July 16, 1966: Fox, González lead Phillies to thrilling 15-inning win over first-place Giants

On July 14, 1966, two days after the All-Star Game, the San Francisco Giants started a six-game road trip in Philadelphia. The Giants were in first place in the National League and had been for most of the season, but they had been inconsistent since a 12-game winning streak in May. When they arrived in Philadelphia, the Giants were up by only one game over the second-place Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Giants were perennially one of the best teams in the NL during the 1960s. They had winning seasons every year, won the pennant in 1962, and finished second to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965 with 95 wins. Their roster featured stars like Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Matty and Jesus Alou, Juan Marichal, and Gaylord Perry.

The Phillies had a strong team as well. They were in fourth place, seven games over .500. Their lineup had stalwarts Johnny Callison, Dick Allen, Bill White, Cookie Rojas, Tony Taylor, and Tony González. The Phillies’ starting pitching was also a strength, led by Jim Bunning and Chris Short.

The Phillies were two years removed from the disastrous end of their 1964 season. They had spent most of that season in first place and were poised to win their first pennant in 14 years, but they fell apart during the last two weeks of the season, losing 10 in a row and finishing one game behind the eventual World Series-winning St. Louis Cardinals.

After coming in sixth in 1965, the Phillies revamped their roster for another pennant run by adding veterans like White, Dick Groat, Harvey Kuenn, Larry Jackson, Bob Buhl, Bob Uecker, Phil Linz, Terry Fox, Roger Craig, Jackie Brandt, and Ray Herbert, many of whom were very accomplished but well past their primes.

Some of general manager John Quinn’s deals involved trading young players with promising futures.1 The biggest loss was right-handed pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, sent to the Chicago Cubs in April 1966 in a package for two starting pitchers, 35-year-old Jackson and 37-year-old Buhl. Both were very good players, especially earlier in their careers, and Jackson pitched well for the Phillies for three years, but Jenkins pitched in the majors for another 18 years, won 280 games, and earned a place in Cooperstown.2

With the addition of so many over-the-hill veterans, Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stan Hochman began referring to the team as the Wheeze Kids, a humorous reference to the nickname of the Phillies’ 1950 pennant-winning team, the Whiz Kids.3

On Thursday night, the first game of the series, Jackson needed just 98 pitches for a complete-game shutout of the Giants. Perry, who had a 12-1 record in the first half of the season and was the winning pitcher in the All-Star Game, was relieved during the Phillies’ four-run fourth inning. The Giants trailed the Pirates by percentage points.

The next night Marichal returned the favor, going nine innings and holding the Phils to one run for his 15th win of the season. Mays homered against Bunning, the 526th of his career. San Francisco was back in first.

The Saturday afternoon game on July 16 was the rubber match, and both teams had doubleheaders the next day, the Giants in Pittsburgh and the Phillies hosting the Dodgers. What the Oakland Tribune described as a “whooping, screaming” crowd of 31,5314 included more than 16,000 kids and women who took advantage of a free-admission promotion.5

Philadelphia’s Buhl started vs. 25-year-old lefty Ray Sadecki for the Giants.6 The game was scoreless until the top of the fourth, when the Giants’ Jim Davenport hit a homer off the upper-deck facing in left-center.7 The Giants got another run that inning on a Mays double and McCovey’s RBI single.

Mays was 35 that year and hit .288 with 37 home runs and 103 RBIs. He had been even better in 1965, one of his two MVP years, when he batted .317 with 52 home runs and 112 RBIs.

The Phils picked up a run with some small ball in their half of the fourth, and Uecker tied things up in the fifth with a solo shot to left, his seventh and final homer of the season.8 Philadelphia had an opportunity to take the lead when Buhl walked and Rojas singled, but Callison9 – headed for a 0-for-6 game – flied to left and Groat flied to right, ending the inning.

The top of the sixth featured three Giants hits and three Phillies errors, which resulted in a 5-2 Giants lead. But White, who started his career with the Giants in the late 1950s, hit a two-run homer, his 16th of 1966, in the bottom of the sixth to keep the score close.

At that point, the game became a battle of the bullpens. San Francisco’s Lindy McDaniel preserved the one-run lead in the seventh. In the eighth, singles by Groat and Allen10 and a sacrifice by Kuenn gave the Phillies runners on second and third with one out, but Bill Henry and Frank Linzy each recorded an out to strand the runners.

Going into the bottom of the ninth, the Phils were down one, 5-4. González, a good contact hitter, had replaced Rojas in center in the top of the inning. He led off with a single against Linzy, the Giants’ top reliever.

A bunt and a groundout later, and González was on third with two outs. Linz, a former Yankees backup infielder who had taken over for Groat at shortstop, hit a chopper to third.

As Frank Dolson of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “The ball took a high hop and glanced off the glove of third baseman Jim Davenport,”11 allowing González to score, tying the game and sending it into extra innings.

“I thought he’d catch it,” Linz said after the game. “It was, well … a miracle.”12 Davenport was not charged with an error on the play.13

The Phillies brought right-handed reliever Fox into the game in the 10th. Fox had been purchased from the Detroit Tigers in May, and he shut out the Giants for six innings. In three of those innings, the Giants got runners into scoring position, but Fox pitched out of a jam each time.

