July 19, 1970: Rookie Jim Hutto’s pinch-hit grand slam lifts Phillies

Jim Hutto may be best remembered among baseball trivia buffs for a game in which his biggest accomplishment was simply not getting hurt. On May 2, 1970, when the Phillies lost catchers Tim McCarver to a broken hand and Mike Ryan to a broken finger in the same half-inning, rookie utilityman Hutto was called on as their emergency replacement behind the plate. He survived the rest of the game unscathed and went 1-for-2 as the Phillies fell to the San Francisco Giants, 7-1.1

A brighter moment from that same season – Hutto’s only full campaign in the majors – came on July 19, in the first game of a doubleheader against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. Batting against veteran Jim Brewer in a crucial ninth-inning situation, the 22-year-old crushed a pinch-hit grand slam to give Philadelphia the lead it needed to win. It was the third and final homer of Hutto’s 61-game big-league career, which also included a handful of appearances with the 1975 Baltimore Orioles.

A pinch-hit grand slam, while not the absolute rarest of baseball feats, is still an uncommon event. From 1916 through the end of the 2022 season, Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet had record of 397 pinch-slams – an average of fewer than four per season. The 1970 season was a fairly busy one for them, with seven hit, but a few other seasons – including 1968, 1964, and 1955 – saw none at all.2

Frank Lucchesi’s Phillies entered the day in fifth place in the National League East Division, 10 games behind first-place Pittsburgh, with a 39-49 record. Walter Alston’s Dodgers stood in second place in the NL West, but were also 10 games back: Their 53-36 record placed them well behind the streaking Cincinnati Reds, who were 64-27. The Reds ended the season 102-60 and took their division by a handy 14½ games.

On a steamy Sunday night at Dodger Stadium, Lucchesi sent lefty Chris Short to the mound for the first game. In his 12th season as a Phillie, Short had a 5-10 record and a 4.63 ERA coming into the game. He’d pitched against the Dodgers just once that season, throwing one-third of an inning in a relief stint in a 14-inning game on May 9. Starting for the Dodgers was righty Alan Foster, at 6-8 and 3.85. He’d started against Philadelphia once, on April 28, pitching into the 10th inning and taking a 3-2 loss on a pinch-homer by Rick Joseph.

Academy Award-winning actor Ernest Borgnine was in the house as a featured celebrity and was honored in a midgame ceremony.3 Among the ballplayers in uniform, Hutto may have been the least famous or celebrated. A seventh-round draft pick of the Red Sox in 1965, he’d been chosen by the Cardinals in the 1967 minor-league draft, then shuffled along to the Philadelphia organization in an April 1969 trade. Lucchesi took a liking to Hutto’s versatility: He could play first base, third base, and the outfield, and catch. In what The Sporting News termed a “mild surprise,” the young jack-of-all-trades earned a roster spot out of spring training in 1970.4

Hutto entered the doubleheader hitting .210. He was not in the starting lineup for the first game, though that wasn’t rare: Of his 57 appearances in 1970, only 14 were starts.

The first five innings passed without any scoring. Each team moved a single runner to third but couldn’t get him across the plate. The Phillies finally assembled the game’s first run in the top of the sixth, starting with a leadoff single by second baseman Denny Doyle. Twenty-year-old rookie right fielder Oscar Gamble sacrificed him to second, and a single by third baseman Don Money moved him to third. First baseman Deron Johnson picked up the run with a groundball to shortstop that the Dodgers could not convert into a double play.

The Dodgers took back the lead in the bottom half of the inning, piling up four runs over the span of four batters. Pitcher Foster singled to right with one out. The Phillies lost a chance to retire shortstop Billy Grabarkewitz when catcher Ryan and first baseman Johnson collided chasing his foul pop.5 Instead, Grabarkewitz walked. Center fielder Willie Davis cleared the bases with his fourth home run of the year, to right field, and first baseman Wes Parker followed with a solo shot to left.6

Relief pitcher Lowell Palmer entered the game and retired the next two hitters to hold the deficit at 4-1. Palmer, Fred Wenz, and Dick Selma turned in solid bullpen work from there, allowing the Dodgers only one single, two walks, and no runs in their final three innings.

The score stayed 4-1 until Philadelphia mounted a game-tying two-out rally in the eighth. Gamble grounded an infield single to shortstop, and Money reached when Dodgers rookie third baseman Steve Garvey misplayed his bouncing groundball. (Garvey became more successful as a first baseman in subsequent seasons, winning four straight Gold Gloves at that position in the mid-1970s.)7 The 28,396 fans lit into Garvey “with savagery seldom heard at Dodger Stadium,” by one account.8

Johnson chased Foster with a three-run, game-tying homer on an 0-and-2 count.9 The Phillies mounted an additional threat against reliever Brewer, as pinch-hitter Byron Browne drew a walk and moved from first to third on a wild pitch. But center fielder Larry Hisle, 0-for-5 that day, watched a called third strike to end the inning.

