July 4, 1969: Fergie Jenkins tosses extra-inning gem to beat Bob Gibson, Cardinals

“You won’t see two better pitchers in your whole life than those two today,” declared Chicago Cubs skipper Leo Durocher about the Independence Day 1969 matchup between future Hall of Famers Fergie Jenkins and Bob Gibson.1

While Jenkins went the distance in the Cubs’ 10-inning win over the St. Louis Cardinals, “It was a strange sight indeed to see the remarkable No. 45 trudging to the Cardinal dugout,” wrote Cubs beat writer George Langford about Gibson’s removal from the game in the 10th.2 It was the first time in 53 appearances, dating back to 1967, that Gibson was knocked out in the middle of an inning.

The pitching duel in St. Louis occurred in such oppressive heat “that it was remarkable that both Jenkins and Gibson were able to continue pitching,” opined Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman.3

Equally integral as the pitching was the performance of Chicago’s Don Kessinger, who reached base four of his five turns at bat to extend his on-base streak to 10 games. In that same stretch, he hit .341 with five extra-base hits, strengthening his candidacy for the National League All-Star team. “He’s the all-star of all-stars,” lauded Jenkins to the Tribune, “He was fantastic today.”4

For the first time since 1937, the Cubs (52-28) occupied first place to start the day on July 4, though the task was easier in 1969, the inaugural season of divisional play. With a seemingly comfortable eight-game lead over the New York Mets in the NL East Division, manager Durocher had the North Siders basking in pennant fever, which Cubs fans hadn’t experienced since 1945. “There can be no question,” exclaimed Holtzman, “the Cubs are that good.”5

“There is only one thing that has gone right for me in the last 10 days. The beer strike in St. Louis ended,” quipped Cardinals manager Red Schoendienst, expressing his frustration with his team’s mediocrity.6 The defending two-time NL champions (37-43) were in fifth place. They had lost seven of their last 10 games entering the four-game set with the Cubs to conclude a nine-game homestand.

One of the few sources of reliability for the Cardinals was Gibson, coming off his remarkable NL Cy Young- and MVP-winning season (1.12 ERA and 13 shutouts) in the Year of the Pitcher. With pitching mounds lowered from 15 to 10 inches to increase offense in 1969, the 33-year-old Gibson had made a seamless transition. His 10-5 record (2.19 ERA) was accompanied by a major-league-leading 14 complete games and the third-most strikeouts in baseball (131).

While Gibson garnered national attention with dazzling statistics and World Series heroics, 26-year-old Canadian-born Fergie Jenkins challenged him as one of the NL’s best pitchers. Coming off successive 20-win seasons in his first two campaigns as a starter, Jenkins rivaled Gibson on the major-league leaderboards with an identical 10-5 record (2.62 ERA), one more strikeout (132), and two fewer complete games (12).

Five days earlier, on June 29, both Gibson and Jenkins had gone the distance in a tense pitching duel at Wrigley Field. The Cubs broke through a scoreless deadlock with three runs in the eighth in a 3-1 win. It was Jenkins’s third victory with one loss and one no-decision in his five career head-to-head matchups with Gibson.

A crowd of 28,177 including “a full contingent of … left field Bleacher Bums from Chicago”7 filed into Busch Stadium on a sweltering Friday afternoon with temperatures approaching 100 degrees and well exceeding that mark on the field.8

After two scoreless frames, Kessinger tripled with one out in the third and scored the game’s first run on Glenn Beckert’s sacrifice fly to center field, giving the Cubs a 1-0 lead.

After facing the minimum through the third inning, Jenkins encountered trouble in the fourth. He walked Lou Brock on a full count to lead off the inning.9 Brock scored, tying the game, after consecutive base hits by Curt Flood and Vada Pinson. With runners on first and third with no outs, Joe Torre followed with a grounder to deep third, but Gold Glover Ron Santo threw to catcher Randy Hundley “in a dust-raising play” to nab Flood.10 “I made up my mind before the ball was hit that I would go home instead of trying for a double play,” Santo told the Tribune after the game.11

Tim McCarver’s grounder advanced both runners, so Jenkins issued an intentional walk to Mike Shannon to load the bases. Julián Javier popped up to Santo to end the threat.

