August 23, 1938: Jimmie Foxx hits walk-off grand slam to complete doubleheader sweep for Red Sox

The Boston Red Sox seemed determined (or destined) to lose the second game of their August 23, 1938, doubleheader with the Cleveland Indians, but they kept coming back. They were down 6-0 before the bottom of the second inning. They were outhit by the visiting Indians, committed four errors while Cleveland made none, and doled out seven walks to just two granted by Indians pitchers. But a walk-off ninth-inning grand slam by the decade’s most prolific power hitter, Red Sox first baseman Jimmie Foxx, gave Boston an improbable comeback win.

It was a Tuesday afternoon at Fenway Park. Perhaps the Red Sox were just worn out; it was their third doubleheader in less than a week, and they had won the first game – a prior rainout rescheduled for this date – by the score of 13-3.1 The twin bill drew 18,500. Before the day began, the Red Sox (61-45) were in third place in the American League, 12½ games behind the New York Yankees. They were just one game behind the Indians, though, and their win in the first game saw them edge ahead.

In the opener, Boston scored three runs in the first inning, five in the second, and three more in the third, and held an 11-2 lead after three innings. Third baseman Pinky Higgins had two doubles and drove in five runs. Fritz Ostermueller went the distance and got the win, bringing him to 7-4. The losing pitcher was Johnny Humphries (7-5).

The second game pitted rookie Jim Bagby (11-8, 3.79) for Boston manager Joe Cronin against the more established right-hander Denny Galehouse (5-5, 4.33), pitching for Cleveland manager Ossie Vitt.2 The Indians jumped out to a 4-0 lead in the top of the first, with five hits, an error, and a walk. The Red Sox didn’t score in their half of the inning.

When Bagby gave up a leadoff double to shortstop Skeeter Webb in the second, Cronin called in Archie McKain to relieve. McKain got two groundouts, but Jeff Heath tripled and Earl Averill singled. It was 6-0, Cleveland.

In the bottom of the second, Galehouse got an out but then walked the next three. Rookie Jim Tabor, appearing in his 13th major-league game, pinch-hit for McKain and hit a fly ball to left field deep enough to score Red Nonnenkamp from third; Boston got its first run.

The Red Sox added a second run when Foxx hit a solo homer in the third inning, his 34th of the season. It was apparently quite a blast. The Associated Press account said the homer was “due in Chicago tonight. It cleared the left-field screen, bounced off a nearby roof, and then dropped through the open door of a pullman on a passing West-bound train.”3

Neither team scored in the fourth but the Indians made it 7-2 in the fifth when Boston’s Emerson Dickman gave up a single and then saw Ken Keltner triple into the right-field corner.

In the bottom of the inning, Galehouse gave up three runs on a walk, Joe Vosmik’s RBI double to the flagpole in center, and a two-run homer over the screen in left by shortstop/manager Cronin. It was Cronin’s 14th home run of 1938. The score stood 7-5, and it was a game again. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that Galehouse – who had allowed only one hit in the first three innings – was “hopelessly wild … and when he began to find the plate in the later stages, the Sox began to hit him.”4  

A scoreless sixth inning for both sides was just a pause before the action-packed final three frames. Cleveland expanded its lead to four runs on seventh-inning RBI singles by Averill and Hal Trosky. The Red Sox answered with a run of their own against Johnny Humphries – who had started and taken the loss in the day’s first game – in the bottom of the seventh. Cronin singled to left, took second on a wild pitch and third on a fly out, and tagged and scored on another fly-ball out.

Cleveland made it 10-6 in the top of the eighth on a single, an error, and Dickman’s balk. For the second inning in a row, however, the Red Sox answered. Johnny Peacock led off with a single against Humphries and took third on Vosmik’s two-out single. Foxx hit an RBI double off the left-field wall to make it a three-run game. The next batter was Cronin, who erased that deficit, first-pitch-swinging, with a game-tying three-run homer “high into the left field fishnet.”5 Tie score – 10-10.