Brewer had made two prior appearances against Philadelphia that season. He pitched two perfect innings on April 27, then surrendered two runs on a pair of homers in 1⅔ innings on May 8. The Phillies quickly rallied against the veteran lefty in the top of the ninth. Leadoff hitter Larry Bowa, another Phillies rookie, beat out an infield grounder, and Ryan drew a walk. Terry Harmon, pinch-hitting for Wenz, moved both runners up with a bunt. Tony Taylor, pinch-hitting for Doyle, received an intentional walk to load the bases with one out.

Hutto, a right-handed batter, was warming up pitchers in the Phillies bullpen when Lucchesi summoned him to hit for the lefty-swinging Gamble. It was his first game appearance since July 12, when he grounded into a double play and played a few innings in left field against the Chicago Cubs.

Brewer’s first pitch missed the plate. Hutto guessed he would follow with a fastball, to avoid falling further behind in the count with the bases loaded. The rookie guessed correctly and pounded the ball into the left-field seats for an 8-4 Philadelphia lead. After the game, he described Brewer’s offering as “a high, nothing fastball” and said he was just trying to hit a fly ball deep enough to bring in a run.10 After Money grounded out, the Phillies tacked on a ninth run on back-to-back doubles by Johnson and Browne.

Selma nailed down the win in the bottom of the ninth. He walked Garvey with one out, then got left fielder Ted Sizemore to line back to the mound. Selma caught Sizemore’s liner and threw to first to double off Garvey, ending the game in 2 hours and 24 minutes. Wenz earned the second of his three career major-league wins. Brewer took the loss, and Selma got the 12th of the 22 saves he posted that season. The Phillies won the nightcap in similarly dramatic fashion: Ryan’s two-run ninth-inning homer off reliever Pete Mikkelsen gave Philadelphia a 4-2 victory.

Hutto’s moment of clutch glory didn’t lead to more playing time. He didn’t appear in another game until July 26, when he again played the last few innings in left field against San Diego.11 In 18 additional appearances over the remainder of the season, he collected only three hits in 29 at-bats, with two additional RBIs. His average dropped from .222 to a season-ending .185. The Phillies closed the season in fifth place at 73-88, 15½ games back, while the Dodgers finished in second at 87-74.

The Phillies traded Hutto to Baltimore in December of that year. The Angels picked him up in November 1971, then dealt him back to the Orioles in June 1973. His willingness to play multiple positions made him a fan favorite while playing for the Orioles’ Triple-A farm club in Rochester, New York, under manager Joe Altobelli. Five fruitless at-bats with the 1975 Orioles reduced Hutto’s lifetime big-league average to .175.

After retiring, Hutto served as a minor-league manager and coach.12 He was in the news in 2017 when he called on Major League Baseball to extend pension and health benefits to hundreds of former players who did not accumulate enough service time to qualify for full pensions.13

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the specific sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for general player, team and season data and the box scores for this game.

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1970/B07191LAN1970.htm

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/LAN/LAN197007191.shtml

1970 photo of Jim Hutto downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 The fateful half-inning – the sixth, as it happened – is summarized in the SABR biographies of McCarver and Ryan, both written by Dave Williams. A foul ball broke McCarver’s hand; two batters later, Ryan broke a finger making a tag play at home plate.

2 Analysis of pinch-hit grand slams based on a Baseball-Reference Stathead search for home runs hit by pinch-hitters with runners on all three bases, conducted December 20, 2022. Note that this database, at the time of search, did not include records from the Negro Leagues.

3 John Wiebusch, “Dodgers Blow 2 to Phils – and Fans Blow Up,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1970: Part III: 1.

4 Allen Lewis, “Tony Wins ‘Oscar’ for Smash Performance as Phil,” The Sporting News, April 18, 1970: 29. Hutto was one of two “mild surprises” on the Phils’ April 1970 roster; outfielder Sam Parrilla was the other. Parrilla played in 11 games in April and May that season and then left the big-league stage.

5 Allen Lewis, “Phils Sweep Dodgers on HRs for 5 in Row,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 20, 1970: 17.

6 Lewis, “Phils Sweep Dodgers on HRs for 5 in Row.”

7 Second-year Dodger Bill Russell played the latter part of the game in right field, replacing Andy Kosco. Like Garvey, Russell went on to long-term fame at another position – shortstop.

8 Wiebusch.

9 “Phils Sweep Dodgers on HRs for 5 in Row.”

10 Bill Conlin, “Ready Reserve? Hutto’s a Jim Dandy!” Philadelphia Daily News, July 20, 1970: 56.

11 Conlin quoted Hutto as saying that the May 2 game made Lucchesi reluctant to play him. Having seen both his catchers injured at once, the manager wanted to keep Hutto available in case another, similar emergency arose. (Again, this was Hutto talking, not Lucchesi.)

12 John Kolomic, “Hutto to Manage Newark This Year; Chism to Act as Scout, Then Coach,” Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle, March 16, 1984: 1D.

13 Douglas J. Gladstone, “MLB, Take Care of Retirees,” Baltimore Sun, August 4, 2017: 15.