Gibson thwarted Cubs threats in the sixth and eighth innings. In the former, Kessinger led off with a single and was forced by Beckert’s groundout. Beckert raced to third on Billy Williams’s one-out single, but both were left stranded. In the eighth, third baseman Shannon’s errant throw to first base allowed Kessinger to advance to second on what should have been a routine leadoff out. Gibson intentionally walked the left-hand-hitting Williams with one out, then fanned Santo and Willie Smith.

The Cardinals’ only true scoring chance after the fourth inning came in the eighth when Brock and Flood collected consecutive one-out singles. Durocher made his way to the mound to check on Jenkins, who had convinced himself that he wasn’t hot. “If you go out there and tell yourself, ‘Man, it’s hot!’ Pretty soon you’ll find yourself in the showers. I just told myself it was a real nice cool day,” said Jenkins.12 The right-hander told his skipper as much, to which Durocher replied, “That’s great, pal, because you’re going to win or lose this yourself.”13 Jenkins made his point by retiring Pinson and Torre on fly outs to keep the game tied, 1-1.

Cubs fielding foiled a possible Cardinals walk-off victory in the ninth. Williams continued the defensive highlight reel by “racing into the left field corner … to rob McCarver of a possible extra-base hit” to lead off the inning, just as he had done to end the sixth inning.14 Kessinger made his second of “two of the finest fielding plays any shortstop will ever make,” exclaimed the Tribune’s Langford, retiring Shannon with a flip from deep short to first base.15 The Arkansas native had made a similar play in the sixth inning, robbing Flood of a leadoff hit. Following Javier’s single, Jenkins punched out pinch-hitter Vic Davalillo.

Gibson returned to the mound in the 10th, working on a six-hitter with nine strikeouts. In “one of the most brilliant games of his career,” Kessinger gave the Cubs their needed momentum with a single to center field on the first pitch of the inning.16 He stole second on the next pitch and advanced to third as Beckert bunted for a base hit.

Williams broke the game’s deadlock with a bloop RBI double to center field. Santo, who previously struck out three times in four plate appearances, singled to drive in Beckert. After Santo’s National League-leading 73rd RBI, Schoendienst emerged from the dugout to end Gibson’s day.

Contemporaneous newspaper accounts of this game focused on Gibson’s mid-inning removal, which snapped his streak of “53 consecutive no-knockout appearances” in the regular season.17 Including postseason games, his streak was at 59. This interest suggests sportswriters’ fascination with Gibson’s ability to complete games and work through tough innings.18 “Had the game been played at night or the Cardinals had hit decently, Gibby likely would have kept his streak intact,” conjectured Cardinals beat writer Neal Russo.19 Southpaw Joe Hoerner relieved Gibson and retired three straight.

Jenkins easily stifled the Cardinal bats in the bottom half of the 10th inning, inducing back-to-back groundouts and striking out Flood to end the game in 2 hours and 32 minutes. Writer Holtzman described the game as “one of the toughest” for the Cubs, who “responded as champions.”20

In his third consecutive complete-game victory, Jenkins finished with a seven-hitter featuring 10 strikeouts and two walks. It was also his third straight distance-going win against St. Louis in ’69, yielding just two runs in 28 innings.

