June 19, 1963: Tigers’ Gates Brown hits pinch-hit home run in his first career at-bat as Carl Yastrzemski leads Red Sox to blowout victory

Over the course of his 13-year major-league career spent entirely with the Detroit Tigers, Gates Brown established himself as one of baseball’s all-time best pinch-hitters. Brown, nicknamed The Gator, possessed a classic profile for a pinch-hitter: a good but not great bat with questionable defensive skills. Brown’s first pinch-hit success came in his major-league debut against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park when Brown homered off Bob Heffner. Despite Brown’s pinch-hit blast, the Tigers lost their ninth game in a row in a blowout headlined by rising star Carl Yastrzemski’s two home runs.

When he was 18, Brown was convicted of burglary and sent to prison. While serving his time at the Mansfield Reformatory in Ohio, Brown played on the prison’s baseball team. In the fall of 1959, Detroit sent scouts to see the left-handed-hitting Brown, and he homered in front of them. Impressed, the Tigers helped Brown get parole a year early and signed him for $7,000.

The Tigers limped to a 24-36 start in 1963. Meanwhile, at Triple-A Syracuse, Brown started the season with 13 home runs and an .821 OPS. With the “hope of picking up some punch,” wrote the Detroit Free Press, the Tigers called up Brown on June 17.1 The next day, the Tigers fired skipper Bob Scheffing and hired Charlie Dressen, a former manager for Cincinnati, Brooklyn, Washington, and Milwaukee, to replace him. Dressen managed his first game for Detroit that night. The managerial switch did not immediately change the Tigers’ fortunes, as they lost 9-0 to the Red Sox and starting pitcher Earl Wilson. “They didn’t treat me very well,” said Dressen in a barely audible voice after the game.2

More positively, however, Dressen sounded enthusiastic about the prospect of managing Brown, telling reporters, “I’m going to play that boy as soon as we see a right-handed pitcher. They’ll tell me he can only play left field. Okay, [Tigers regular left fielder] Rocky Colavito used to play right field [for] Cleveland. That’s what we’ll do.”3

After the replacement manager’s rocky start, some Tigers expressed apprehension and shock about Dressen’s arrival: “[W]hy didn’t [Tigers management] get one of the new breed. … Why the same old tired faces?”4 One player told reporters he understood the team would begin to hear the letter ‘I’ around the clubhouse, while another said he heard “[Dressen] takes credit for a lot of what the players do and always has an excuse when something he does doesn’t turn out well.”5 

Whatever his new players may have thought of him, the Tigers returned to the field the next day for the second game of the Dressen era on June 19. Boston gave the ball to Bob Heffner, a 6-foot-4 right-hander making his major-league debut before 14,795 at Fenway Park. (In the crowd was his father, Curtis Heffner, a maintenance man for an electric company in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who had flown into Boston for the game.6) Heffner started his professional career in Boston’s minor-league system in 1957 and opened 1963 with a 1.92 ERA at Triple-A Seattle. Needing arms to restock their depleted pitching staff, the Red Sox summoned Heffner to Boston. 

The Tigers countered with veteran southpaw Don Mossi. Considered a control artist, Mossi started his career as a relief pitcher for the 111-win Cleveland Indians in 1954, and he earned selection to the American League All-Star team in 1957. Dealt to Detroit before the 1959 season, Mossi had been a fixture in the Tigers’ rotation ever since.7 He came into the June 19 game 4-3 with a 3.88 ERA, having just lost a start to Yankees in which he went 7⅔ innings and allowed four runs.

After Heffner pitched two scoreless frames to start his big-league career, the Red Sox scored twice in the bottom of the second. With one out, right fielder Lou Clinton doubled and scored on a single by shortstop Eddie Bressoud. After a groundout, Heffner, in his first major-league at-bat, “clubbed a drive high off the fence in dead center”8 for a double that drove in Bressoud and gave Boston a 2-0 lead.

Heffner wiggled out of trouble in the top of the third when, with two out and the bases loaded, he retired Al Kaline on a grounder to short.9 In the bottom of the third, Yastrzemski singled and cleanup hitter Frank Malzone made it 4-0 by hitting his 10th homer of the ’63 campaign, off a light tower in left field. The Tigers got on the scoreboard in the fourth when Colavito scored on an error by Red Sox first baseman Dick Stuart on a groundball by Tigers shortstop Dick McAuliffe.

