams had 204 game-deciding plate appearances – an appearance in which he contributed the RBI that provided the margin of victory for the Boston Red Sox as it gave them at least one more run than the opposing team eventually scored.1

When his 1939 rookie season began, Williams was 19 years old and playing right field. During that first year, there were 14 games in which he came to bat and produced the run that wound up deciding the game: eight times on home runs, four on singles, one on a double, and one on an RBI groundout. 

Williams’ first game-deciding RBI happened in his eighth big-league game, on May 3 at Cleveland’s League Park. Going into the game, he was batting .344 and already had connected on his first major-league home run.

The season was young. Cleveland was 4-6, and Boston was 5-3. Indians manager Ossie Vitt selected 32-year-old veteran right-hander Willis Hudlin as his starting pitcher. In 13-plus years with Cleveland, Hudlin had won 146 games and lost 141. Joe Cronin managed the Red Sox. Often their shortstop, he was feeling ill and replaced there by Tom Carey. Cronin’s starter on the mound was Elden Auker, in his sixth season. The 28-year-old righty had been 77-52 for Detroit the five previous years. He had appeared in two games for the 1939 Red Sox, faced 11 batters, and walked five of them, but was without a decision.

The early innings provided a scoreless duel. Boston’s Jimmie Foxx and Bobby Doerr each collected doubles off Hudlin, in the first and second innings respectively. Williams, batting cleanup, flied to center to strand Foxx on second in the first inning. Auker walked right fielder Moose Solters in the first but retired every other batter he faced in the first three innings.

With two outs in the top of the third, Joe Vosmik – the previous season’s AL hit leader with 201 – singled and Foxx doubled again, but Williams popped up to third base. Boston shortstop Carey’s two-out single in the fourth also was fruitless. Solters’ one-out single in the home half of the fourth was the first hit against Auker; it happened one batter after Williams made a leaping catch to rob center fielder Roy Weatherly in front of League Park’s 290-foot right-field wall.2

In the top of the fifth, the Red Sox edged across a run. Auker led off with a single. He was forced at second on center fielder Doc Cramer’s grounder to Hudlin. Vosmik singled to right and Cramer went from first to third,; he soon scored on Foxx’s sacrifice fly to left. Vosmik took second when rookie Indians second baseman Jim Shilling dropped the throw to the infield for an error. Williams was up for the third time with a runner in scoring position, but he struck out to keep it a 1-0 game.

Shilling, in his ninth big-league game, had a two-out double in the fifth, and both teams had two batters reach after two outs in the sixth. All those runners were stranded.

The Red Sox gave Auker some insurance in the seventh. With one out, both Vosmik and Foxx singled to center, Vosmik going first to third on Foxx’s hit.

That brought up Ted Williams. He had left four runners in scoring position in three hitless at-bats. He again was facing Hudlin, who had debuted in the big leagues when Williams was seven years old. But this time, Williams hit an opposite-field single to left field. Vosmik scored, and Foxx went first to third. It was 2-0, Red Sox.

They added a third run when third baseman Jim Tabor hit into a force play at second base, scoring Foxx. Tabor stole second and scored on Doerr’s single to left.

It was 4-0 heading into the bottom of the seventh. Auker walked the leadoff batter, third baseman Ken Keltner. A force at second secured the first out, but a throwing error by Tabor on the next play put Indians on first and second with one out. Vitt had Earl Averill pinch-hit for Hudlin, but he grounded into a force play at second and shortstop Skeeter Webb grounded out, third to first.

Bill Zuber was the new pitcher for Cleveland in the eighth. After getting two outs, he allowed a single to left by Cramer and then Vosmik’s fourth hit of the day, an RBI double to right-center. Zuber then struck out Foxx. The score was 5-0, Red Sox.

With one out in the bottom of the eighth, Solters worked a walk off Auker. Left fielder Jeff Heath singled to right-center, and Solters advanced to third base. First baseman Hal Trosky struck out, and Auker might have escaped the inning but for a fielding error by shortstop Carey on a ball hit by Keltner. Solters scored to break the shutout. The next batter flied out.