While the Cubs’ lead over the Mets decreased to 7½ games (due to the Mets’ twin-bill sweep over the Pittsburgh Pirates), the Cardinals’ seventh loss in their last nine contests sent them “plunging … 16 games behind the Cubs” and seven games below .500 for the first time in four seasons.21 A year earlier, the Cardinals were 20 games above .500.22 Schoendienst summed up the defeat to the Tribune: “We had enough opportunity to win today. We just don’t hit anymore.”23

Postgame discussions focused on Kessinger’s performance, the extreme heat, and the pitchers’ endurance. “You pitched a great one today,” Kessinger remarked to Jenkins.24 “It was even better than he pitched last Sunday against Gibson because of the heat,” Kessinger told the Tribune.25

The stifling temperatures and suffocating humidity exhausted both the players and umpires. Umpire Chris Pelekoudas replaced Shag Crawford at home plate in the seventh inning after Crawford, who “could not take the 97-degree heat and the humidity, which was at 85 percent,” left the game.26

Gibson revealed that he suffered from intense leg cramps and dizziness, which made it difficult to see his batterymate McCarver’s signals: “Timmy looked like he had 10 fingers instead of five.”27 Wearing thick flannels, Gibson claimed he lost 12 pounds and Jenkins six during the game.28

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bill Marston and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the Sources cited in the Notes, the authors consulted Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet.org, SABR.org, and the SABR BioProject.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLN/SLN196907040.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1969/B07040SLN1969.htm

Notes

1 George Langford, “Cards Find They’re in Losing Rut,” Chicago Tribune, July 5, 1969: II, 1-2.

2 “Cards Find They’re in Losing Rut.”

3 Jerome Holtzman, “Four-Hit Assault Chases Gibson in Tenth Inning,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 5, 1969: 60.

4 Langford, “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1.”

5 “Four-Hit Assault Chases Gibson in Tenth Inning.”

6 “Cards Find They’re in Losing Rut.”

7 “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1,” Chicago Tribune, July 5, 1969: II, 1-2.

8 Neal Russo, “Cardinals Fizzle, While Cubs Sizzle, 3-1,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 5, 1969: 5A.

9 “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1.”

10 Bob Gray, “Cards Can’t Hit Into a Double Play,” Poplar Bluff (Missouri) Daily American Republic, July 5, 1969: 4.

11 Langford, “Cards Find They’re in Losing Rut.”

12 Langford, “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1.”

13 “Cards Find They’re in Losing Rut”.

14 “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1.”

15 “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1.”

16 “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1.”

17 Bob Gray, “Bob Gibson Knocked Out: First Time in Two Years,” Poplar Bluff (Missouri) Daily American Republic, July 5, 1969: 4.

18 Contemporary reports about this game focused on Gibson’s streak more than any other aspect of the game. There are several possible reasons. Sportswriters were fascinated by Gibson and the percentage of starts he completed. In the 1968 and 1969 seasons, Juan Marichal (57), Gibson (56), and Denny McLain (51) recorded the most complete games in baseball; however, Gibson completed 56 of 69 starts (81.2 percent); Marichal 57 of 74 starts (77.0 percent); and McLain 51 of 82 starts (62.2 percent). Furthermore, Gibson completed six straight starts, winning five of them, in the 1967 and 1968 World Series. During the dates of Gibson’s streak, Marichal was removed in mid-inning at least six times and McLain at least eight times. During Gibson’s streak, he pitched at least seven innings in every start except one when he went six innings and gave up five runs in a loss to Philadelphia on April 25, 1969. For more perspective and context: During the dates of Gibson’s streak, Marichal pitched less than seven innings seven times and McLain nine times.

19 Neal Russo, “Gibby’s No-Kayo Streak Snapped After 53 Games,” The Sporting News, July 19, 1969: 36.

20 Holtzman, “Four-Hit Assault Chases Gibson in Tenth Inning.”

21 Langford, “Cards Find They’re in Losing Rut.”

22 While only enough to move into fourth place in the NL East, the Cardinals played much better baseball through their final 80 games of the 1969 season with a record of 49-31 (.612 winning percentage). This included a 7-2 record against the Cubs after their matchup on July 4.

23 “Cards Find They’re in Losing Rut.”

24 Langford, “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1.”

25 “Cubs Beat Cards in 10th Inning, 3-1.”

26 “Cards Find They’re in Losing Rut.”

27 Russo, “Cardinals Fizzle, While Cubs Sizzle, 3-1.”

28 “Cardinals Fizzle, While Cubs Sizzle, 3-1.”