May 10, 2013: Jon Lester’s one-hitter is franchise win number 9,000 for the Red Sox

The wins pile up as the years pass by. The first win for Boston’s American League franchise came on April 30, 1901. The Boston Americans had lost their first three games before beating the Philadelphia Athletics, 8-6, in 10 innings. Cy Young was the winning pitcher.

First named the Red Sox in 1908, they hit regular-season win number 1,000 on July 29, 1913, at Fenway Park when Rube Foster shut out the Chicago White Sox, 2-0. This chart—counting only regular-season wins—shows the other thousand-win milestones:

On May 10, 2013, as the team was on its way from a last-place finish in 2012 to a World Series win in October, the Red Sox won for the 9,000th time, behind a brilliant performance from one of the top starting pitchers in franchise history.1This Friday night win, so far as we have been able to find, received no media attention at all at the time as the 9,000th in team history.

There had been focus in the preceding month on the streak of 794 regular-season games for which Fenway Park was sold out, running from May 15, 2003, through April 8, 2013. Including postseason games, the streak was 820 games.2 On April 10, attendance was 30,862—several thousand below capacity. This May 10 game drew only 33,606.

Four years removed from their most recent postseason appearance, the Red Sox hadn’t come into the 2013 season as a particularly inspiring team. The 2012 team had finished in last place, with a record of 69-93 under one-year manager Bobby Valentine. They were 26 games behind the New York Yankees in the AL East.

They’d won their first two games of 2013, in New York, and had never dropped out of first place as they opened a weekend series with the Toronto Blue Jays. They came into the game tied for first (a three-way tie with the Yankees and Baltimore Orioles), having lost three games in succession and six of their last seven.

Red Sox manager John Farrell named Jon Lester as his starting pitcher. Lester, in his eighth season in Boston, was 4-0 in 2013. For the Blue Jays, managed by John Gibbons, veteran right-hander Ramón Ortiz served as an “emergency starter,” in what National Post columnist John Lott called, “a showdown made in mismatch heaven.”3 The last time Ortiz—who was 13 days from his 40th birthday—had started in the majors was in 2011.

Lester set down the Blue Jays in order in each of the first five innings, with only two of the outs via strikeout, one in the second and one in the third. The Red Sox got a one-out single and a walk in the bottom of the first, but DH David Ortiz hit into a double play.

With one out in the second, Boston built on a four-pitch walk to left fielder Daniel Nava and a single into center by catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia that advanced Nava to third. Third baseman Will Middlebrooks grounded to Jays shortstop Maicer Izturis, whose throw to second for an attempted force play was in the dirt, and Nava scored.

It was the only run for the Red Sox in the five innings Ortiz pitched for the Jays, despite getting a runner into scoring position in every inning. As Richard Griffin pointed out in the Toronto Star, Boston was 0-for-10 with runners in scoring position.4

Lester, by contrast, continued to keep the Blue Jays off the bases into the sixth. Many Red Sox fans were well aware that Lester already had a no-hitter to his credit, thrown on May 19, 2008, against Kansas City, the most recent one in team history. He retired the first two batters in the sixth inning, but Izturis, batting with two outs, hit Lester’s first pitch into the left-field corner for a double. Any thought of a perfect game or no-hitter was thus erased. It was “a clean double several feet over the outstretched arm of third baseman Middlebrooks that landed just inside the foul line.”5

Lester received an ovation from the fans at Fenway. He struck out the next batter to end the inning.

Brett Cecil took over pitching for Toronto in the seventh. A double by Middlebrooks was all Boston managed, and it remained a one-run game.

After Lester retired the side in order in the seventh, the Red Sox provided some insurance by pushing across four more runs. Center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury singled right over second base, and right fielder Shane Victorino singled between shortstop and third.

With second baseman Dustin Pedroia at the plate, Cecil threw a wild pitch into the dirt on an 0-and-2 count and both runners moved up 90 feet. Pedroia poked a single into right-center, driving in Ellsbury, with Victorino going to third. Cecil struck out Ortiz for the first out.

