May 23, 1901: Chicago’s Clark Griffith intentionally walks Philadelphia’s Nap Lajoie with bases loaded to help preserve victory

With no one out, the bases loaded, and his team holding a four-run lead in the top of the ninth inning, Chicago White Sox pitcher and manager Clark Griffith had a choice to make when the most feared hitter in the American League stepped to the plate at the Windy City’s South Side Park on May 23, 1901.

“[Nap] Lajoie was up and Griff was confronted with the problem,” reported Sporting Life, “whether to let him hit it, possibly to the end of the grounds, for a swat that would tie the score, or whether to force in a run by giving him a base on balls.”1

While giving a team a free run is not the typical strategy, in this case, Griffith decided that intentionally walking the potent Lajoie gave the White Sox the best chance at winning.

As it played out, he made the right decision.

After intentionally walking Lajoie and letting in a run, Griffith induced three straight groundouts to end his brief relief outing and finish out Chicago’s 11-9 victory in front of 2,800 Thursday afternoon patrons.

In the second meeting of a scheduled four-game series,2 the visiting Athletics struck first with five runs in the top of the third inning off White Sox rookie starter Jack Katoll, a 25-year-old right-hander who was born in what later became the country of Poland.

Chicago third baseman Fred Hartman committed an error on Doc Powers’ leadoff grounder. Two outs later, Philadelphia capitalized with a barrage of hits, highlighted by Lajoie’s double, for a 5-0 lead that knocked Katoll, the winner of three of his last four starts, out of the game.

The White Sox, who entered the game 16-8 and half a game behind the league-leading Detroit Tigers, were not fazed, erasing their deficit in the bottom of the inning and taking a lead they wouldn’t relinquish.

Facing A’s left-handed rookie Eddie Plank, a future Hall of Famer who had made his major-league debut 10 days earlier, Chicago turned several hits, walks, and Philadelphia errors  into seven runs. Sam Mertes highlighted the scoring with a three-run home run to left-center, his second of the season. A’s manager Connie Mack pulled the 25-year-old Plank before he could escape the onslaught, and Chick Fraser got the last out and manned the slab for the rest of the game.

Chicago added two more runs in the fifth, Herm McFarland hit a solo home run in the sixth, and the White Sox scored another run in the eighth for an 11-5 lead. They collected only nine hits in the game – led by three by Hartman and two each by McFarland and Mertes – but also drew seven walks for the third time in May.3 Chicago runners also stole four bases, including the first for rookie relief pitcher Zaza Harvey, a 22-year-old who became a full-time outfielder with the Cleveland Blues later in the 1901 season and finished the year with 16 steals.4

But the A’s refused to give up, despite five innings of shutout relief from Harvey, who lost his effectiveness in the top of the ninth.

Philly’s Joe Dolan and Fraser led off the ninth with back-to-back singles. Phil Geier sent a fly to left, but a miscommunication between Chicago left fielder McFarland and shortstop Frank Shugart allowed the ball to drop, loading the bases. Harvey then walked Dave Fultz and Lave Cross, leaving the White Sox ahead 11-7 and Lajoie coming to the plate.

Reports differ on what happened next.5

According to the Chicago Tribune, Harvey threw one ball to Lajoie before Griffith relieved, while the Chicago Inter Ocean reported that Griffith threw all four pitches outside the strike zone. Regardless of who threw the pitches, Lajoie became only the second major-leaguer known to have been intentionally walked with the bases loaded – the first being Abner Dalrymple of the National League’s 1881 Chicago White Stockings.6 Geier scored on the free pass.

Griffith’s concern about pitching to Lajoie didn’t come without reason. Over Lajoie’s first 20 games of the season, he had faced only five rookie starters,7 so most of the 42 hits that had led to his .525 average had come against veterans with NL experience.8

With Lajoie aboard and Dolan, Fraser, and Geier having crossed the plate, the White Sox still led but only 11-8. The bases were still loaded with no one out, so Griffith needed to step up and prove he was the ace his club expected him to be.

Socks Seybold, who had at least one hit in all but one of Philadelphia’s first 21 games and carried a .419 average into this game, had two hits on his ledger before facing Griffith.9 But the 30-year-old rookie, who became one of the AL’s top sluggers in the earliest years of the league, hit a slow dribbler to third base, forcing Fultz out at the plate.10

Harry Davis shot a sharp grounder to second baseman Mertes, who fed the ball to shortstop Shugart for the start of what appeared to be a 4-6-3 double play, but umpire Al Mannassau ruled Seybold out at second but Davis safe at first.11 In the process, Cross scored, giving Davis his first RBI of the season and cutting Chicago’s lead to 11-9.

Undeterred, Griffith induced Morgan Murphy into a grounder to shortstop to end the threat and secure Chicago’s 17th win of the season, which vaulted the White Sox half a game ahead of the Tigers, who lost to the Boston Americans. Chicago, which won the AL pennant in 1900 when the league was still a Class A minor league, finished 1901 as champion again with an 83-53 record.

Despite Harvey’s collapse in the ninth inning, he earned his second win of the season. Plank took the first loss of his career as the Athletics fell to 7-15, but there were plenty of victories coming his way. He reeled off wins in each of his next five starts, a streak punctuated by a shutout of the Milwaukee Brewers on June 13 – Plank’s first of 69 in his career, which ranked fourth when he retired.12

By the end of 1901, Plank posted a 17-13 record with a 3.31 ERA and had the fifth-highest Wins Above Replacement value among AL pitchers (5.3).13 His efforts helped the A’s finish in the first division, taking fourth with a 74-62 record, nine games behind the White Sox.

