More than any other achievement in the statistically obsessed game that is baseball, Anson’s hit totals are subject to debate. The most respected statistical references in the game disagree on how many hits the 19th-century Chicago star actually had … or whether he even reached 3,000. The Hall of Fame credits Anson with 3,081 hits. But The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia gives him 3,012. Baseball Reference says Anson had 3,435 hits. Project Retrosheet accepts both the 3,012 and 3,435 figures, while the Macmillan Encyclopedia gives him an even 3,000. Total Baseball credits Anson with 2,995. Anson biographer David Fleitz puts the figure at 2,995 or 3,418.1

There are as many reasons for the differing totals as there are totals themselves. One relates to the 423 hits Anson achieved while playing for National Association teams in Rockford and Philadelphia between 1871 and 1875. The National Association was a precursor to the National League, and whether its statistics are counted hinges on who’s doing the counting.

But the legitimacy of the Association as a major league is hardly the only question. The keeping of statistics was an imprecise science in the 19th century, occasionally flavored by favoritism depending on who was keeping the stats. In no case was this truer than with Anson, whose presence engendered strong sentiments, both favorable and unfavorable. There is evidence that scorekeepers and league officials tampered with the record books to inflate his hit totals. Although Anson was the game’s first great star, the major reference works today agree on his hit totals for a mere nine of his 22 seasons. For example, in 1894 Total Baseball, Macmillan, and Fleitz credit Anson with having made 132 hits. But ESPN, Baseball Reference, and Retrosheet say he made 133, and the Hall of Fame puts the total at 137.2

Changes in rules contribute another source of controversy. In 1887 the National League adopted a rule counting bases on balls as hits. Anson had 60 walks that year, and the Hall of Fame counts those walks as hits because that’s how they were recorded in 1887. None of the other major references do.3

Those difficulties in verifying Anson’s achievement are magnified by the fact that at the time he did it, nobody paid the slightest attention to his career hit total, or to the notion that he might be approaching a milestone.

In short, it is today impossible to reconstruct exactly how many hits Anson made, or say with certainty whether and when he reached 3,000. We can, however, fashion some sort of consensus or estimate out of the cumulative judgments of the major reference works. When you delete Anson’s performance in the National Association as well as the 60 walks he got in 1887, then examine the various versions of his remaining hit record side by side, the expert consensus arrives at 3,012 hits. Although it’s coincidental because the year-by-year figures don’t track, that sum happens to be precisely the number put forward by The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Baseball Reference, and Retrosheet (in the case of the latter two, minus the NA games).

If we accept the 3,012 hit total as a best estimate, then Anson reached 3,000 during the last game he ever played in Chicago. The date was September 19, and the Colts—preparing for a season-ending road trip to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis—were hosting Louisville’s Colonels in what gave every appearance of being an insignificant game between the ninthand eleventh-place teams.4

A good crowd of 6,000 showed up on a Sunday afternoon at West Side Park for what was presumed to be, if not officially designated as, Anson’s final home game. What they witnessed could hardly be termed an artistic success, given that the eight errors—six by Louisville—led to all of the runs in the 5–2 Colts victory being unearned.

Nor was there anything remarkable about the “3,000th” hit. It was a second-inning lead-off single, and although the Chicago fans cheered their hero lustily for it, that amounted to more of a “lifetime achievement” recognition than any response to a batting milestone. He got an equally enthusiastic ovation following an uneventful double later in the game.

The precise date—and even the legitimacy—of Anson’s achievement is still debated today. But Anson was the most consistent and durable hitter of the 19th century. Whatever his final hit total, it remained a record for 17 years. Not until 1914 did Honus Wagner and Napoleon Lajoie join him in what would eventually become recognized as the 3,000-hit club. (Wagner, by the way, played in center field for the Colonels in the September 19 game and had one hit, a single.)

Notes

1 Hall of Fame data from http://www.baseballhall.org/hof/anson-cap; Total Baseball data from Total Baseball, Revised and Updated, 2004. ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia data from 2006 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia by Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer; Baseball Reference data from http://www.baseballreference.com/players/a/ansonca01.shtml; Fleitz data from David Fleitz, Cap Anson, The Grand Old Man of Baseball, (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005). Macmillan data from The Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, 1996. The Fleitz hit total discrepancy is attributable to the author’s ambivalence on the question of whether to count the 423 hits Anson is credited with during his years playing in the National Association.

2 Ibid.

3 The Hall of Fame’s inclusion of the 1887 walk totals as hits (see the citation above), is not decisive to Anson’s 3,000-hit total, since even if those 60 walks were subtracted from his career hits the Hall would still credit him with 3,021 hits.

4 The game account is based primarily on reporting from the Chicago Tribune, September 20, 1897, supplemented by the Baltimore Sun, September 20, 1897.

In spite of an ungainly build – Wagner was barrel-chested, with huge hands, and bowed legs – he was a tremendous athlete with great speed.3 As of 2022, he ranked third all-time with 252 triples and 10th with 723 steals. He was also a great hitter, with a .328 lifetime batting average and – although the exact total varies by source – more career hits than all but seven other players in major-league history. Wagner may be best known by many baseball fans as the player with the most valuable baseball card in history, a value driven both by the scarcity of the American Tobacco Company’s T206 card and Wagner’s extraordinary talent.4

Wagner debuted in the major leagues in 1897 with the Louisville Colonels, then moved to the Pirates after the 1899 season. Finishing in the National League’s Top 10 in hits in every season but one from 1899 through 1912, he recorded his 3,000th career hit in 1914, at the age of 40.

Exactly when Wagner reached the 3,000-hit milestone, joining Cap Anson as the second member of that club, is a matter of dispute. Newspaper coverage of the Pirates’ 3-1 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies on June 9, 1914, said Wagner recorded his 3,000th career hit in that game, a ninth-inning double against Philadelphia’s Erskine Mayer. “Old Bismarck Reaches 3,000th Safety Mark After 17 Years of Wonderful Batting,” a headline in the Pittsburgh Gazette Times proclaimed.5

As of 2022, several authoritative sources, including the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Major League Baseball, follow the contemporary record books and recognize June 9, 1914, as the date of Wagner’s 3,000th hit.6 These sources credit Wagner with 3,430 career hits.

Other prominent references, however, place Wagner’s milestone later in the month. The Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, first published in 1969, 14 years after Wagner’s death, conducted its own research on seasons before 1903, before official NL statistics existed. Determining that Wagner had fewer hits in several of those seasons than previously calculated, Macmillan set his career hit total at 3,420. In the twenty-first century, Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org have followed Macmillan’s data in developing their baseball history databases.7

By this count, Wagner’s celebrated hit of June 9 was only the 2,990th of his career, and he instead got number 3,000 in the second game of a Sunday doubleheader against the Cincinnati Reds on June 28, nearly three weeks later.8

Wagner’s Pirates had won the World Series in 1909, after a 110-win season with a .724 winning percentage. They had been competitive in the NL the next few years, finishing third twice and second once, before falling to fourth at the end of the 1913 season. They had not had a losing season since 1898, two years before Wagner’s arrival.

Pittsburgh won 15 of 17 games to start 1914 and led the NL by four games on May 25 after a victory over the Brooklyn Robins. But the Pirates had played poorly for about a month after the win against Brooklyn, going 8-20 (with one tie) over the next 29 games.

The Cincinnati franchise had struggled over the previous decade, never finishing above third after 1904, and was seventh of the eight NL teams in 1913. Like the Pirates, the Reds had spent time in first place earlier in 1914 before slumping. Cincinnati’s 26-15 record on June 1 had tied the New York Giants for the top spot, but the Reds had dropped seven in a row before Pittsburgh’s visit. Going into the doubleheader, both teams were one game over .500, and tied for third place, six games behind the league-leading Giants.9

In the first game of the day, the Pirates led 6-2 going into the bottom of the ninth, but the Reds scored five runs in the ninth to win, 7-6. Wagner was held hitless in three at-bats.

Right-hander Marty O’Toole started the second game for Pittsburgh. The Pirates had paid a record $22,500 in 1911 to obtain O’Toole’s services, but his arm had been damaged by overuse, and O’Toole was generally ineffective for the Pirates. By 1914 the 25-year-old Washington native was being referred to as the “Lemon.”10 O’Toole was 0-1 with a 5.47 ERA in seven appearances going into the start against the Reds.

Rookie Pete Schneider, the youngest player in the NL in 1914, started for the Reds, nearly two months before his 19th birthday. Schneider had starred that year for the Seattle Giants of the Northwestern League, going 12-2 with a 1.43 ERA. He had received $571 in advance money from the Chicago Whales of the Federal League but had not signed a contract with the Whales. Schneider had also been courted by the Reds, and when he decided to play for Cincinnati, he had to return the advance money to the Whales.11 Schneider was making his third appearance, and first start, for Cincinnati. He had no won-lost record and a 4.91 ERA entering the game. There were 11,000 fans on hand to witness the action.

Displaying what the Cincinnati Enquirer described as “dazzling speed and a curve ball that would do credit to Babe] Adams or Bert Humphries,”12 Schneider set down the first two Pittsburgh batters to open the game before second baseman Jim Viox beat out a groundball to shortstop for an infield hit.13 Wagner had his first shot of the game at his 3,000th hit but flied out to left field for the third out.

After O’Toole set the Reds down in order in the bottom half of the first, Pirates first baseman Ed Konetchy walked to open the second and reached second base with two outs when Schneider’s pickoff throw got past Dick Hoblitzell at first. Konetchy then tried to steal third, but Reds catcher Tommy Clarke threw him out to end the inning.

Cincinnati went ahead in its half of the second. Heinie Groh, the Reds’ second baseman and an emerging star at age 24, singled with one out and went to third on Hoblitzell’s single. Wagner picked up the force at second on a groundball by Harry LaRoss as Groh scored for a 1-0 lead.

That was all the Reds managed against O’Toole, but Schneider was even better. Through six innings, Viox’s first-inning single was Pittsburgh’s only hit, and the first two Pirates to bat in the seventh were retired, bringing up Wagner, who had flied out again in the fourth.

Wagner singled to center, giving him 3,000 career hits under the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia’s count. But he advanced no farther, as Konetchy popped up for the third out.