A new pitcher was called in—Mickey Storey, who struck out first baseman Mike Napoli. Nava, though, doubled high off the wall in left-center, knocking in two more runs, and Saltalamacchia doubled onto the warning track in right field, one-hopping the front of the Toronto bullpen. That drove in Nava. It was 5-0, Red Sox.

Lester continued his “near perfect” night by retiring the Blue Jays in the eighth. He got catcher J.P. Arencibia to fly out to left-center. Second baseman Mark DeRosa grounded out third to first. And third baseman Brett Lawrie lined out to Pedroia.

The Red Sox went one-two-three in the eighth, and Lester returned in the ninth, bidding for Boston’s first complete game of the season.

Down to their final three outs, the Blue Jays saw center fielder Colby Rasmus strike out, Lester’s fourth K of the game. Izturis grounded out short to first. And Lester struck out the last batter of the game, Adam Lind—who had come in to pinch-hit in the sixth as the DH.6 It took him seven pitches to strike out Lind, but that he did.

It was a game in which Lester was “a pitch away from perfection.”7 He had a one-hit shutout, with only one clean double marring what was an otherwise perfect game. Lester faced 28 batters and threw 118 pitches. His record improved to 5-0.

Afterward, Lester reportedly laughed when asked about being disappointed by not getting a no-hitter or perfect game. “All that stuff, the stars got to be perfectly aligned for you. It’s got to happen. … You can’t pitch to that. You’ve got to pitch your game.”8

In Lester’s career, it was the third game in which he had allowed no more than one hit to Toronto while working at least seven innings; he’d thrown eight innings of one-hit ball on April 29, 2008, and seven innings on April 28, 2010.    

Lester finished the season at 15-8 with a 3.75 ERA. The Red Sox were 97-65, first in the AL East and 23 games ahead of last-place Toronto.

The Red Sox kept rolling, beating Tampa Bay in the Division Series three games to one, the Detroit Tigers in the ALCS, four games to two, and then winning the World Series in six games from the St. Louis Cardinals. Lester was 1-0 against the Rays and 1-1 against the Tigers, and won both Game One (8-1) and Game Five (3-1) of the World Series.9

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Laura H. Peebles 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. Thanks to Adrian Fung for providing access to Toronto newspaper coverage of this game. Video of the full game is available on YouTube.com.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS201305100.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2013/B05100BOS2013.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS5qgKUWp00

Notes

1 This milestone appears to have received no media attention at the time.

2 https://www.mlb.com/news/red-sox-sellout-streak-at-fenway-park-ends/c-44437740. Accessed January10, 2023.

3 John Lott, “Lester’s One-Hitter Enough to Sink Jays,” National Post (Toronto), May 11, 2013: FP20. The Blue Jays were having a difficult time settling their pitching staff.  Ortiz had appeared in only one previous game in 2013, throwing 3⅓ innings of relief on April 17, giving up two runs. Though he played three more seasons in Dominican and Mexican League baseball, his final major-league appearance was on June 2, 2013.

4 Richard Griffin, “Jays Muster One Hit off Lester,” Toronto Star, May 11, 2013: S6.

5 Howard Ulman (Associated Press), “Blue Jays batters Baffled as Lester Pitches One-Hitter,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 11, 2013: S11.

6 Rajai Davis had had to leave the game due to a strained left oblique. Griffin.

7 Peter Abraham, “Lester, Nearly Perfect, Dazzles Toronto,” Boston Globe, May 11, 2013: C1.

8 Abraham.

9 At the end of the 2022 season, the Red Sox had 9,796 regular-season wins, leaving them 204 from 10,000. They had also won 108 postseason games. By no means did it help that the Red Sox have been swept six times in postseason series—1988, 1990, 1995, 2005, 2009, and 2016. But 2013 was a very good year—the Red Sox win in Game Six of the World Series was at home, at Fenway Park. It was the first time they had won a World Series at home since 1918.