As for Lajoie, he continued hitting.

In 131 games, he led the AL in most offensive categories. His .426 average remains an AL single-season record,14 and he added a league-leading 14 home runs and 125 RBIs to win the Triple Crown. Lajoie also paced the AL in hits (232), runs (145), doubles (48), and WAR (8.3). He later added four more batting titles and hit .338 over his 21-year career, and became the third member of the 3,000-hit club in 1914.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Larry DeFillipo and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Nap Lajoie, SABR-Rucker Archive.

Sources

In addition to using the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the Baseball-Reference.com, Stathead.com, and Retrosheet.org websites for pertinent statistics and the box scores. He also used information obtained from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Times, Philadelphia Record, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Inter Ocean, Sporting Life, and The Sporting News.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHA/CHA190105230.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1901/B05230CHA1901.htm

Notes

1 W.A. Phelon, Jr. “Chicago Gleanings,” Sporting Life, June 1, 1901: 7.

2 The next day’s game was postponed because of cold and windy conditions, and the threat of snow. That game was eventually made up on July 23.

3 Original reporting from both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Inter Ocean credited Chicago with 11 hits in this game. The White Sox also drew what amounted to a season-high 14 walks on May 5 at Milwaukee and received seven free passes on May 1 against the Detroit Tigers. For the season, Chicago’s offense had at least seven walks in 15 of 137 games (10.9 percent). The Washington Senators had the next highest tally of games with seven or more walks, hitting the mark in 10 of 138 games (7.2 percent).

4 Harvey’s promising career ended prematurely after 12 games in 1902, when a stomach ailment forced him to quit playing. “To Welcome the Bluebirds,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 6, 1902: 6.

5 Box scores at Baseball Reference and Retrosheet indicate Griffith pitched two-thirds of an inning, but contemporary reports from the Chicago Inter Ocean and Chicago Tribune provide accounts that suggest Griffith recorded all three outs in the ninth. Both papers reported that Griffith entered to face Lajoie with no outs and explained how he retired the side on three straight infield grounders. “‘Griff’ Fills the Breach,” Chicago Tribune, May 24, 1901: 6; “‘Grif’s Great Head,” Chicago Inter Ocean, May 24, 1901: 8.

6 Since Lajoie was intentionally walked with the bases loaded, there have been four other known instances as of 2025: two in the National League, the New York Giants’ Mel Ott (1929) and San Francisco’s Barry Bonds (1998), and two in the AL, Texas’s Josh Hamilton (2008) and Corey Seager (2022).

7 Lajoie had collected three or more hits six times in his first 20 games (all coming within his first 11 games of the season) to help him reach the .525 average coming into this game, and all but one of those performances had come against former NL pitchers. He had four hits against George Cuppy (nine NL seasons before 1901) and Ted Lewis (five seasons), and Lajoie had three hits against Cy Young (11 seasons), Win Mercer (seven seasons), and Bill Carrick (three seasons). Four of the rookies he faced had never pitched in the majors before, while another had briefly appeared in the NL but still fell into the modern definition of rookie status in 1901.

8 Since 1901, only six other players have hit .500 or better with a minimum of 40 plate appearances in their team’s first 21 games of the season. They are Harry Heilmann (.541 in 70 plate appearances for the 1921 Detroit Tigers and .500 in 68 for the 1923 Tigers), Mike Piazza (.537 in 42 for the 1995 Los Angeles Dodgers), Ty Cobb (.526 in 48 for the 1925 Tigers), Devin Mesoraco (.525 in 46 for the 2014 Cincinnati Reds), and Gavy Cravath (.512 in 51 for the 1919 Philadelphia Phillies). In 1901 Lajoie was hitting .525 in 90 plate appearances.

9 Seybold closed the season hitting .334, good for fourth in the AL.

10 Seybold had played professionally since 1892 and made his major-league debut with the 1899 Cincinnati Reds, playing in 22 games. In the first five seasons of the AL, Seybold hit 41 home runs, trailing only Boston’s Buck Freeman (46).

11 According to the Chicago Tribune, fellow umpire Tommy Connolly was supposed to have worked the game with Mannassau, but Mannassau worked the field alone. The Tribune also noted a close call at the plate earlier in the game and suggested that those decisions stressed the importance of a two-umpire system. Connolly had worked with Mannassau the day before, but in the series finale two days later, Mannassau was again by himself. The article incorrectly said that Fultz – not Davis – was safe at first on this play. “‘Griff’ Fills the Breach.”

12 After retiring in 1917, Plank trailed Christy Mathewson (79), Cy Young (76), and Walter Johnson (71). As of 2025, Plank ranks fifth, having been passed by Grover Cleveland Alexander. He also had 326 career victories, a record for left-handers until Warren Spahn eclipsed him on the last weekend of the 1962 season.

13 Ranking ahead of Plank were Boston’s Cy Young (12.4), Baltimore’s Joe McGinnity (8.1), Detroit’s Roscoe Miller (6.6), and Chicago’s Clark Griffith (5.7).

14 MLB credits Lajoie with a .421 average on three fewer hits than Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet have listed.