May 14, 1933: Hack Wilson’s pinch-hit, walk-off grand slam sends Dodgers home victorious

A steady rain was pouring down on Ebbets Field in the bottom of the ninth inning. His team clinging to a 6-4 lead, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Fidgety Phil Collins loaded the bases with four erratic pitches to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Johnny Frederick, prompting Phillies manager Burt Shotton to come to the mound. Shotton’s struggling Phillies (8-16) were sitting in last place in the early-season National League standings, and in facing the beatable Dodgers (9-11) of manager Max Carey, he did not want another one to get away.

Shotton called upon submarining reliever Ad Liska from the bullpen to face the next Brooklyn batter, Jake Flowers. As he made his waytoward home plate, however, the 0-for-3 Flowers suddenly reversed his steps. Emerging from Carey’s dugout to take his place was another player – an unmistakable, portly figure. The pinch-hitter’s physique could only belong to one person, a body once described by a newspaperman of the day as being “shaped like a beer keg, and not unfamiliar with its contents.”1

As the man waddled toward the batter’s box, the cheer quickly grew from behind the Dodgers’ dugout. “What a spot for the Hack!!!”2

Lewis “Hack” Wilson, tipping 200 pounds despite being all of 5-feet-6-inches tall, more resembled a lineman on a small-town high-school football team than a major-league baseball player. Three years removed from his amazing 191-RBI season with the Chicago Cubs, Wilson – batting a mere .167 (6-for-36) with no home runs to start 1933 – had recently been benched by Carey, and had appeared only in a pinch-hitting role twice in the past week. Nonetheless, everyone on the Flatbush premises – including Carey, the Dodger fans, and perhaps even Wilson himself – sensed that a turnaround was imminent in the next moment.

The decisive moment about to transpire was the climax to a back-and-forth, muddy struggle all afternoon long.

With rookie Frank Pearce making his third major-league start for the Phillies, the game stood even at 3-3 in the bottom of the sixth. In that inning, the Dodgers edged in front on a fly ball to center by Del Bissonette that scored Flowers. The Phillies tied it again in the seventh, on Dick Bartell‘s clutch two-out single to center field off Dodgers relief pitcher Joe Shaute (who had replaced starter Walter “Boom-Boom” Beck in the third and threw nearly five innings). Bartell’s hit plated Brooklyn native Neal Finn, who had singled and taken second on a hit by Chick Fullis.

After the Phillies added two more in the eighth for a 6-4 advantage, a frustrated Brooklyn manager Carey was ejected by home-plate umpire Cy Pfirman in the bottom half “for real or alleged remarks on the subject of called balls or strikes.”3

Shortly thereafter, the rain could no longer be ignored, and a 15-minute delay hit the game. “There was a squall in every inning,” Harold Parrott of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote of the unabated rain, “and Pfirman at the plate was like a man standing up in a row boat.”4 Aptly named for the inclement environment, Brooklyn pitcher Hollis “Sloppy” Thurston, in his final major-league season, held the Phillies in check in the top of the ninth to set the stage for the drama.

Before giving the free pass to Frederick, Collins permitted a single to Danny Taylor and walked Lefty O’Doul. (He would be sent across town to the New York Giants a month later.) The downpour then resumed; but as Flowers made his U-turn back toward the Brooklyn bench and Wilson came out, Pfirman and his crew remained intent on finishing the battle.

It would not last much longer. “Wilson swung on Liska’s first and last pitch,” wrote Parrott, “and bulged the wire mesh above the fence in right center.”5

The grand slam touched off a puddle-splashing celebration among the Dodger faithful in the neighborhood – both outside Ebbets Field and within. “Round, little Wilson hit that one as he used to sock ‘em for the Cubs,” said the Philadelphia Inquirer, “wading through the mud in the wake of three other fellows. He [then] had to fight his way through the wild-eyed fans to get off the field.”6

The water-logged homers by Wilson and fellow Dodger Joe Stripp were the only extra-base hits anyone was able to drive through the day’s precipitation. Stripp, Taylor, and Tony Cuccinello had stroked two hits apiece for Brooklyn while Don Hurst and Finn, the latter back in his home borough, knocked two singles for the Phillies and Spud Davis contributed two RBIs. Collins, in relief of Snipe Hansen and a strong, six-inning effort from Pearce, was charged with the loss while Thurston picked up the win.

Carey’s Dodgers finished the 1933 season in the second division, marking his final stint as a manager. Fourteen 14 years later, the losing skipper Shotton returned to Brooklyn full-time and manage the Dodgers to a pennant in 1947, guiding his revolutionary team through perhaps the most transformational season baseball had ever seen.

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author accessed Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, SABR.org, and The Sporting News archive via Paper of Record.

NOTES

1 Doug Feldmann, Dizzy and the Gas House Gang (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2000), 114.

2 Harold Parrott, “‘What a Spot for the Hack’ Was Cry and Smashing Home Run Was Echo,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 15, 1933.

3 “A’s Drop Twin Bill; Phils Lose,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 15, 1933.

4 Parrott.

5 Parrott.

6 “A’s Drop Twin Bill; Phils Lose.”