Outstanding defense by Wagner – what the Pittsburgh Post described as a “leaping pickup and throw” on a bouncer, then a “[chase] into left field” to catch a fly ball – kept Cincinnati off the scoreboard in the bottom of the seventh.14

Schneider had to hold off two last Pittsburgh threats to preserve the shutout. With two outs in the eighth, he walked pinch-hitters Joe Leonard and Ham Hyatt. Speedy 24-year-old left fielder Max Carey, early in his Hall of Fame career as one of the game’s top contact hitters and baserunners, grounded to second, and “was barely beaten out by Groh’s toss” to first for the final out.15

In the top of the ninth, former Red Mike Mowrey led off with a single, and Viox sacrificed him to second. The tying run was in scoring position as Wagner batted against Schneider, born in 1895, the same year as the great shortstop’s professional debut. But Schneider was up to the challenge, retiring Wagner on a popup, then fanning Konetchy on a curveball to close out his first major-league win. “[Schneider’s] first start in the big show must surely be labeled an artistic success,” the Cincinnati Enquirer concluded.16

Wagner finished 1914 with a .252 batting average, which turned out to be the lowest of his career; the Pirates came in at 69-85-4 and in seventh place. He played through 1917, recording his final major-league hit – number 3,430 or 3,420, depending on the source – on September 3 against the Reds, as he finished his 18th season in Pittsburgh.

Regardless of whether Wagner’s 3,000th career hit happened on June 9, 1914, in Philadelphia or 19 days later in Cincinnati, he was still the second player in the history of the game to reach the 3,000-hit threshold, and the first in the twentieth century. Unlike Anson, whose lifetime statistics were similarly challenged by subsequent research, there is no question that his career hit total exceeded 3,000.17 Napoleon Lajoie became the third man to reach the 3,000 threshold, just three months after Wagner in 1914.

Author’s note

While I was in the process of writing this article, my family and I took a vacation to New York City. We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the trip. Unbeknownst to me, the museum possesses, and displays, items from the extensive baseball card collection of Jefferson R. Burdick.

One of the highlights of the collection on display is the famous Honus Wagner card mentioned in this article. It was interesting to see the card in person. I hadn’t realized how small it is, only about one inch by three inches. It was a pleasant coincidence to see the card after doing the research for an article on Wagner.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to John Fredland for his suggestions and revisions to the first draft of this article. The final product is significantly improved because of his input. The article was fact-checked by Evan Katz and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, I used Baseball-Reference.com for team, season, and player pages and logs and the box scores and play-by-plays for this game.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN191406282.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1914/B06282CIN1914.htm

Notes

1 Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: The Free Press, 2001).

2 Bill James, “Baseball’s Best Player,” Bill James Online, https://www.billjamesonline.com/article151/, (last accessed March 15, 2022).

3 Jan Finkel, “Honus Wagner,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/honus-wagner/ (last accessed March 14, 2022).

4 Dan Hajducky, “T206 Honus Wagner Baseball Card Sells for $6.606 Million, Shattering Previous Record,” ESPN.com, https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32031670/t206-honus-wagner-baseball-card-sells-6606-million-shattering-previous-record (last accessed March 14, 2022).

5 James Jerpe, “Mayer Beats Pirates, but Wagner Gets Hit: Old Bismarck Reaches 3000th Safety Mark After 17 Years of Wonderful Batting – Crowd Gives Mighty Cheer – Phillie Pitcher in Form,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, June 10, 1914: 10.

6 National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, “The 3,000-Hit Club, Honus Wagner,” http://exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/3000_hit_club/wagner_honus.htm (last accessed March 15, 2022).

7 Mike Lynch, “Explaining the Honus Wagner Career Hits Discrepancy,” Sports-Reference.com, https://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2014/07/explaining-the-honus-wagner-career-hits-discrepancy/ (last accessed March 15, 2022).

8 Tom Ruane, “A Retro-Review of the 1910s,” Retrosheet.org, https://www.retrosheet.org/Research/RuaneT/rev1910_art.htm (last accessed March 15, 2022). When following this count, Wagner attained 1,000 hits in his 755th game on September 6, 1902. It took him 769 more games to get to 2,000 hits; he reached that milestone on June 27, 1908.

9 The doubleheader was a single-day stop in Cincinnati, between the Pirates’ four-game home series with the St. Louis Cardinals that concluded on June 27 and a three-game set in St. Louis opening a day later. At the time, Pennsylvania law forbade Sunday baseball, and the Pirates often scheduled one-day visits to other NL cities. The date in Cincinnati was originally scheduled as a single game, but a May 4 rainout resulted in the doubleheader.

10 Dick Thompson, “Marty O’Toole,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/marty-otoole/ (last accessed March 16, 2022).

11 “Pitcher Schneider Signed,” Boston Globe, June 11, 1914: 15.

12 Jack Ryder, “Hopped Back Into Second Place: Reds Recover Form and Swat Pirates Twice,” June 29, 1914: 9.

13 The game description is taken from this newspaper account of the contest: Ed. F. Balinger, “Pirates Fall Twice Before Red Brigade,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, June 29, 1914: 8.

14 Balinger.

15 Balinger.

16 Ryder, “Hopped Back Into Second Place.” Schneider pitched in 207 games for the Reds and New York Yankees from 1914 through 1919, finishing his career with a 59-86 record and a 103 ERA+.

17 Bill Felber, “September 19, 1897: Cap Anson’s 3,000th Hit? SABR Baseball Games Project, https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/september-19-1897-cap-ansons-3000th-hit/ (last accessed March 19, 2022).

Connie Mack made similar remarks about Lajoie’s fielding skills at second base. “He plays so naturally and so easily it looks like lack of effort. Larry’s reach is so long and he’s fast as lightning,” opined Mack, Lajoie’s manager during two stints with the Philadelphia Athletics.2

Lajoie began his career in 1896 in the National League, debuting with the Philadelphia Phillies at age 21. He was a star there for the next four years, but during a contract dispute jumped to Mack’s Athletics of the upstart American League for the 1901 season.3

Lajoie had another stellar season in 1901, winning the first Triple Crown in American League history, but the Phillies won an injunction from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court forbidding him to play for any team except the Phillies. Since the injunction was enforceable only in Pennsylvania, the Athletics transferred him to the Cleveland Bronchos in 1902.4

Lajoie was very popular with the fans and the press in Cleveland, which led to the team being known as the Cleveland Naps from 1903 through 1914. (He’s the only major-league player to have his team named after him while still an active player.5)

On his way to pacing the AL with a .378 batting average in his first season in Cleveland, Lajoie attained his 1,000th career hit on July 7, 1902, in the 653rd game of his career, making him one of just a few players in major-league history to accumulate 1,000 hits in fewer than 700 games.6 It took Lajoie 767 more games to get to 2,000 hits. He reached that milestone on July 20, 1908.

A little over six years later, on September 26, 1914, three weeks after his 40th birthday, Lajoie singled in the second game of a Saturday doubleheader against the Washington Senators in Cleveland.

Sources vary on where this hit put Lajoie’s career total. Contemporary coverage considered it his 2,998th career hit; some twenty-first-century references regard it as hit number 2,999.

Either way, it was one of only four hits for the Naps in a 6-0 loss, their 99th defeat of 1914. Cleveland had never won an AL pennant, but the franchise had at least avoided last place in its first 13 seasons. That streak was ending in 1914. The Naps had won only 24 of 86 games from June 24 through September 24 (a .279 winning percentage) to drop into the cellar, 20 games behind the next closest club and 48½ games behind the first-place Boston Red Sox, with a week to go in the season.

This was a historically bad season, opening with eight straight losses and finishing April with a .250 winning percentage. Naps pitchers allowed 708 runs, 90 more than any other AL team. Among Cleveland’s parade of Blues, Bronchos, Naps, Indians, and Guardians since the AL’s inaugural 1901 season, 1914’s winning percentage of .333 stood, as of 2022, lowest in franchise history.

To put this in perspective, the 1914 Naps won even less frequently than the 1969 (.385 winning percentage) and 1971 (.370) Indians teams that shared newsprint with reports of the Cuyahoga River catching fire in June 1969; the 1985 (.370) and 1987 (.377) squads, which set the cultural climate for the fictional woebegone Cleveland club in the 1989 movie Major League; and the 1991 (.352) Indians, who initiated the rebuild that in 1995 yielded the city’s first AL pennant in 41 years.

Lajoie’s own numbers in 1914 mirrored his club’s decline; he was batting .258 and slugging .305, far below his career totals, as well as his production in any previous season.

The New York Yankees arrived in Cleveland on September 27 to open a three-game series, beginning with a Sunday doubleheader. New York – in its second season after moving its home games from Hilltop Park to the Polo Grounds full time, dropping its original “Highlanders” nickname, and rebranding itself as the Yankees – had yet to win an AL pennant and was tied for sixth in the American League with a 66-78 record.

Given the poor performance of the two teams, many of the 3,000 Cleveland fans who attended the doubleheader may have been more excited about the prospect of seeing Lajoie reach the milestone than the possibility of Naps victories.7

In the first game of the day, the Yankees started 26-year-old right-hander Marty McHale, who had struggled through the season with a 6-14 record. The Naps countered with rookie righty Guy Morton.

Morton was an example of the cliché, “A pitcher has to be pretty good to lose 20 games.” He threw hard – his manager thought he was almost as fast as Walter Johnson – but Morton, who had made his major-league debut in June 1914, the month of his 21st birthday, was 0-13 before his start against the Yankees.8 The poor record was in part a result of weak fielding and run support during many of Morton’s starts.9

Each pitcher allowed a run in the first inning and shut down his opponent in the second. The Yankees added another run in the top of the third to take a 2-1 lead.

The hurlers then put up zeros until the bottom of the fifth, when a double by Lajoie contributed to a three-run outburst that put the Naps ahead, 4-2. Lajoie doubled for the second consecutive inning in the sixth, and the Naps tacked on one more run during that frame to increase their lead to three runs.10  

Roger Peckinpaugh, a Nap before joining the Yankees in a May 1913 trade, was serving as New York’s interim manager for the season’s final three weeks; at age 23 he was the youngest man to ever manage a major-league team. The opportunity to manage had opened up when Frank Chance quit the position out of frustration with ownership interference.11 Peckinpaugh replaced McHale with Boardwalk Brown in the seventh.12 Brown held the Naps hitless the next two innings.

The Yankees cut the gap to two with a seventh-inning run but made it no closer. Morton pitched a complete game, earning the first win of his career, as the Naps took the game, 5-3.13

Lajoie ended the game with 3,000 career hits – or maybe 3,001.

