September 27, 1919: Bob Shawkey fans 15 and wins 20th for Yankees

Before the Yankees-Athletics doubleheader on September 27, 1919, New York pitcher Bob Shawkey had won 20 games in a season once. In 1916, his first full season with the Yankees, the man known as Sailor won a league-leading 24 games. Shawkey was 24-14 and retrospectively had a league-leading eight saves.

Entering the doubleheader, the third-place Yankees (77-59, .566) led the fourth-place Detroit Tigers (78-60, .565) by one percentage point. With just three games left on the schedule, the Yankees trailed the second-place Cleveland Indians by 5½ games. The woeful Athletics were in last place with a record of 36-101.

Shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, batting .307, and Frank “Home Run” Baker (10 round-trippers) led the Yankees offense. The Boston Red Sox trailed the first-place Chicago White Sox by 20 games, but Babe Ruth was making a mockery of the home-run race in his last season before being traded to the Yankees.

In the first game of the twin bill, 35-year-old veteran hurler Jack Quinn pitched the Yankees to a 4-1 victory, allowing 10 hits, walking two, and striking out six. Second baseman Del Pratt led the offense with a home run and single, and three runs batted in.

The Athletics had been in last place in the American League since 1915 after owner-manager Connie Mack sold off most of his star players following the stunning upset loss to Boston’s “Miracle Braves” in the 1914 World Series. Philadelphia did not escape the AL cellar until 1922.

The Yankees’ pitcher for the second game, right-hander Shawkey, 28, broke into the major leagues in 1913 with the Athletics. In June of 1915 Mack sold him to the Yankees for $3,000.

Athletics pitcher Pat Martin, 25 years old, was making just his second major-league start. In fact, Martin would make just five more starts in the major leagues, as his career ended on June 6, 1920 in a game won by the Yankees, 12-6, with Martin not figuring in the decision.

Shawkey had picked up his 19th victory three days before, on September 24, pitching all 13 innings and beating Waite Hoyt and the Red Sox, 2-1. In his start before that, he gave up seven runs in 5⅓ innings in relief of Hank Thormahlen in an 11-2 loss to the Chicago White Sox.

With just one game to go after the doubleheader, the Yankees hoped to hold off the Tigers and retain their third-place finish for a larger share of postseason money.1

The Yankees made their intentions known immediately. Right fielder Sammy Vick led off the game with a single and Roger Peckinpaugh walked. Vick went to third on Baker’s force-play grounder. First baseman Wally Pipp popped out but Del Pratt walked, loading the bases, and Duffy Lewis’s single scored Vick. Center fielder Chick Fewster slammed a bases-clearing triple, and the Yankees led 4-0. Catcher Muddy Ruel’s popout to second baseman Jimmy Dykes ended the inning.

The Athletics got a run in the second inning when Shawkey walked Dykes and Art Ewoldt and Ewoldt scored on a single by A’s catcher Lena Styles.

After a scoreless third inning, New York added a run when Fewster singled to left-center field, Shawkey sent him to third with a single to left field, and Fewster scored on Vick’s fly ball to Amos Strunk in right field.

The teams were scoreless for the next 4½ innings, until the top of the ninth inning, when four more Yankee baserunners crossed the plate with two outs. Peckinpaugh walked. Baker’s single to center and Wally Pipp’s bunt single loaded the bases. Del Pratt singled to center field and Philadelphia center fielder Frank Welch made a bad throw trying to pick off a runner. When the dust had cleared, all four Yankees, including Pratt, had scored.2

Down 9-1 going into the home half of the ninth, the Athletics got a run. With two outs, Charlie High pinch-hit for Al Wingo and reached first on Peckinpaugh’s error. High stole second and third, and came home on Ivy Griffin’s single. Amos Strunk’s groundout to second ended the game. Shawkey had held the Athletics to seven hits and struck out 15 batters.

Sportswriters credited the Yankees’ sweep to the nearly unhittable pitching of Quinn and Shawkey. Wrote one Philadelphia scribe, “Through the paraspinous pitching by Jack and Bob3 and more or less clouting on the part of their associates in the enterprise, the Yankees beat our Athletics in two ballgames, the score being 4 to 1 and 9 to 2.”4 The double victory over the disheartened Athletics gave New York a half-game lead over Detroit in the race for third place in the American League, and the New York sportswriters took a more sanguine view: “The team of Mack was helpless before Bob and he registered 15 strikeouts, the record for the season.”5

Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter Edgar Forrest Wolfe, who wrote under the playful name Jim Nasium, waxed almost poetic about Shawkey’s strikeouts. “During the progress of that record battle yesterday another record of eleven years standing had a minor squeak from being kicked totally out of the succulent statistics as Shawkey came within one record for strikeouts in the American League set by Rube Waddell against the Athletics in 1908 by Rube Waddell,” he wrote.6

Before his 15-strikeout performance, Shawkey had never reached double figures in strikeouts. and after this 15-strikeout game would reach double figures in strikeouts two more times, the first time on July 18, 1922, against the Detroit Tigers (10 strikeouts) and on July 5, 1926, against the Athletics (10 whiffs again).

Shawkey won 20 or more games four times in his career: 1916 (24-14), 1919 (20-11), 1920 (20-13), and 1922 (20-12). He pitched for the Yankees from 1915 to 1927, when he retired.

Shawkey’s feat was not the only thing that made the headlines in baseball on September 27, 1919. The Red Sox’ Babe Ruth hit his major-league record-breaking 29th home run of the season in a loss to the Washington Senators at Griffith Stadium.

SOURCES

Besides the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.orgwebsites.

NOTES

1 “Mackmen Defeated Twice by Yankees,” New York Times, September 28, 1919: 117.

2 “Mackmen Defeated Twice By Yankees.”

3 At this long remove, one can only assume that some Philadelphia sportswriters sought a little self-amusement while covering the woebegone team. “Paraspinous” and “paraspinal” are medical terms meaning adjacent to the spine. Merriam-Webster.com Medical Dictionary, merriam-webster.com/medical/paraspinal. Accessed September 13, 2020.

4 Jim Nasium, “Shawkey Fans 15, Macks Losing Two,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 1919: 20.

5 “Mackmen Defeated Twice by Yankees.”

6 Jim Nasium.