Jack Wilson became Boston’s fourth pitcher and it looked as if he might have given the game away in the top of the ninth, when he walked Trosky and then gave up a home run over the left-center-field wall to Keltner, the 21-year-old rookie third baseman’s 22nd homer of the season. The Indians took a 12-10 lead.

Willis Hudlin had been brought in from the Cleveland bullpen and gotten the final out in the bottom of the eighth. Now manager Vitt hoped he could hold a two-run lead so the Indians could end the day with a win in the second game.

Bobby Doerr worked a walk but was out at second on Peacock’s 4-6 grounder. Ben Chapman pinch-hit for Wilson and singled. Doc Cramer reached on an infield single, and Boston had the bases loaded with just one out. Vosmik, though, popped up to shortstop.

Foxx was up next. Tris Speaker, who had been selected for the National Baseball Hall of Fame a year earlier, was apparently visiting Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey in his private box. Yawkey reportedly said, “I hope he’s not finished his hitting for the day” and then added, “Don’t worry. He’ll put that first pitch out of the lot.”6 That’s just what happened.

Foxx swung at Hudlin’s first pitch and ended it all with a walk-off grand slam. “As bat met ball Hudlin started for the runway to the clubhouse with never a backward glance,” reported the Plain Dealer. “He knew where the ball was going. It went high over the net that is stretched above the left field wall to save windows across the street.”7

The Red Sox had scored eight runs after there were two outs in the bottom of the eighth.

Despite the lopsided score early in the second game, and approaching darkness, the large crowd “had stuck almost to a man.”8 They were rewarded for their faith.

It was Foxx’s 35th home run of the season and his second of the game. It was also the first walk-off grand slam in Red Sox history. Through the 2024 season, there have been 22 others. One player – Vern Stephens – hit two of them, in back-to-back seasons in August 1949 and August 1950. The last in the sequence was on August 7, 2023, when shortstop Pablo Reyes broke a 2-2 tie in the bottom of the ninth with a two-out grand slam off Kansas City’s Carlos Hernández.

Foxx, whose 415 home runs from 1930 through 1939 led all major leaguers, was 6-for-10 on the day, while both Higgins and Cronin were 7-for-11. Cronin and Foxx together had driven in 11 of the 14 runs in the day’s second game.

Mildred Cronin, Joe’s wife, reportedly exclaimed, “Who cares if the Yankees win the pennant after that one?”9

The Red Sox had scored 13 runs in the first game and 14 in the second, and they had edged ahead of Cleveland for second place in the American League, where they remained for the rest of the season. They finished 9½ games behind New York. Cleveland finished third, 13 games back.

Acknowledgments

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

Sources

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

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS193808232.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1938/B08232BOS1938.htm

Photo credit: Jimmie Foxx, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 The Red Sox had come off a six-game losing streak and had taken two from the visiting Philadelphia Athletics on August 17, then won their next three games, but from August 21 to 27, they played five more doubleheaders in seven days.

2 Bagby was the son of former major-league pitcher Jim Bagby. Galehouse broke into the majors briefly in 1934; this was his third full season. A December 1938 trade sent him to the Red Sox, for the first of five seasons with Boston.

3 Associated Press, “Foxx Homer Really on Ride; Drops Through Train Door,” Worcester (Massachusetts) Evening Gazette, August 24, 1938: 12.

4 Gordon Cobbledick, “Foxx’s 4-Run Homer in 9th Crashes Indians Into 3rd Place,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 24, 1938: 15.

5 Gerry Moore, “Foxx Puts Sox in Second Place,” Boston Globe, August 24, 1938: 1, 20.

6 Associated Press, “Foxx Homer Really on Ride; Drops Through Train Door.”

7 Cobbledick. Moore in the Globe wrote that the ball cleared the wall by “only a few feet.” It was still a home run. “Jimmie trotted around the bases wearing a grin as wide as the Sahara Desert.”

8 Moore.

9 Moore.