Newspaper coverage reported that his second double against McHale, in the sixth inning, had put Lajoie in the 3,000 Hit Club. As the hometown Cleveland Plain Dealer described it, “His 2,999th [in the fifth] was also a double, but he had no chance to go beyond the 3,000th as he failed to come to bat again in the first game and was allowed to go home when that contest was ended.”14 The Cleveland Press noted that Lajoie was presented with the ball after he reached second base in the sixth.15

The Brooklyn Times Union corroborated the Cleveland papers: “Lajoie got a great reception when he drove out the second double.”16

But two prominent twenty-first-century references, Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org, have a different count. Both credit Lajoie with 2,999 hits as of September 26, putting him one hit ahead of what everyone believed in 1914.

The difference is that these sources rely on the 1969 Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia for statistics from prior to 1903, rather than data from the Spalding Guides, which were considered authoritative during Lajoie’s career as an active player, through his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937, and for several years past his death in 1959.17 By this count, the fifth-inning double off McHale was the actually Lajoie’s 3,000th hit.

Regardless of which was his 3,000th hit, the veteran was pleased that he had joined Cap Anson and Honus Wagner (who had reached the milestone three months earlier) in the 3,000 Hit Club. Lajoie opined, “I believe I come pretty close to being the happiest man in Cuyahoga County. It’s mighty fine to make 3,000 hits when you figure Pop Anson and Honus Wagner are the only other batters to turn the trick. I feel like my pet bats have a few more hits in their systems and I feel like boosting my mark a few hundred before I quit.”18

The milestone hit came in Lajoie’s 1,613th game in 13 seasons with Cleveland’s AL franchise. He appeared in one more game with his namesake team, drawing a walk as a pinch-hitter on September 30. The Naps finished the season at 51-102-4.

Cleveland sold Lajoie to the Philadelphia Athletics in January 1915. Reunited with Mack in Philadelphia, he did have a couple hundred more hits in his bats, as he played his final two years for the Athletics and finished his career with 3,243 hits. As of 2022, that was the 15th highest career total for hits.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks for John Fredland for his comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Andrew Harner for providing 1914 newspaper accounts. The article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, I used Baseball-Reference.com for team, season, and player pages and logs and the box scores and play-by-plays.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE191409271.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1914/B09271CLE1914.htm

Notes

1 National Baseball Hall of Fame, “Nap Lajoie,” https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/lajoie-nap (last accessed September 5, 2022).

2 “Nap Lajoie,” https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/lajoie-nap.

3 Stephen Constantelos and David Jones, “Nap Lajoie,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Nap-Lajoie/ (last accessed August 1, 2022).

4 “Napoleon Lajoie: How Major League Baseball Made Legal History,” State Museum of Pennsylvania (last accessed August 1, 2022).

5 Constantelos and Jones, “Nap Lajoie.”

6 Two twentieth-century players to reach the 1,000-hit plateau in fewer than 700 games are Chuck Klein (683 games) and Ichiro Suzuki (696 games). It’s not likely that Lajoie’s 653 games is the all-time record for fastest to 1,000 hits, but poor record-keeping during the nineteenth century makes it difficult to know who actually holds the record. For example, Baseball-Reference.com shows that Willie Keeler accumulated 931 hits in 556 games between 1892 and 1897. Keeler certainly reached 1,000 career hits in 1898 since he led the NL in hits with 216 that year. But it is not known exactly how many games into 1898 it took him to accumulate the 69 hits he needed to reach 1,000.

7 Henry P. Edwards, “Lajoie Makes His 3,000th Base Hit in Big Leagues,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 28, 1914: 9.

8 Chris Rainey, “Guy Morton,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/guy-morton/ (last accessed April 4, 2022).

9 Morton’s 3.31 ERA was more than half a run higher than league average, but his 0-13 record was undeserved. Cleveland had scored two or fewer runs in 8 of his 12 starts. Morton had also been victimized for 16 unearned runs in 117 innings pitched (1.23 unearned runs per nine innings).

10 “Lajoie Rings Up His 3,000th Hit in Majors,” Brooklyn Times Union, September 28, 1914: 4.

11 Eugene Murdock, “The Youngest ‘Boy Manager,’” SABR Research Journals Archive, http://research.sabr.org/journals/youngest-boy-manager (last accessed August 1, 2022). Peckinpaugh’s tenure as manager of the Yankees lasted only for the final 20 games of the 1914 season; they hired Bill Donovan to manage in 1915. As a player. Peckinpaugh helped the Yankees win their first pennant in 1921 and won the World Series with Washington in 1924; he also managed the Indians from 1928 through 1933 and again in 1941, finishing his managerial career with a .505 winning percentage in 995 games.

12 “Naps Play Yankees in a Double Header Today,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 27, 1914: 17.

13 Morton improved to a 16-15 record in 1915; his 2.14 ERA was eighth in the AL, and his 7.4 Wins Above Replacement, as calculated by Baseball-Reference.com, topped all AL pitchers but Walter Johnson. In his 11-season career, spent entirely with Cleveland, Morton finished with a 98-86 record and a 3.13 ERA (108 ERA+) in 317 games.

14 Edwards, “Lajoie Makes His 3,000th Base Hit in Big Leagues.”

15 Perfect Season Project, An Uncommon Arrangement of Cleveland Indians History, “Game 151,” https://perfectseasonproject.wordpress.com/2019/09/16/game-151/#comments (last accessed April 5, 2022).

16 “Lajoie Rings Up His 3,000th Hit in Majors.”

[17] Mike Lynch, “Explaining the Honus Wagner Career Hits Discrepancy,” Sports-Reference.com, https://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2014/07/explaining-the-honus-wagner-career-hits-discrepancy/, (last accessed March 15, 2022).

[18] “Lajoie Third Player to Make 3,000 Hits,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 28, 1914: 9.

Cobb was a controversial figure, but his skill on the diamond was unmatched. SABR biographer Daniel Ginsburg wrote, “Adopting an aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of play which mirrored his fiery temperament and abrasive personality, Cobb dominated the game in the batter’s box and on the base paths.”3 Many of his contemporaries believed he was the best to ever play the game. One of those contemporaries, a fellow member of both the Hall of Fame and the 3,000-Hit Club, Tris Speaker, argued, “The Babe was a great ballplayer, sure, but [Ty] Cobb was even greater. Babe [Ruth could knock your brains out, but [Ty] Cobb would drive you crazy.”4 Bill James ranks him as the fifth-best player ever.5

Debuting with the Detroit Tigers in 1905 at age 18, Cobb was the youngest player to reach 1,000, 2,000, and 3,000 hits.6 His 1,000th hit came in his 762nd game, on May 13, 1911, at 24 years and 145 days old.7 It took just 687 more games to get to 2,000 hits, a milestone he reached on June 20, 1916, at the age of 29 years and 184 days.8

Just a little over five years later, on August 19, 1921, Cobb—at age 34 in his first season as Detroit’s player-manager—was on the verge of his 3,000th hit, as the Tigers hosted the Boston Red Sox in a doubleheader.

A day earlier, Boston had swept a twin bill from Detroit. Although Cobb’s Tigers had won the American League pennant three consecutive times from 1907 to 1909, they had finished seventh in two of the three seasons preceding 1921. Detroit was in sixth place with a 52-63 record. Boston was fifth at 52-57.

Cobb had five hits in the August 18 doubleheader. Sources vary on where this put his career total. The record book in use in 1921 set it at 2,997 hits; later references gave him 2,995.

Whatever the number, game coverage focused solely on Cobb’s performance in the doubleheader. If anyone was counting down to the imminent milestone, it was not mentioned in the day’s newspaper.

“Manager Cobb, as might be expected, had the best success with the Red Sox pitchers,” the Detroit Free Press observed, as Cobb competed for an AL batting crown that teammate Harry Heilmann ultimately won. “In nine trips to the plate, [Cobb] collected five safeties.”9

In the first game of the August 19 doubleheader, Cobb moved even closer to 3,000 by collecting a single and a double during the Tigers’ 12-8 loss to the Red Sox.

For the second game, the Red Sox started seven-year-veteran righty Elmer Myers, who had an 8-10 record. Myers, once such a promising phenom that Connie Mack thought he would make history, had had his career derailed by the effects of a poison gas attack in France during World War I.10

The Tigers countered with rookie left-hander Bert Cole, who had mostly been used in relief before this game. He had picked up a win in long relief, giving him a 1-0 record going into the start. 

Both hurlers pitched well for the first five innings. Myers allowed the Tigers a run in the first but put up zeros the next four frames. Cole was even better, holding the Red Sox scoreless through five innings.

Myers said the gas attack caused him to tire as games progressed, and that seemed to be the case in this game. The Red Sox hurler retired Lu Blue to start the sixth, but shortstop Joe Sargent began a parade of Tiger hits with a double.11

The next five batters—Larry Woodall, Cole, leadoff man Ralph Young, Bob Jones, and Cobb—all hit singles. Left fielder Bobby Veach, who finished the season with career highs in hits (207) and RBIs (128), followed with Detroit’s second double of the inning.

The rain of hits resulted in five Tigers runs and left men on second and third. Myers walked eventual Hall of Famer Heilmann, who pounded career highs in hits (237) and RBIs (139) that season, and batted .394 to edge Cobb (who batted .389) for the AL batting title, loading the bases for Blue’s second at-bat of the inning.

Blue smashed a line drive toward left field, but shortstop Everett Scott snared the ball with a tremendous leap. Scott threw to third to double up Cobb and end the onslaught, but the Tigers led 6-0.  

Cole kept his shutout intact in the top of the seventh and helped his own cause with an RBI single in the bottom half to increase the lead to 7-0.

Myers had more trouble in the eighth. After Jones’s triple, Cobb doubled to drive in another run. Veach earned a base on balls to put two Tigers on base, and a double by Blue drove both men in to make it 10-0.

Cole put up two more zeros in the eighth and ninth to finish his shutout. He moved into the starting rotation for the remainder of the season and finished the campaign with seven wins against four losses. 

The game stories in the Boston Globe and Detroit Free Press describe two hits by Cobb, a single in the sixth and a double in the eighth. The box score indicates that Cobb had three hits in the game for four total bases, which means he singled in one of his three at-bats prior to the single in the sixth.

With his three-hit game and five-hit doubleheader, Cobb had joined the 3,000 Hit Club. But the question remained: Which hit was Number 3,000?

By the record book used during Cobb’s career and lifetime, he retired at 4,191 hits—a figure highlighted six decades later when Pete Rose overtook him as the major leagues’ all-time hit leader in 1985.12

Under that accounting, which the National Baseball Hall of Fame follows as of 2022, Cobb entered the second game of the doubleheader with 2,999 career hits, making his first single of the game his 3,000th hit.13

Another assessment of Cobb’s record, however, holds that the commonly accepted count mistakenly added two hits from the 1910 season and recalculates his hit total at 4,189. This total, stemming from research conducted by SABR member Pete Palmer in 1982, is standard in twenty-first-century reference sources like Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.14

In this view, Cobb had 2,997 hits at the beginning of the game, and his third hit—the eighth-inning RBI double—gave him the milestone.