Linzy matched Fox with scoreless innings, and the game moved to the bottom of the 15th with the score still tied. The Giants replaced Linzy with lefty Joe Gibbon. White singled. Clay Dalrymple, who had replaced Uecker behind the plate, bunted White to second. Next up: González. On the first pitch, he singled to left. The Giants’ left fielder, Jim Ray Hart, fumbled the ball, allowing White to score and ending the game.

The Philadelphia Inquirer called the 3-hour 49-minute contest a “thrilling, come-from-behind triumph.”14 Fox’s six shutout innings in relief earned him the win.

After the game, the Phillies were 48-40 and still in contention. They finished 1966 with a respectable 87-75 record, fourth in the 10-team National League.

The Phillies’ strategy of adding aging vets to take another crack at the pennant didn’t pan out. They won only two more games in 1966 than they had in 1965. During the next 10 months, the Phils made an about-face and jettisoned most of the veterans they had recently acquired, including Buhl, Groat, Uecker, Craig, Linz, Herbert, Brandt, and Kuenn.

San Francisco finished 1966 with 93 wins but missed the pennant by 1½ games to the Dodgers. The Giants finished a frustrating second in the NL for five straight seasons (1965-1969).

In 1967 the Phils won only 82 games, just two games over .500, and the dismantling of the team’s core began with the trade of Bunning to the Pirates that December. Manager Gene Mauch was fired in 1968, and Allen was traded to the Cardinals in December 1969. Callison, Taylor, Rojas, and González were all gone shortly thereafter. The 1968 season began a string of seven straight losing seasons for the Phillies.

Author’s Note

The author attended this game at Connie Mack Stadium as a member of his local Cub Scout troop. In June 2023 he interviewed pitcher Terry Fox over the telephone. At 90 years of age, Fox lived in New Iberia, Louisiana.

“I remember the game because it went extra innings, and we were able to control it and win,” Fox said. “That made a big difference. I did what the Phillies got me for. I also remember the umpire telling me after the game that it was the best game he had ever seen.”

It was Fox’s longest game for the Phils, but it wasn’t the longest of his career. That was on June 24, 1962, when he pitched for the Tigers. It too was a Saturday afternoon game, New York Yankees in Detroit. Fox went eight shutout innings in relief, although the Yankees won the game in 22 innings. (He also pitched 7⅓ innings in relief for Detroit on June 11, 1963, in a 15-inning game against the Red Sox in which he took the loss.)

“I wasn’t an overpowering pitcher, but I could throw a curveball, a good changeup, and a sinker,” said Fox. “I kept the ball low, and I threw a lot of strikes. The infielders knew how I pitched, and they expected the ball to be hit on the ground.”

Fox’s career numbers bear this out. Out of 1,664 batters faced in seven major-league seasons, he issued only 124 walks, hit only 12 batters, threw just six wild pitches, and committed just one balk.

The 1966 season was Terry Fox’s last the majors and his only one with the Phillies. He spent seven years in the minors and seven in the big leagues, mostly with Detroit. He finished with a 29-19 record, all in relief, with 59 saves and a 2.99 career ERA. He retired in 1967 after a year in the minors and accumulating shoulder injuries.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Russ Walsh 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 for pertinent information, including the box score and play-by-play.

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1966/B07160PHI1966.htm

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PHI/PHI196607160.shtml

Notes

1 Alex Johnson, part of the Cardinals’ return for White, Groat, and Uecker, went on to win the 1970 American League batting title.

2 Quinn redeemed himself in 1972 in his final trade by acquiring future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton from the St. Louis Cardinals for Rick Wise.

3 Stan Hochman, “Wampum Walloper Breathes Life Into Wheeze Kids in Pirate Rout,” Philadelphia Daily News, April 26, 1966: 51. Hochman later christened the 1983 Phillies with the same nickname. That team made it to the World Series, only to lose to the Baltimore Orioles in five games. And by 1983, no one remembered that he had used the same nickname for the 1966 team. The 1983 Phillies were indeed older than the 1966 team, but the 1966 Phillies were the original Wheeze Kids.

4 Emmons Byrne, “Giants Fall in 15th, 6-5,” Oakland Tribune, July 17, 1966: 35.

5 The paid attendance was 14,484. Harry Jupiter, “Phils Clip Giants in 15th,” San Francisco Examiner, July 17, 1966: III, 1.

6 Sadecki had been acquired from the St. Louis Cardinals on May 8, 1966, in a trade for Orlando Cepeda.

7 Allen Lewis, “Phils Tie in 9th, Edge Giants in 15th, 6-5,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 17, 1966.

8 Uecker’s seven homers in 1966 were half of his career total of 14.

9 In both 1964 and 1965, Callison hit over 30 homers and had over 100 RBIs. He was an All Star both years. But 1966 was the beginning of the painful decline in Callison’s batting power. He hit a respectable .276 and led the NL with 40 doubles, but he hit only 11 homers and had only 55 RBIs. He did not reach 20 homers again in a season.

10 Dick Allen had a quiet day for the Phillies, going 2-for-7 with no RBIs and two K’s. But Allen had a monster year in 1966 – second in the NL with 40 homers, third with 110 RBIs, and fourth with a .317 batting average. He finished fourth in the NL MVP vote.

11 Frank Dolson, “Phils Find Matinee Idol in 15th Reel,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 17, 1966.

12 Dolson.

13 The game-tying RBI was Linz’s sixth and last of 1966. He got only 70 at-bats and appeared in only 40 games with the Phillies that season.

14 Lewis, “Phils Tie in 9th, Edge Giants in 15th, 6-5.”