Trailing 4-1 going into the fifth, Dressen pinch-hit Brown for Mossi. Making his first appearance in a big-league game, Brown homered. The Detroit Free Press said Brown “really hit it, driving the ball high and deep into the rightfield seats.”10 Brown became the third American League player to hit a pinch-hit home run in his first at-bat (joining Ace Parker of the Philadelphia A’s in 1937 and John E. Kennedy of the 1962 Senators).

Dressen brought in Phil Regan to pitch the fifth and decided against making a double switch that would have allowed Brown to remain in his first big-league game. With none on and two out, Yastrzemski hit his first home run of the game, into the center-field bleachers, to give Boston a 5-2 lead. Facing Mickey Lolich in the seventh with two on, Yastrzemski again homered to the center-field bleachers to give the Red Sox an 8-2 lead. “That was a terrific feat,” said Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey after the game. “In the [thirty] years that I’ve been watching Red Sox games that was the first time that I’ve seen consecutive home runs hit into the centerfield bleachers.”11 The blasts were Yastrzemski’s fourth and fifth home runs of the season. (He finished the ’63 campaign with 14 homers, won his first batting title with a .321 average, and made the first of his 18 All-Star Game appearances.)

In command of the game, Heffner struck out the side (Colavito, first baseman Norm Cash, and catcher Gus Triandos) in the eighth inning. After the Red Sox scored their ninth run in the bottom half, Heffner went on to finish the complete game. Although McAuliffe led off with a double, Heffner retired the next three batters, giving the Tigers their ninth straight loss. Heffner faced only 14 Tigers batters over his last four innings. The victory was Boston’s eighth in nine games as it pulled within three games of the Yankees for the American League lead.

The Tigers lost their 10th game in a row to Boston the next day but snapped their losing streak with a road victory over the Kansas City Athletics on June 21. Despite the players’ concerns about Dressen’s hire, he helped the team turn its season around. Under Dressen, the team went 55-47 and moved up to a fifth-place finish. In fact, the Tigers’ performance over the season’s final three-plus months resulted in Detroit finishing higher than Boston in the final American League standings.

Following his noteworthy debut, Brown stayed with the Tigers the rest of 1963, and he hit his second home run in the season’s final game, on September 29. After he spent 1964 as a regular outfielder, the Tigers made Brown a part-time player who primarily faced right-handers. His career year came in the Tigers’ World Series-winning campaign of 1968. During the Year of the Pitcher, Brown soared to a .370/.442/.685 slash line, good for a 234 OPS+. Remarkably, in his 48 pinch-hitting appearances, Brown’s slash line rose to .450/.542/.850.

Brown played another seven years in Detroit, but never again reached the heights of his 1968 season. The addition of the designated hitter allowed him to get regular playing time in 1973, but in 433 plate appearances, he hit only .236/.328/.366. Two years later, in 1975, after batting .171, Brown retired from baseball. In his retirement, Brown remained involved with the Tigers organization. Brown died in 2013 at the age of 74.

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. He reviewed coverage in the Boston Globe and Detroit Free Press and Dave Gagnon’s SABR biography of Gates Brown.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS196306190.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1963/B06190BOS1963.htm

Photo credit: Gates Brown, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Joe Falls, “Scheffing Refuses to Panic,” Detroit Free Press, June 18, 1963: D-1.

2 Joe Falls, “New Manager – but Same Old Tigers,” Detroit Free Press, June 19, 1963: D-1.

3 Joe Falls, “Oh, My – Tigers Lose 9th Straight!” Detroit Free Press, June 20, 1963: D-3.

4 “Dressen: Another Stengel?” Lansing (Michigan) State Journal, June 20, 1963: F-1.

5 Milton Gross, “‘Shocked’ Tigers Leery About Dressen Big ‘I,’ Boston Globe, June 20, 1963: 48.

6 Roger Birtwell, “Yaz, Rookie Rip Tigers,” Boston Globe, June 20, 1963: 45.

7 Biographical information about Don Mossi comes from his SABR biography by Mark Stewart: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/don-mossi/.

8 Birtwell.

9 Retiring Kaline was particularly impressive because he came into the game hitting .343 with a 1.026 OPS and 15 home runs. After going 0-for-4 in the game, Kaline fell to .338, allowing Boston’s Frank Malzone (2-for-4) to take the league lead with a .342 average. Kaline finished the season at .312 and Malzone at .291.

10 Falls, “Oh, My – Tigers Lose 9th Straight!”

11 “Red Sox Rookie Holds Tigers in 9-2 Victory,” Lynn (Massachusetts) Daily Item, June 20, 1963: 25.