Still, all sources agree that Cobb’s 3,000th hit occurred in the second game of the doubleheader on August 19, 1921. He was the fourth, and youngest, player to achieve the milestone, following Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, and Nap Lajoie. He was 34 years and 243 days old when he reached that plateau in his 2,135th game.15 He needed just 686 games to go from 2,000 to 3,000 hits.

As in the pregame coverage, Cobb’s milestone went unacknowledged after it happened. While previous instances of players achieving their 3,000th hits—such as Wagner in 1914 and Lajoie later that season—received public attention at the ballpark and in newspaper accounts, there is no record of Cobb’s 3,000th hit being celebrated at the time.

The Sporting News did not mention anything about Cobb reaching 3,000 hits in its coverage of the game.16 The Detroit Free Press, noting that Cobb had five hits in 10 at-bats during the doubleheader, asserted, “Cobb hit like a fiend all afternoon,” but did not mention his milestone.17 Similarly, the Boston Globe emphasized that “Cobb bunched his batting average during the afternoon.”18

As it happened, the exact circumstances of Cobb’s 3,000th hit went unrecognized until 1958, when Stan Musial neared the 3,000-hit milestone and the Detroit News “was prompted to seek the occasion and date of Cobb’s 3,000th hit for comparative purposes,” which revealed “there was no notice taken whatsoever of the occasion.”19 A “lengthy searching of the files” was required to find when Cobb’s milestone hit happened.20

Cobb became baseball’s first member of the 4,000 Hit Club in 1927, his first of two seasons with the Philadelphia Athletics at the end of his career. Ironically, that hit came against his former team, the Detroit Tigers. Unlike Cobb’s 3,000th hit, newspaper headlines heralded his 4,000th hit.21

For 1928 Cobb was joined in Philadelphia by the next two players to reach 3,000 hits: Eddie Collins and Speaker, both of whom had attained the milestone in 1925. The team won 98 games and finished in second place, 2½ games behind the New York Yankees, who won their third consecutive AL pennant.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to John Fredland and Bill Nowlin for their suggestions concerning the first draft of this article. The article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, I used the Baseball-Reference.com for team, season, and player pages and logs and the box scores and play-by-plays for this game.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/DET/DET192108192.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1921/B08192DET1921.htm

Notes

1 Reddit, “By Request: Compilation of Quotes and Stories About Ty Cobb,” https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/9x1wix/by_request_compilation_of_quotes_and_stories/ (last accessed September 29, 2022).

2 Reddit, “By Request: Compilation of Quotes and Stories About Ty Cobb.”

3 Daniel Ginsburg, “Ty Cobb,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ty-cobb/ (last accessed September 29, 2022).

4 Reddit, “By Request: Compilation of Quotes and Stories About Ty Cobb.”

5 Baseball Evolution, “Bill James Top 100,” http://baseballevolution.com/top100s/billjames100.html (last accessed April 8, 2022).

6 Baseball-Reference: Bullpen, “3,000 Hit Club,” https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/3,000_hit_club (last accessed April 9, 2022).

7 It is rare to accumulate 1,000 hits in under 700 games. For example, it took Ichiro Suzuki, who had a record 10-consecutive seasons with over 200 hits, 696 games to reach his first 1,000 safeties in US baseball.

8 The following web site was used to calculate Cobb’s age when he reached 2,000 hits: The Calculator Site, “Time Between Dates,” https://www.thecalculatorsite.com/time/days-between-dates.php (last accessed April 9, 2022).

9 “Tales of the Tigers,” Detroit Free Press, August 19, 1921: 12. According to Baseball-Reference.com, Heilmann entered the August 19 doubleheader with a .407 batting average; Cobb was batting .384. Heilmann finished the season at .394; Cobb hit .389.

10 Bill Nowlin, “Elmer Myers,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/elmer-myers/ (last accessed April 11, 2022).

11 Game action transcribed from the following newspaper article: “All Detroit in Second Clash—Cobb Bumps Ball,” Boston Globe, August 20, 1921: 4.

12 Rose finished his career with 4,256 base hits.

13 “The 3,000 Hit Club,” Ty Cobb, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, http://exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/3000_hit_club/cobb_ty.htm (last accessed August 4, 2022).

14 Herm Krabbenhoft, “How Many Hits Did Ty Cobb Make in His Major League Career? What Is His Lifetime Batting Average?” Baseball Research Journal, Volume 48, Number 1, Spring 2019: 92-97.

15 Baseball-Reference: Bullpen, “3,000 Hit Club.”

16 Dan Holmes, “Tigers Are Only Team with Three 3,000 Hit Club Members,” Vintage Detroit Collection, https://www.vintagedetroit.com/tigers-are-only-team-with-three-3000-hit-club-members/ (last accessed August 5, 2022).

17 “Told About the Tigers,” Detroit Free Press, August 20, 1921: 11.

18 “Moving on Cleveland,” Boston Globe, August 20, 1921: 4.

19 Ritter Collett, “Journal of Sports,” Dayton Journal Herald, May 10, 1958: 12.

20 Collett, “Journal of Sports.”

21 Harry Bullion, “Bengals in Third Place: Ty Cobb Gets 4,000th Hit,” Detroit Free Press, July 19, 1927: 14.

Speaker’s Indians were in third place with a 16-9 record, 3½ games behind the AL-leading Philadelphia Athletics and 1½ games behind that afternoon’s opponent, the Washington Senators. Washington had defeated Cleveland the previous afternoon, 6-2, in the first game of their four-game series. The Indians started the season strong following a disappointing 67-86 finish the previous year. The Indians featured a solid outfield led by veterans Speaker and Charlie Jamieson, with Joe Sewell anchoring the infield and Glenn Myatt behind the plate. The pitching staff featured 20-game winner Joe Shaute, veteran left-hander Sherry Smith, and George Uhle, who had won 22 and 26 games in 1922 and 1923, but regressed in 1924, winning only nine. Cleveland did lose veteran right-hander Stan Coveleski, who had been traded to Washington in the offseason. Although the Indians’ pitching had been questionable over the past couple of seasons, Speaker was optimistic about his staff during spring training.4

The Senators were reigning World Series champions. After defeating the New York Giants in seven games, Washington was favored to repeat as the AL pennant winner, although concern was expressed about the staff’s aging pitchers.5 Like the Indians, the Senators were guided by a future Hall of Fame player-manager, Bucky Harris, with three other future Hall of Famers on the roster: Walter Johnson, Goose Goslin, and Sam Rice. The trio had played together since 1921 when the 20-year-old Goslin joined the club. Washington was 18-8, two games behind Philadelphia, but riding a four-game winning streak.

Uhle received Cleveland’s starting assignment. The 6-foot right-hander was 4-1 with a 3.10 ERA in 58 innings pitched. He had won a complete game four days earlier against Boston. Uhle had not faced the Senators so far in the season and struggled against them the previous season. Cleveland’s starter threw a fastball and overhead curve, which was complemented by a slider later in his career.6 In early May, Uhle received praise for his improved performance; The Sporting News reported that the “big righthander is showing great control and has all the zip needed on his fast ball and curve.”7

Tom Zachary started for Washington. The struggling 6-foot-1 veteran right-hander was 2-1 with a 5.04 ERA in 25 innings pitched. He struggled with control issues, issuing 15 walks against only seven strikeouts thus far. Zachary had lost his previous start, when he allowed four runs on four hits and four walks in six innings against the St. Louis Browns. He had finished with double digits in wins during the preceding five seasons and was expected to be a key component of Washington’s staff.8 His pitching repertoire has been referenced as unconventional and included the knuckleball.9

Despite the low temperature, 20,000 baseball fans attended the Sunday afternoon game.10 Uhle started the game by retiring Washington on two groundouts and a lineout. In the bottom of the first, Rube Lutzke doubled to right field with one out. Speaker lined out to short, and Lutzke was doubled off second base. Zachary benefited from another inning-ending double play in the following frame when George Burns grounded into one with runners on first and second.

Washington scored first, in the third inning. With two outs, Rice doubled into the left-center gap. Bucky Harris singled down the left-field line, just over the third-base bag. He plated Rice and advanced to second base on the throw home. Joe Harris grounded out. Washington led 1-0.

The Senators missed another scoring opportunity in the fourth inning. Goslin reached first on an infield error but was picked off by catcher Luke Sewell. Mule Shirley reached base on a wide throw by shortstop Joe Sewell. Ossie Bluege flied out. Roger Peckinpaugh singled to left field, but Shirley was thrown out attempting to reach third base. Lutzke, Cleveland’s third baseman, made a spectacular defensive play to tag out Shirley. Jamieson’s throw from left field was offline; Lutzke “went almost to the third base coaching box for the sphere and then dove across the bag to touch Shirley before he could reach the cushion.”11 Cleveland’s two fielding errors were negated by two Washington baserunning outs. In the Indians’ half, Zachary escaped another jam, benefiting from another double play. Lutzke struck out to start the inning, Zachary’s lone strikeout victim in the game. Speaker doubled into left field, his 2,998th career hit. Joe Sewell was hit by a pitch. With runners on first and second, Luke Sewell grounded into an around-the-horn double play to preserve the Senators’ slim lead.

In the Washington sixth, Goslin doubled off the right-field wall, missing a home run by a foot. In the Cleveland sixth, Speaker delivered career base knock number 2,999, a single into right field. Each team’s bats fell silent during the seventh inning as both sides were retired in order.

Washington bats awakened in the eighth inning. Rice led off with a bloop single, which landed just over Lutzke and six inches away from Joe Sewell’s glove.12 Bucky Harris sacrificed Rice to second base. Joe Harris singled up the middle on a 3-and-2 count,13 scoring Rice and giving the Senators a 2-0 lead. In the bottom half, Washington changed its defense, moving Goslin from center field to left field, Joe Harris from left field to first base, and Earl McNeely replacing Goslin in center field. (McNeeley replaced first baseman Mule Shirley in the batting order.) Cleveland pinch-hitter Joe Klugmann started the inning by grounding out. Uhle hit an infield single. He advanced to second on Jamieson’s groundout. Lutzke fouled out to end the inning.

