September 29, 1987: Don Mattingly’s record sixth grand slam sinks Red Sox

For a player who had excelled so consistently for the prior three seasons, Don Mattingly’s 1987 was unusually streaky. After leading the American League in hitting in 1984 and finishing first and second respectively in the 1985 and 1986 MVP voting, Mattingly got out of the gate slowly, batting .175 without a home run in the season’s first nine games.

On a getaway day in the Bronx, Thursday, May 14, against the Texas Rangers, Mattingly entered the game slashing .240/.318/.411 with just three home runs through 33 games. He hit his first career grand slam that afternoon, a fourth-inning blast off Mike Mason.1 He hit a three-run home run the next night in Seattle, along with three hits and five RBIs, to get his season on track. With two hits at Yankee Stadium on June 1, he topped .300 to stay.

Mattingly’s season was interrupted in early June by a 20-day stint on the disabled list, the first visit of the 26-year-old’s career. The break divided his season into two halves, and when he returned to action on June 24, he resumed his annual pursuit of crushing American League pitching, batting .336/.371/.601 over his final 88 games with 24 doubles, 24 home runs, and 79 RBIs.2

His second grand slam came in Toronto on June 29, against John Cerutti in a 15-14 win. On July 8 Mattingly began one of the more remarkable hitting feats in baseball history when he went deep in eight straight games, matching Pittsburgh Pirate Dale Long’s accomplishment in 1956.3

From July 8 to July 18, Mattingly went 17-for-37 (.460 batting average) with 10 home runs and 21 runs batted in. The streak included two more grand slams, in a July 10 victory against Joel McKeon of the White Sox and a July 16 win in Texas against Charlie Hough and the Rangers.

The Yankees led the American League East into August, when they lost 8 of 10 on a road trip to Cleveland, Detroit, and Kansas City and settled into third or fourth place for the rest of the season. But Mattingly wasn’t done hitting grand slams.

He tied the all-time single-season mark set by Ernie Banks (1955 Cubs) and Jim Gentile (1961 Orioles) with his fifth slam on September 25 in an 8-4 win in Baltimore against rookie José Mesa, leaving him with nine remaining games in the Yankees schedule. He would strike for a sixth and final time four days later back in the Bronx.

The defending American League champion Boston Red Sox came into New York playing out the string. Boston’s 74-82 record put the Red Sox 21½ games behind Toronto in fifth place, while the Yankees’ 86-70 record was a distant fourth, 9½ games back. In a disappointing sequel to their magical 1986, the Red Sox hadn’t been a .500 club since late April.

The Yankees had pulled off a stunning comeback the night before. Trailing 7-3 in the bottom of the ninth, New York scored six runs off four Boston pitchers, capped off by Mike Easler’s walk-off two-run home run off Calvin Schiraldi. Mattingly knocked in the first of the six runs with a bases-loaded sacrifice fly. 

Boston sent veteran southpaw Bruce Hurst to the mound for his final start of the season. Hurst was 14-6 with a 3.76 ERA through mid-August when his season went into a tailspin. He lost six of his next seven starts with an ERA of 6.32, putting him at 15-12, 4.27 for the season.

New York countered with 28-year-old Charles Hudson, who was 10-6 with a 3.82 ERA. In his first season in the Bronx after a trade with the Phillies, Hudson had started the season 6-0 with a 2.02 ERA but had not won as a starter since May 15. He spent much of the season in and out of the rotation and even endured his first trip back to Triple A in four years.

Hurst and Hudson were sharp early, each allowing one baserunner in each of the first two innings. Marty Barrett singled for his second hit of the day but was stranded in the top of the third, and then the Yankees batters went to work in the bottom half of the inning.

Hurst struck out Joel Skinner to start the inning, but rookie Roberto Kelly and Rickey Henderson followed with singles and a double steal that put runners at second and third.4 Hurst lost Willie Randolph on a non-intentional walk, loading the bases for Mattingly.