Williams – on his way to 107 walks, second in the AL to Harlond Clift of the St. Louis Browns (111) – walked to lead off the top of the ninth for the Red Sox. But Tabor hit into a 6-3 double play, and Doerr flied out to right.

Auker went the distance. In the bottom of the ninth, he surrendered a leadoff single to Shilling but struck out pinch-hitter Ben Chapman and turned pinch-hitter Odell Hale’s grounder into an unassisted second out. Weatherly grounded out, second to first, and the game was over.

With the final score as it was, the second run scored by Boston was the one that provided the edge needed to win. It was the game-deciding hit – Ted Williams’ single in the top of the seventh.

Most of the press attention was on Auker, who had pitched masterfully. Joe Cronin was quoted: “Isn’t it great to get a game pitched like that in that small ball park?…That’s the best-pitched game the Red Sox have given in League Park since I came to Boston.”3 The Boston Globe reporter further explained, “Not a single Indian drive found the chummy right field wall on which the Clevelanders count so much. The closest ball that came to the 290-foot barrier was a liner of which Ted Williams made a leaping glove-hand stab on little Roy Weatherly.”4 Cleveland’s Plain Dealer wrote that Auker “held the hapless redskins to five hits, scattered over as many innings, and was robbed of a shutout by an infield error on an easy chance in the eighth inning.”5

Joe Vosmik’s four hits in five at-bats led the Plain Dealer to say, “his bat figured prominently in the scoring of every Red Sox run.”6 The Cleveland paper didn’t even mention Williams. The Boston Herald did, however, noting that he had “been a bit too anxious his first three times up, leaving a total of four mates stranded, for he was the third out thrice in a row.”7 He was credited, though, with “two sparkling catches.”8

In all, “The Kid” hit 110 game-deciding home runs. The first came the day after this game, in Detroit on May 4, a three-run homer in the fifth inning that provided the fifth, sixth, and seventh runs in a game the Red Sox won, 7-6. He had homered earlier in the same game, his first multi-homer game. But it was the fifth-inning homer that made the difference in the end.

At season’s end, the Red Sox finished in second place, 17 games behind the New York Yankees, and the Indians were third, 3½ games behind Boston. Ted Williams led both leagues with 145 RBIs, which remains a major-league rookie record as of 2026. He had earned the respect of opposing ballclubs and led the American League with 12 intentional walks, the first of nine seasons in which he led that category.

As noted, Williams had 14 game-deciding plate appearances in 1939 and 204 overall. Of the 204, there were 110 home runs, while 39 were singles, 18 were doubles, 10 were triples, five were on bases-loaded walks, 15 came on groundouts, and seven were on sacrifice flies.  There were 107 at home and 97 on the road. Seventeen occurred in extra innings, and 10 more in the ninth inning. 

His final such decider was a home run, on September 17, 1960, in Washington. Williams’ two-run homer off Pedro Ramos in the top of the sixth inning just cleared the fence in right field and provided the runs necessary for a 2-1 win over the Senators.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy-edited by Mike Eisenbath.

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/CLE/CLE193905030.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1939/B05030CLE1939.htm

Notes

1 Under this definition, if a Williams two-run homer increased Boston’s lead from 2-1 to 4-1, and the Red Sox went on to win 4-3, it qualified as a game-deciding hit. (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.)

2 Gerry Moore, “Auker’s Work Inspires Sox…Now Challenge All Comers,” Boston Globe, May 4, 1939: 20.

3 Moore.

4 Moore.

5 Gordon Cobbledick, “Indians Give Hudlin No Runs in 22 Innings; Auker Coasts,” (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, May 4, 1939: 19.

6 Cobbledick.

7 Burt Whitman, “Vosmik Drives Four Hits, Foxx Three; Williams Singles in Return To Sox,” Boston Herald, May 4, 1939: 20. Both Williams and Cronin had been out with colds.

8 United Press, “Jim Turner to Face Cincinnati,” (Quincy, Massachusetts) Patriot Ledger, May 4, 1939: A-6.