The Senators hit all grounders in the ninth inning, including an infield single by Bluege deep in the hole between short and third, though he didn’t advance. In the bottom half and down two runs, Speaker jump-started Cleveland’s inning with a single. His third hit that afternoon enabled the Gray Eagle to join the exclusive 3,000-hit club as its fifth member, behind Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, Napoleon Lajoie, and Ty Cobb.14 Speaker’s accomplishment was noted but not immediately celebrated. Ray Knode ran for Speaker. Joe Sewell lined out. Luke Sewell doubled. For the first time that afternoon, there were two runners in scoring position. Knode scored on Cliff Lee’s sacrifice fly while Luke Sewell advanced to third base. With two outs and the tying run 90 feet away, Burns popped out to second base. Washington held on for a 2-1 win.

In addition to delivering his 3,000th hit,15 Speaker doubled and singled twice to raise his batting average to .388. Rice scored both Washington runs and was the only Senator with two hits. Both pitchers went the distance, with Zachary earning his third win and Uhle absorbing his second loss. Their combined control was notable, as the two pitchers combined to issue only one walk.

The Senators repeated as 1925 AL champions, compiling a 96-55 record and finishing 8½ games ahead of the Philadelphia Athletics. They fell just short of repeating as World Series champions, losing to the Pittsburgh Pirates in seven games. The Indians finished the season in sixth place with a 70-84 record, 28½ games behind Washington. Cleveland dropped 14 of 15 games from June 15 to 29 and didn’t move above sixth place thereafter.

Tris Speaker exhibited little deleterious effects of age that season. He finished with an AL-leading .479 OBP in 518 plate appearances. His 1.057 OPS was the third highest in his career, and his 6.5 Wins Above Replacement (per Baseball-Reference.com) was the AL’s third-highest total among position players. Speaker was named as a Baseball Writers’ Association of America AL All-Star,16 batting .389 with 35 doubles, 12 home runs, and 87 RBIs while patrolling center field. He nearly captured his second AL batting title, losing out to Detroit’s Harry Heilman on the season’s final day when Heilman banged out six hits during a doubleheader.17 Speaker finished his career with 3,514 hits, the fifth highest total in major-league history. In 1937 he was part of the second class voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.18

Sources

Besides the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Alamanc.com, Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet.org, and the following:

James, Bill. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: The Free Press, 2001).

baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE192505170.shtml

retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1925/B05170CLE1925.htm

Notes

1 “Speaker Makes His 3,000th Safe Drive,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 18, 1925: 20.

2 Ralph M. Dorn, “Benny Karr Makes Himself Valuable,” The Sporting News, May 21, 1925: 3.

3 “Speaker Makes His 3,000th Safe Drive.”

4 Francis J. Powers, “Pitching Brighter, So Is Tris Speaker,” The Sporting News, March 26, 1925: 1.

5 Paul W. Eaton, “Griff Not Hurrying Veteran Pitchers,” The Sporting News, March 26, 1925: 1.

6 Bill James and Rob Neyer, The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers: An Historical Compendium of Pitching, Pitchers, and Pitches (New York: Fireside Books, 2004), 408.

7 Francis J. Powers, “Spurgeon Shares in Tribe’s Success,” The Sporting News, May 7, 1925: 2.

8 Paul W. Eaton, “For Washington, Johnson and Ruel,” The Sporting News, February 26, 1925: 5.

9 James and Neyer, 436.

10 Stuart M. Bell, “Zachary Hurls Nats to Second Win Over Tribe by 2-1 Count,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 18, 1925: 1.

11 “Lutzke Hero of Brilliant Play,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 18, 1925: 21.

12 Bell.

13 Denman Thompson, “Joe Harris Making Good Record as Griff: Sam Gray Hurls Seventh Win in Row,” Washington Evening Star, May 18, 1925: 22.

14 Multiple newspaper accounts noted that Speaker was the sixth person to reach 3,000 hits. The sixth player mentioned was Sam Crawford, who was listed with 3,051 hits in 9,849 at-bats for a .310 batting average in several newspaper accounts on May 18, 1925. Major-league records, including those at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, list Crawford with 2,961 hits in 9,570 at-bats for a .309 lifetime batting average.

15 A potential discrepancy exists regarding the actual date Speaker delivered hit number 3,000. Several sources (Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, Baseball-Almanac.com, and Total Baseball Fourth Edition) show that Speaker accumulated 2,961 hits from his 1907 debut through 1924. From the start of the 1925 season (April 14) through May 17, 1925, the batting game logs on Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference show Speaker accumulating 38 hits. If the hit totals from his major-league debut through May 17, 1925, are correct, Speaker collected 2,999 hits through May 17, 1925. He collected hit number 3,000 on May 18, 1925, a first-inning single off Washington pitcher George Mogridge.

16 “Big League Writers Select All-Star Team for The Sporting News,” The Sporting News, November 19, 1925: 3.

17 “Bengal Slugger Goes on Hitting Rampage,” Detroit Free Press, October 5, 1925: 16.

18 Stuart Cameron, “Speaker, Young, Lajoie in Baseball ‘Hall of Fame,’” Dayton (Ohio) Herald, January 20, 1937: 16.

Collins maintained that level of play over a career that spanned from 1906—when he made his major-league debut under an assumed name while still a student at Columbia University—to 1930.2 In 1914, during the Deadball Era, he received the Chalmers Award as American League MVP. Nine seasons later, in 1923, with scoring and home runs up, Collins finished second in the MVP voting to Babe Ruth, then came in second again to Walter Johnson a year later.

“Collins sustained a remarkable level of performance for a remarkably long time. He was past thirty when the lively ball era began, yet he adapted to it and continued to be one of the best players in baseball every year. … [H]is was the most valuable career that any second baseman ever had,” wrote baseball historian Bill James.3

Collins was especially adept at stealing bases. He studied pitchers carefully, especially their feet and hips, and was able to take large leads and get a good jump when trying to swipe a bag.4 He retired with 741 career steals, eighth best all-time as of 2022.

In addition to being a prolific basestealer, Collins was a consistent hitter. In 1920 he batted .372 with 224 hits and finished his career with a .333 batting average. He averaged 178 hits per season for 16 years (1909-1924).

Collins reached the 1,000-hit plateau on August 26, 1913, at 26 years old, in his 832nd career game. It took him another 895 games to get to 2,000 hits, a milestone he attained on his 33rd birthday, May 2, 1920.

By then Collins had moved from the Philadelphia Athletics to the Chicago White Sox. After four American League pennants and three World Series championships in Philadelphia, Connie Mack sold his star second baseman’s contract in 1915 for financial reasons.

Collins won another championship with the White Sox in 1917 and captained the infamous 1919 Black Sox team that threw the World Series. Collins was not in on the fix; his career continued after eight Chicago teammates were banned for life.

The White Sox finished seventh or eighth in the American League three times from 1921 through 1924, but Collins continued to hit. In 1925 he took on a player-manager role and was batting .327 after a three-hit game in a 16-15 loss to the Detroit Tigers on June 2.

Collins’s hits in that slugfest gave him 2,999 for his career, setting him up to reach the 3,000-hit plateau during the final game of the series the next day. The White Sox were in third place, seven games behind the Philadelphia Athletics, with a 23-20 record.

The sixth-place Tigers had a 20-26 mark but had won 11 of their last 14 games, including five of six against Chicago. With a high-powered offense that led the AL in 1925 with 903 runs, Detroit had racked up 70 runs on 112 hits in its last seven games.

Leading the Tigers was baseball’s all-time hit king, 38-year-old manager and center fielder Ty Cobb. Six months older than Collins, Cobb had been a member of the 3,000-Hit Club since August 1921. Like Collins, he also had three hits on June 2, including a walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth.

The White Sox starter on June 3 was future Hall of Famer Ted Lyons. The 24-year-old right-hander was in his third year with Chicago and possessed a 5-2 record with an excellent 1.93 earned-run average. The Tigers countered with six-year-veteran righty Rip Collins, who had lost his first five decisions in 1925 and had a 2-7 record and a 4.35 ERA.5

Chicago’s Johnny Mostil opened the game with a double. One out later, Eddie Collins came to the plate for his second opportunity at the milestone. (He had walked in the ninth inning the previous day after reaching 2,999 hits in the seventh.)

Collins hit a single to center to become the sixth man in major-league history to attain the 3,000-hit plateau. Mostil scored, and Chicago had a 1-0 lead.

That score held until the top of the third inning. With men on first and second and one out, Collins slapped another RBI single. Earl Sheely followed with a single that made the score 3-0.

After putting two runners on base in each of the first two innings but not scoring, the Tigers got to Lyons in the bottom of the third. A single by Fred Haney and a double by Frank O’Rourke brought Cobb to the plate with men on second and third and one out. Cobb’s groundout scored Detroit’s first run. A single by Harry Heilmann and a double by Lu Blue tallied two more runs for the Tigers, and tied the score, 3-3.

In the top of the fourth inning, shortstop Jackie Tavener’s throwing error allowed Chicago’s leadoff batter, Willie Kamm, to get on. A double by Ray Schalk and a single by Mostil drove in two runs, putting the White Sox back ahead, 5-3. Collins’s third hit of the day gave the White Sox men on the corners, and Mostil stole home on a double steal. Two more hits drove in another couple of runs before Rip Collins could get out of the inning, but the White Sox had scored five times to increase their lead to 8-3.

Lyons had control problems in the bottom of the fifth. He walked the bases loaded, and all three runners scored on a double by Heilmann and a sacrifice fly by Blue. The Tigers now trailed by two.

The Chicago hurler settled down after that inning, allowing the Tigers just one more run, in the bottom of the seventh. The White Sox added four more runs off Rip Collins and the Detroit relief corps to make the final score 12-7 in Chicago’s favor.

The teams combined for 29 hits, which made for a lengthy contest by the standards of the day. The Chicago Tribune reported, “[T]he game dragged so badly that fans were late for supper and lots of others missed the boat to Windsor [Ontario, Canada, across the Detroit River]. The game took 2 hours and 32 minutes.6

Collins played with the White Sox through 1926. His final four seasons returned him to the Athletics. There, his teammates in 1928 included two other members of the 3,000-Hit Club: Tris Speaker (who had reached 3,000 the month before Collins did in 1925) and Cobb, in the final year of each of their careers. The team won 98 games and finished 2½ games behind the New York Yankees.

Author’s Note

As noted, Eddie Collins was the sixth member of baseball’s 3,000-Hit Club, following Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Cobb, and Speaker.

When some of Collins’s predecessors reached the 3,000-hit milestone—or were believed to have reached it—in-game commemorations and newspaper coverage celebrated their accomplishment. This was the case for Wagner and Lajoie in 1914.