After falling behind in the count one ball and two strikes, Hurst tried to fool Mattingly with a changeup. “I just wanted to try to stay on the ball,” Mattingly explained after the game. “I didn’t want to pull off. He got me with two changeups the first time.”5

Mattingly set the record in style, launching his sixth grand slam “11 rows deep into the third tier of the right-field stands,” according to the New York Times.6

“I can’t explain it,” Mattingly mused after the game when asked about his newfound prowess with the bases loaded. “I haven’t done anything different other than try to hit the ball hard. Before, I would hit a sacrifice fly with the bases loaded.”7

The Yankees led 4-0 but the assault kept coming. Hurst sandwiched a Gary Ward single between two walks to load the bases again. Mattingly’s grand slam was his sixth of the season and the Yankees’ 10th, tying the 1938 Detroit Tigers’ all-time team record.

Boston manager John McNamara replaced Hurst with right-hander Tom Bolton to face the switch-hitting Bob Meacham. Meacham grounded out to first, plating the Yankees’ fifth run of the inning, before Skinner bookended the inning with a fly out to right.

Hudson kept the momentum as he allowed just one baserunner, a fifth-inning single to Ed Romero over the next four innings.

The Yankees had another shot at a grand slam in the fifth inning when singles by Ward and Royster and a walk to Meacham loaded the bases for the third time in three innings. Skinner popped out to first and Kelly grounded out to keep the Yankees off the scoreboard in the fifth.

Hudson allowed his final hit in the eighth as he cruised to his 11th victory of the season with a four-hit shutout. “That,” manager Lou Piniella said after the game, “is as good a pitched game as we’ve had all year.”8

New York tacked on one more run in the bottom of the eighth with a sacrifice fly, leading to the final score of 6-0 in front of 20,204 spectators.

It was a final highlight in a disappointing 1987 season for the Yankees. Mattingly hit his 30th home run in the season’s next to last game, making him the first Yankee since Mickey Mantle (1955-62) and Roger Maris (1960-62) to hit 30 in at least three straight seasons. Despite his sluggish start and his 20-day visit to the DL, Mattingly finished with numbers in line with his prior excellent seasons: .327/.378/.559 for a 146 OPS+, slightly off his 158 OPS+ of 1984-86, along with 38 doubles and 115 RBIs, striking out only 38 times. He did not lead the league in any major categories and finished seventh in the American League MVP vote.

Mattingly did not hit another grand slam in his 14-year major-league career. “It feels good to do this, to do something nobody in the game has done,” Mattingly said when asked about the record. “All the players who have played, it’s surprising that nobody did it. You don’t go after records. I just try to hit the ball hard.”9

The Yankees finished the season a respectable 89-73 but a distant nine games behind Detroit, which swept Toronto in the final weekend of the season to take the American League East. Boston finished 20 games off the pace at 78-84, one of only two seasons in the 1980s that Boston did not reach .500.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author accessed Baseball-Reference.com for the box score and play-by-play as well as James Lincoln Ray’s SABR biography of Don Mattingly.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA198709290.shtml

https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/don-mattingly/

Photo credit: Courtesy of Jerry Coli / Dreamstime.

Notes

1 Coming into 1987, Mattingly was 12-for-47 with one double with the bases loaded.

2 Mattingly’s second half was more in line with his 1984-86 run when he batted .340/.382/.560 while averaging 48 doubles, 30 home runs and 123 RBIs per season. He batted .311/.390/.485 with six home runs before his stay on the disabled list in 1987.

3 The feat was matched by Ken Griffey Jr. in 1993.

4 The stolen base was the 40th of the season for Henderson and the 700th of his career. He was almost exactly halfway to his career total of 1,406 stolen bases, an all-time record which stood 468 steals ahead of second-place Lou Brock as of this writing in 2022.

5 Murray Chass, “Mattingly Breaks Slam Mark,” New York Times, September 30, 1987: B7. 

6 Chass.

7 Chass.

8 Bob Ryan, “Mattingly’s Record Slam Sinks Hurst,” Boston Globe, September 30, 1987: 52.

9 Chass, “Mattingly Breaks Slam Mark.”