Newspaper coverage of Cobb’s 3,000th hit in 1921, however, did not reference the milestone. Instead, no date for Cobb’s entry into the 3,000-Hit Club was recognized until 1958. At that time, Stan Musial was approaching 3,000 hits, and a Detroit newspaper realized that it did not have a record of Cobb’s 3,000th. The newspaper searched Cobb’s career records and identified a date for the milestone.

Similar to Cobb, there is no coverage from 1925 of Collins reaching 3,000 hits, in the June 3 game or any other. Moreover, research for this article did not identify an origin story—as happened with Cobb—for this game eventually being recognized as the occasion of Collins’s milestone.

A search through the Newspapers.com database in October 2022 revealed that the first mention of a date for Collins’s 3,000th hit was in 1974, as Al Kaline approached his 3,000th.7 The given date for Collins’s milestone was June 5, 1925.8 Eighteen years later, when Robin Yount joined the 3,000-Hit Club, coverage identified June 3, 1925, as the date when Collins attained his 3,000th hit.

“It’s certainly possible that not even Eddie was aware of it,” indicated SABR member Rick Huhn in an October 2022 email. Huhn is the author of Eddie Collins: A Baseball Biography, published in 2008. “He was the antithesis of a self-promoter. Thus, even if he was aware that he had reached the milestone it’s unlikely he would have mentioned it to anyone.”

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to John Fredland for his review and input on the first draft of this article. The article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, I used Baseball-Reference.com for team, season, and player pages and logs and the box scores and play-by-plays for this game.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/DET/DET192506030.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1925/B06030DET1925.htm

Notes

1 National Baseball Hall of Fame, “Eddie Collins,” https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/collins-eddie (last accessed April 18, 2022).

2 The day before Collins joined the 3,000-Hit Club another Columbia product made a famous appearance. Lou Gehrig replaced Wally Pipp in the Yankees lineup on June 2, 1925. Gehrig did not miss a game until April 30, 1939.

3 Baseball Almanac, “Eddie Collins Quotes,” https://www.baseball-almanac.com/quotes/quoclls.shtml (last accessed April 18, 2022).

4 Paul Mittermeyer, “Eddie Collins,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/eddie-collins/ (last accessed April 18, 2022).

5 Baseball Reference has 4.35 as the ERA while Retrosheet has 4.48. 

6 Almost a century later, games of this length are considered short. The quote is from James Crusinberry, “Swatfest Gives Sox 12 to 7 Win Over Ty Cobbs,” Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1925: 20.

7 Jim Hawkins, “Al’s Endurance, Ability Key to 3,000 Hits,” Detroit Free Press, September 19, 1974: 1-D.

8 Hawkins, “Al’s Endurance, Ability Key to 3,000 Hits.”

Home-plate umpire Tom Dunn stopped the game briefly after Waner’s hit so that the future Hall of Fame right fielder could soak in the historic moment.1 Waner’s former Pittsburgh teammates and his current Boston teammates gave him a standing ovation after the ball he mashed for his 3,000th hit was presented to him. According to the Boston Globe, the game was stopped for three minutes while members of the Braves and Pirates congratulated Waner.

Waner’s single to center plated Tommy Holmes to cut the Braves’ deficit to 4-2 in the fifth. The Braves added a run in the sixth, then tied the score, 4-4, in the bottom of the ninth against Sewell.

Bob Elliott’s 10th-inning home run — his second of the game — off Boston’s Johnny Sain gave the Pirates a 7-4 edge. In the bottom of the inning Nanny Fernandez, who went 3-for-6 in the contest, pulled the Braves within one, smacking a two-run homer off Pirates reliever Dutch Dietz. Then Dietz closed out the 7-6 victory for the Pirates in the game that would be remembered for the single that put Waner in rare company in baseball history.

With his hit off Sewell, Waner joined Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Honus Wagner, Eddie Collins, Nap Lajoie, and Cap Anson as the only players at the time to reach the 3,000-hit plateau. It was only fitting that Waner connected on the momentous hit against the Pirates, the team with which he had spent a decade and a half (1926-1940) tearing the cover off the ball.

Waner was the National League Most Valuable Player in 1927, his sophomore year in the big leagues, recording a .380 average and his first of three batting titles as a member of the Pirates. Waner also led the NL in RBIs (131) and hits (237) that season, spearheading the Pirates to a pennant before they were swept by the New York Yankees in the World Series.

During his 15-year tenure in Pittsburgh, Waner batted .340 and led all players with 2,868 hits, 558 doubles, and 187 triples. Despite his small stature (5-feet-8), Waner was known as “Big Poison” when he played for the Pirates. Big Poison patrolled right field for Pirates, while his younger brother Lloyd — nicknamed Little Poison — took the center-field duties. Paul and Lloyd dominated baseball in Pittsburgh for 14 years together. (Lloyd broke into the big leagues in 1927, a year after his older brother.)

Legend has it that the Waner brothers attained their “Poison” nicknames in a game against the Dodgers at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. A Dodgers fan who had a deep Brooklyn accent told other people in the stadium that he was there to see the “big person and little person” from Pittsburgh (Paul and Lloyd) but because of his accent, “person” sounded like “poison.”2

Paul and Lloyd were also referred to by many as the “Waner Wonders.” They combined to record 5,611 hits — the most by two brothers in the major leagues.3

The Waner tandem — the only brother duo to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame4 — was broken up when Paul was cut by the Pirates at the age of 37 after a disappointing 1940 season. He signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but was released a month into the 1941 season and signed with the Braves. There he rejoined Lloyd, whom the Pirates had traded to the Braves in May for right-handed pitcher Nick Strincevich. The reunion was brief; in June Lloyd was traded to the Cincinnati Reds for Johnny Hutchings, a right-handed reliever.

It had appeared that Paul Waner got his historic 3,000th hit in a home contest against the Cincinnati Reds on June 17. Waner knocked a sharp grounder to Reds shortstop Eddie Joost in the fifth inning. Moving to his left, Joost knocked the ball down with his backhand near second base, but was unable to make a throw to first, and Waner was rewarded with a hit by the official scorer, Jerry Moore. Fearing that some would view the play as an error rather than a hit (thus tainting the moment), Waner waved furiously at the press box to get Moore’s attention so that he could change the call to an E-6.5

“No, no. Don’t give me a hit on that. I won’t take it,” screamed Waner, who eventually convinced Moore to charge Joost with an error.6

“I don’t want it to be a questionable hit. I want number three thousand to be a good clean hit that I can remember,” Waner said.

Waner recorded his “clean” hit two days later at Braves Field with his single off Sewell.

It took almost 16 years (May 13, 1958) for another hitter — the St. Louis Cardinals’ Stan Musial — to join Waner in the 3,000-hit club.

Before leaving the major leagues in 1945, Waner collected another 152 hits, for a career total of 3,152.

Sources

Parker, Clifton Blue. Big and Little Poison: Paul and Lloyd Waner, Baseball Brothers (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2003).

Okrent, Daniel, ed. The Very Best of Red Smith (New York: Library of America, 2013).

Kavanagh, Jack. “Players Profiles: Paul Waner.” BaseballLibrary.com, baseballlibrary.com/ballplayers/player.php?name=Paul_Waner_1903

Smith, Red. “Red Smith on Baseball: Big Poison.” BaseballLibrary.com, baseballlibrary.com/excerpts/excerpt.php?book=red_smith&page=10

baseballhall.org/hof/waner-paul

baseball-reference.com/players/w/wanerpa01.shtml

digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/W/WA016.html

baseball-reference.com/boxes/BSN/BSN194206190.shtml

exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/3000_hit_club/waner_paul.htm

pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Waner__Paul.html

Notes

1 https://exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/3000_hit_club/waner_paul.htm.

2 Red Smith, “Red Smith on Baseball: Big Poison,” BaseballLibrary.com.

3 https://baseballhall.org/hof/waner-paul.

4 https://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/W/WA016.html.

5 https://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/W/WA016.html.

6 Clifton Blue Parker, Big and Little Poison: Paul and Lloyd Waner, Baseball Brothers (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2003).

Stan Musial didn’t expect to play when his St. Louis Cardinals took on the Chicago Cubs on the North Side of the Windy City. The 37-year-old future Hall of Famer was in perfect health; he was also sitting on 2,999 hits, and with the Redbirds back in the Gateway City the next day, skipper Fred Hutchinson had every intention of letting Stan the Man join an exclusive fraternity in front of his hometown fans. Only an emergency could derail Hutchinson’s plan.

In his 17th season, Musial showed no sign of slowing down. He was coming off a spectacular season in 1957, having led the NL in batting average (.351) for the seventh time and in on-base percentage (.422) for the sixth time; he also belted 29 round-trippers and knocked in 100-plus runs for the 10th time. Musial was the big leagues’ hottest hitter thus far in ’58. He was leading both leagues with a .483 batting average (42-for-87) and a .553 on-base percentage through 22 games, and paced the senior circuit with a .782 slugging percentage. Since he debuted as a mid-September call-up in 1941, one aspect of his hitting had remained constant: his unorthodox stance. “He stands far back from the plate,” wrote the New York Times about the converted pitcher, “his feet close together, right shoulder pointed toward the pitcher, the bat posed motionless and out farther than any player holds it. His head is bent slightly and turned toward the pitcher.”1 You can’t argue with success.

Musial played on Redbird pennant winners in his first four full seasons (1942-1944; 1946; he was in the military in 1945), but the glory years of three World Series championships must have seemed far off in ’58. The Cardinals (8-14) had floundered in last place most of the season, but their current five-game winning streak pulled them into sixth, tied with the Philadelphia Phillies, seven games behind the Milwaukee Braves. Skipper Bob Scheffing’s fourth-place Cubs (13-13) had dropped their last six to fall out of the top spot. The pitching matchup featured a pair of struggling right-handers. The Redbirds’ Sam Jones’s 1-3 record (5.28 ERA) dropped his career slate to 38-50 while the Cubs’ Moe Drabowksy (1-2, 5.40 ERA) was 16-21 in parts of three seasons.

The first half of the game was a Lee Walls highlight reel. He got the Cubs rolling in the first by doubling and subsequently scoring on Ernie Banks’s sacrifice. After a walk, two errors and Irv Noren’s single tied the game for the Cardinals in the third, Walls smacked a deep home run, his 10th, over the “wide screen in left,” according to sportswriter Edward Prell of the Chicago Tribune, to give the Cubs a 2-1 lead.2 With the bases loaded and one out in the fifth, Walls’s sacrifice fly drove in Bobby Thomson for another run.

The Cardinals trailed, 3-1, when Gene Green led off the top of the sixth with a double. After Hal Smith grounded out, Hutchinson motioned to Musial to grab a bat and pinch-hit for Jones. Musial wasn’t sitting on the dugout bench; rather, he had been “sunning himself in a green folding chair in the Cardinals’ bullpen” along the first-base line, according to the Tribune.3 His afternoon leisure rudely interrupted, Musial sauntered to the plate. After fouling off three pitches to the left and taking two balls, Musial took a cut at the sixth offering and sent a liner into the left-field corner for an RBI double.

Musial’s hit brought the modest crowd of 5,692 at Wrigley Field on a Tuesday afternoon to its feet for a rousing standing ovation. The following few minutes were, according to St. Louis sportswriter Bob Broeg, like a scene from “Mack Sennett’s old Keystone Kops” routine.4 Photographers, normally barred from field, poured onto the diamond to record the feat for posterity. While play was interrupted, Musial walked to the pitcher’s mound, where he was met by Hutchinson and third-base umpire Frank Dascoli, who gave him the historic ball. After a few ceremonial waves to the crowd, Musial walked back to the dugout, savoring the moment, and was replaced by pinch-runner Frank Barnes.

The Cardinals tied the score, 3-3, two batters later when Don Blasingame, hitless in his last 16 at-bats, singled. After Drabowsky intentionally walked Joe Cunningham to load the bases with one out, Noren’s groundout force at second plated Dick Schofield to give the Cardinals the lead. Wally Moon’s double to right drove in Blasingame, but Noren was out at home on second baseman Tony Taylor’s relay strike to catcher Sammy Taylor.

The final 3½ frames were anticlimactic. Jones was relieved by Billy Muffett, who tossed four scoreless innings, yielding two hits and walking one. He fanned Chuck Tanner to end the game in 2 hours and 27 minutes. The victory went to Jones, whose five-hit, three-run outing was less than stellar. Tagged with the loss, Drabowsky surrendered eight hits and five runs (four earned) in seven innings.

Immediately after the game, Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse of WGN interviewed Musial on the field. “I was pressing a little the last few games,” said Musial in his Western Pennsylvanian accent. “I was mighty anxious to get this 3000th hit and get it over with.”5 True to his approach to hitting, Musial said he was just trying to make contact and not blast one out of the park. “I went for a base hit. It was a curveball going away, I swung and the next thing I knew I was on second with a double.”6

Musial became the first major leaguer to reach 3,000 hits since the Boston Braves’ Paul Waner in 1942 (though most of his hits were as a Pittsburgh Pirate). Cap Anson (1897), Honus Wager (1914), Nap Lajoie (1914), Ty Cobb (1921), Tris Speaker (1925), and Eddie Collins (1925) preceded them.

The celebration for Musial’s accomplishment began in earnest that evening when he and his teammates boarded an Illinois Central Railroad train at Union Station and headed home to St. Louis. He was in a car with close friends from Pennsylvania and Missouri, as well as his wife, Lil. According to the St. Loui Post-Dispatch, Musial was presented with a cake with the number 3,000. A team of St. Louis broadcasters gave him a pair of commemorative cufflinks.7 When the train pulled into Union Station in the Mound City later that evening, about a thousand fans enthusiastically greeted Musial.

Musial continued to pelt the pill the rest of the season, finishing with a .337 batting average (third highest in the league), though his power numbers dropped. For the first time since 1947, he failed to hit at least 20 home runs, finishing with 17, and his 62 runs batted in were a career low. Musial retired after the 1963 season with an NL record 3,630 hits.

Sources

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

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN195805130.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1958/B05130CHN1958.htm

Notes

1 “Safeties in Numbers: Stanley Frank Musial,” New York Times, May 14, 1958: 39.

2 Edward Prell, “Musial’s 3000th Is Pinch Hit,” Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1958: C1.

3 Prell.

4 Bob Broeg, “Musial Eyes .400 Average After Getting 3000 Hits,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 14, 1958: 4D.

5 “Musial Relaxes, Now That Pressure’s Off,” Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1958: C1.

6 “Musial Relaxes, Now That Pressure’s Off.”

7 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch did not mention the names of the broadcasters; however, at the time they were Jack Buck, Harry Caray, and Joe Garagiola. See Broeg.

Hammerin’ Hank began the 1970 season with his name plastered among the career leaders with 554 home runs, 1,724 runs batted in, and just 44 hits shy of 3,000, yet “never received the proper recognition,” opined beat reporter Jesse Outlar in the Atlanta Constitution.2 Scribe Thomas Rogers of the Cincinnati Enquire lamented that Aaron was “not a household name” despite his daunting accomplishments.3 Playing far removed from East and West Coast media centers, Aaron was rarely mentioned by sportswriters as the game’s best player, let alone one of the greatest players in history, but his value was never lost on his teammates, opponents, and front-office brass. “Statistics actually hide his value to our club,” said Braves GM Paul Richards. “More than anything else, Henry is a game winner.”4

Aaron, a reserved and modest player who shunned the spotlight, looked back on his career as he approached another milestone. “I just wondered, didn’t know, whether I could play in the big leagues with players I had read about,” Aaron revealed about beginning with the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. “Even when I left home to play with the Negro League Indianapolis Clowns in 1952, some people I played with told me I was making a bad mistake.”5 Now in his 17th season, the 36-year-old Aaron was not slowing down. He entered the doubleheader leading the majors in home runs (15), RBIs (37), and slugging (.744), while batting .344

Despite gray skies, Crosley Field, the venerable green cathedral that would be replaced by the all-purpose Riverfront Stadium in less than six weeks, was packed with a standing-room-only crowd of 33,217, its highest attendance since April 27, 1947. The Reds, in first place in the NL West with the league’s best record (25-10) and five games in front of the Braves (19-14), took the first game, 5-1, highlighted by Tony Perez’s and Pete Rose’s home runs. Aaron went 0-for-4, grounding out meekly twice, fanning once, and hitting a lazy popup to center, stuck on 2,999.

First-year skipper Sparky Anderson sent 21-year-old rookie right-hander Wayne Simpson to face the Braves in the second game. Simpson (5-1, 2.05 ERA) was an early-season sensation, who tossed a two-hitter in his debut and then a one-hitter in his third start. After Felix Millan reached second on shortstop Dave Concepcion’s error with one out in the first, Aaron smashed a hard grounder up the middle as the speedy Millan was off on contact. Second baseman Woody Woodward backhanded the ball on the outfield grass but had no play at first as Aaron legged out a single and Millan scored. Simpson said Aaron caught up with an inside fastball and added, “If he hits like that now, how’d he hit 10 years ago?”6

Aaron became just the ninth player in major-league history to collect 3,000 hits, and the first to also have 500 home runs.7 Only two other players with at least 3,000 hits, Paul Waner (1942) and Stan Musial (1958), had begun their careers in the post-1920 Live Ball era. A brief ceremony interrupted the game to honor Aaron. Braves President Bill Bartholomay and Musial left their box seats and proceeded to the pitcher’s mound where Aaron was given the game ball to the delight of fans and photographers.

Though Aaron’s 3000th hit was not one of his famed line drives, his next hit was. In the third with Millan on first via a single, Aaron lined a bullet over the left-field wall to give the Braves a 3-0 lead. Never known for monstrous home runs, like his former Braves teammates Joe Adcock and Eddie Mathews, Aaron still derived his success from the bat speed generated from his compact, 6-foot, 180-pound frame. “Henry had the greatest hand action,” said one-time teammate Bobby Thomson. “The most lethal way of whipping that bat around. … he hit nothing but line drives – even on home runs, those balls jumped out like they were shot out of a cannon.”8

The Braves led, 3-0, entering the bottom of the sixth. Their southpaw starter, George Stone, whose 4-1 slate thus far in ’70 had improved his career record to 24-15, was working on a three-hitter. Slugger Lee May’s two-out double got the Big Red Machine on the board, driving in Perez and Johnny Bench both of whom had singled. Rose, mired in a slump and batting just .254 entering the doubleheader after leading the NL in bating the previous two seasons, led off the eighth with his sixth home run to tie the game. Woodward and Perez followed with singles to end Stone’s day. Hoyt Wilhelm, a 47-year-old knuckleballer, intentionally walked May with one out to load the bases, then retired the next two to escape the jam.

After the Braves squandered a leadoff single by Orlando Cepeda in the ninth, skipper Lum Harris’s squad benefited from two Reds miscues to score three unearned runs in the 10th. The Braves loaded the bases on singles by Millan and Aaron and a walk by Tony Gonzalez off reliever Wayne Granger, in his second inning of work. Second baseman Darrel Chaney misplayed Cepeda’s grounder, permitting two runs to score; Gonzalez reached third while Cepeda was thrown out at second. After Mike Lum drew a walk, Perez muffed Clete Boyer’s laser to third, resulting in another run.

The Reds, who ultimately led the NL with 191 home runs in 1970, needed only the first three batters to tie the game in the bottom of the 10th off reliever Ron Kline. After Perez singled, his fifth consecutive hit of the game, Bench connected for his 11th round-tripper of the season. May made it back-to-back with his 11th to tie the game, 6-6.

This game featured five future Hall of Famers, but the Reds’ 19-year-old rookie right-hander Don Gullett was the surprising hero. In the 15th, he tossed his second scoreless inning of relief, yielding only another two-out walk. Concepcion led off the bottom of the frame with a single off reliever Gary Neibauer, the Braves fifth hurler, in his third inning of work. After Angel Bravo executed a sacrifice bunt, Rose was intentionally walked. To the plate stepped Gullett, who had two hits, including a triple, in his only three other big-league at bats, and had scored three times. According to sportswriter Bob Hertzel of the Cincinnati Enquirer, Anderson thought the teenager had enough speed to avoid a double play.9 Anderson’s unconventional move paid off when Gullett hit a bounder to the right side, between Cepeda and Millan, to drive in Concepcion for the winning run, 7-6.

It was a storybook ending for Gullett, whose RBI single ended the game after 3 hours and 55 minutes and made himself the winner. Equally happy were his 35 guests from his hometown, Lynn, Kentucky, about 120 miles southeast of Cincinnati. “That’s the biggest thrill I’ve ever had, said Gullett.”10

The Reds overcame shoddy defense and 15 runners left on base to emerge with the victory, their 13 in their last 17 games. The Braves blew two three-run leads to lose their fifth in seven games after an 11-game winning streak.

Gullett had the decisive hit of the game, but Aaron was the big story. He was besieged by reporters in the dressing room. “I’m glad it’s over,” he replied matter-of-factly when asked how he felt about his 3,000th hit. “I wanted to get it over with so I could get on with my business.”11  Aaron, always uncomfortable speaking about his own achievements, barely had the chance to savor the afterglow of his milestone hit. Reporters hounded him about something bigger – the most sacred statistic in baseball. Asked if he had a chance to break Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs, he was pragmatic. “If I can hit close to 100 home runs the next two years, I’ll think about going after it,” said Aaron, whose third-inning blast was his 570th. “I can’t see having a shot at it if I’m not well over 600 by the time I’m 38.”12

Aaron still had a lot of baseball left in him.

This article was published in “Cincinnati’s Crosley Field: A Gem in the Queen City” (SABR, 2018), edited by Gregory H. Wolf. To read more articles from this book at the SABR Games Project, click here.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also accessed Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, Newspapers.com, SABR.org/bioproj, and The Sporting News archive via Paper of Record.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN197005172.shtml

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1970/B05172CIN1970.htm

Notes

1 Wayne Minshew, “The Day of the 3000th,” Atlanta Constitution, May 18, 1970: 1C.

2 Jesse Outlar, “Hank, Stan and Club 3,000,” Atlanta Constitution, May 19, 1970: 1C.

3 Thomas Rogers, “Braves’ 3,000 Hitter. Henry Louis Aaron,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 18, 1970: 47.

4 Ibid.

5 Charlie Roberts, “The Greatest Thrill, Admits Happy Henry,” Atlanta Constitution, May 18, 1970: 3C.

6 Bob Hertzel, “Reds Scalp Braves, 5-1, 7-6,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 18, 1970: 47.

7 The previous players with 3,000 hits and the year they got number 3,000 were Cap Anson (1897), Honus Wagner (1914), Nap Lajoie (1914), Ty Cobb (1921), Tris Speaker (1925), Eddie Collins (1925), Paul Waner (1942), and Stan Musial (1958).

8 Hal Hayes, “Something ‘Special’ About Aaron From Start,” Atlanta Constitution, May 18, 1970: 3A.

9 Hertzel.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

It took Mays 13 at-bats to get his first hit as a New York Giants rookie in 1951. That initial hit was a home run off future Hall of Famer, and future teammate, Warren Spahn.2 He averaged an impressive 185 hits a year from 1954 to 1965, and his 190 safeties led baseball in 1960. Mays reached 1,000 hits with a single in his 838th game, on June 23, 1958, the Giants’ first season after they moved to San Francisco. He had his 2,000th hit 844 games later, reaching that milestone with an RBI double on September 1, 1963.

By the end of the 1969 season, Mays had played in 894 more games and collected 926 more hits, which left him 74 hits short of 3,000. Mays managed 14 safeties in April 1970 and tallied 29 hits in May and 20 more in June, for a total of 2,989.

As July began, Mays produced one hit in three home games against the Los Angeles Dodgers, then eight more during a seven-game road trip to Atlanta and Houston. After appearing in his 21st career All-Star Game on July 14, Mays began the season’s second half with a homestand, needing only two hits to achieve the milestone.

The first game after the All-Star break was played on July 17 against the Montreal Expos. Mays was hitless in his first three at-bats but clobbered a three-run homer in his final at-bat of the game. He was sitting on 2,999 hits going into Saturday afternoon’s game with the Expos on July 18.

The Giants were in fourth place in the NL West, four games under .500 at 41-45 and 20 games behind the first-place Cincinnati Reds with their stellar 63-27 record. The Expos, in their second season as an expansion franchise, were in last place in the NL East with a 38-51 record, 12 games behind the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Gaylord Perry started for San Francisco, four days after allowing two runs in two innings in the All-Star Game. The 31-year-old surreptitious spitballer had already won 13 games, and he was on his way to his best season as a Giant, winning 23 games and placing second in the NL Cy Young Award voting.

Montreal countered with Mike Wegener, who was 1-2 going into the tilt, in the second season of his two-year major-league career. The 39-year-old Mays, playing his customary center field, was batting third for the San Franciscans. The 28,879 fans who attended the game at Candlestick Park hoped to witness history.

Perry retired the Expos in order in the first. In the bottom half of the inning, Mays got his first opportunity to reach the milestone, batting with runners on the corners and nobody out. He walked to load the bases for Willie McCovey, who earned an RBI with a fielder’s-choice grounder. A sacrifice fly by catcher Dick Dietz – like Mays, Perry, and McCovey, a 1970 NL All-Star – made the score 2-0.

Struggling with his control, Wegener walked the next two batters, bringing shortstop Hal Lanier to the plate with the bases loaded. Lanier’s double to left field drove in three runs to put San Francisco ahead, 5-0.

Repeating his first-inning performance, Perry set down the side without allowing a baserunner in the second. Wegener retired the first two batters he faced in the bottom half of the inning, which brought Mays to the plate again, still one hit away from the milestone.

The slugger fell behind in the count, but then pulled a groundball between third and short, bounding across Candlestick Park’s artificial turf. It got through untouched for the 3,000th hit of his storied career.

Discussing the at-bat later, Mays said, “I hit a slider. The count was 0-and-2 and I was looking for anything close. None of the pitches Wegener threw me the first time I was up were close.”3

After stepping on the bag at first, Mays walked slowly toward the Giants dugout on the first-base side as teammates and dignitaries came out to congratulate him. Among the luminaries were National League President Charles Feeney; a fellow member of the 3,000-Hit Club, Stan Musial; Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell; and Monte Irvin, who helped Mays get his start in baseball.

The ball Mays hit had been thrown in, and Feeney handed it to Mays.4 Mays acknowledged the ovation from the crowd with a tip of his cap.5 After the celebration, McCovey came to bat. His double to left-center field drove home Mays from first, making the Giants lead 6-0.

Perry again retired the side in order in the third inning. In the bottom half of the inning, Perry came to bat with Lanier on first base. For just the second time in his nine-year career, and the only time that season, Perry slammed a home run. That put San Francisco ahead 8-0.6

The Expos did not manage a baserunner against Perry until Mack Jones walked with one out in the fourth. Marv Staehle’s double with one out in the sixth was the first hit Perry allowed. The two-bagger scored Jim Fairey with what turned out to be Montreal’s only run of the game.

San Francisco responded with two runs in its half of the sixth, with Perry and Mays playing significant roles. Perry led off with his second extra-base hit of the game, a double, and scored when Bobby Bonds followed with a double. One out later, Mays singled for his 3,001st hit, sending in Bonds for a 10-1 lead.

Perry threw a complete game, allowing four hits and one run. He also recorded five putouts, tying a record for NL pitchers.7

At the postgame interview Mays said, “Right now, I don’t feel excitement about this. A reaction may set in later, and in a few days, maybe I will. But the main thing I wanted to do was to help Gaylord Perry win a game. I don’t like to talk about goals, but maybe I have a goal – to help the guys win. I wasn’t going to worry about this thing at all. I thought about it sure, there were two photographers at my house this morning. I couldn’t help but be reminded.”8

The team presented Mays with a large cake after the game, and team owner Horace Stoneham promised $3,000 per year for four years toward the college education of Mays’s 11-year-old son, Michael.9 

Mays became the 10th major leaguer with 3,000 hits, reaching the milestone two months after Henry Aaron, who started with the Milwaukee Braves three years after Mays broke in with the Giants in 1951. Before Aaron and Mays, it had been 12 years since the last man to break the barrier, Stan Musial, had done so, in 1958. Mays joined Aaron as only the second major leaguer with 3,000 hits and 500 home runs.10

Mays played for three more seasons after his 3,000th safety, finishing his career with 3,283 hits.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to John Fredland for carefully reading the first draft of this article. His suggestions significantly improved the final product. The article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Author’s note 

Mays had 10 hits for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League in 1948. In 2020 Major League Baseball included the 1948 Negro American League season among its list of Negro League seasons recognized as “major league.” If those hits are added to Mays’ total, he reached 3,000 hits 15 days before this game, with a single off fellow Hall of Famer Don Sutton in the Giants’ July 3 home game against the Dodgers.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, I used Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for team, season, and player pages and logs and the box scores and play-by-plays for this game.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SFN/SFN197007180.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1970/B07180SFN1970.htm

Notes

1 There is not a definitive answer to who was the best player in baseball history. But there is no question that Willie Mays is in the discussion. Maury Allen (Baseball’s 100, 1981) and Joe Posnanski (The Baseball 100, 2021) have him ranked first in their books of the top 100 players. Bill James (The New Bill James Historical Abstract, 2001) has him third. Baseball Egg has a comparison of nine different lists of the top 100 players. Mays is first on The Athletic.com list, second at Baseball Egg, ESPN, Bleacher Report, and The Sporting News, and is third at The Baseball Scholar and Beyond the Boxscore. Baseball Egg, “Comparing Top 100 All-Time Baseball Player Lists, https://baseballegg.com/comparing-baseball-all-time-top-100 (last accessed May 10, 2022).

2 Spahn and Mays were briefly teammates on the San Francisco Giants in 1965, the final season of Spahn’s Hall of Fame career.

3 Pat Frizzell, “‘No Goals, Just Help Giants Win,’ Says 3,000-Hit Willie,” Sporting News, August 1, 1970: 6.

4 The ball is now in Cooperstown at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

5 The description is transcribed from footage of the hit provided by major league baseball. MLB.com, “Mays Joins the 3,000-Hit Club,” https://www.mlb.com/giants/video/mays-joins-the-3-000-hit-club-c14387145 (last accessed March 7, 2022).

6 There’s an interesting story associated with Perry’s first home run. In 1964 Perry was in his third year with the Giants when a reporter made a favorable comment about Perry’s hitting to Alvin Dark (Perry’s manager). Dark commented, “Mark my words, a man will land on the moon before Perry hits a home run.” Perry was pitching for Giants on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The landing was announced over the public-address system during the game. Perry hit the first home run of his career about 30 minutes later. The web site is Chris Landers, Cut4, MLB.com, “The Story of Gaylord Perry, the Moon Landing and a Most Unlikely Home Run,” https://www.mlb.com/cut4/gaylord-perry-hits-home-run-just-minutes-after-neil-armstrong-moon-landing-c2433 (last accessed May 23, 2022).

7 Jim McGee, “Mays’ Memorable Bouncer,” San Francisco Examiner, July 19, 1970: Section C, 1.

8 Frizzell, “‘No Goals, Just Help Giants Win,’ Says 3,000-Hit Willie.”

9 Frizzell.

10 As of 2022, five more players have reached 3,000 hits and 500 home runs: Eddie Murray, Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, and Miguel Cabrera.