September 8, 1956: A bit of banter helps provoke Ted Williams home run in Baltimore

Top of the first inning. Single. Single. Three-run homer. Game over.

Not quite–the rest of the game still had to be played. But the hit that proved the game-winner for the Boston Red Sox over the Baltimore Orioles on September 8, 1956, was indeed the Ted Williams home run.1

There was a backstory. Billy Loes was the starter for the Orioles, a 26-year-old right-hander who’d begun his career with the Brooklyn Dodgers and had been purchased by Baltimore in May.

During the first game of a Boston-Baltimore doubleheader on June 30, Loes was heckling Williams and Red Sox center fielder Jimmy Piersall. When Williams singled through the open shortstop hole in the sixth, Loes called over to him at first base, “Why don’t a strong guy like you pull the ball and hit it out of the park instead of settling for those lousy taps to left?”2  He and Piersall later exchanged jibes during a Piersall at-bat on July 7.3 No stories of the day indicated that the banter was anything other than light-hearted, but of course it might nonetheless have seemed irritating.

In his SABR biography of Loes, Gregory H. Wolf quotes Jimmy Breslin as dubbing Loes “a Dizzy Dean from the sidewalks of New York” and noted that Loes “cultivated his zany personality” while saying he “made headlines for his wacky statements and bizarre, typically candid pronouncements that left many wondering whether he was cocky, stupid, or a combination of both.”

Loes could perhaps talk a good game, but his record was 2-7 coming into the September 8 Saturday night game at Memorial Stadium.4 The Red Sox were fourth in the American League, 12½ games behind the first-place New York Yankees. The Orioles were in sixth, 26½ games out.

The first batter Loes faced was Red Sox second baseman Billy Goodman, who blooped a single to right field. Next up was shortstop Billy Klaus, who did the same, Goodman running first to third.

Williams stepped into the batter’s box. As the Boston Herald reported, “Ted jumped on a one-ball, two-strike pitch and lashed it into the right-field bleachers.”5

The score was quickly 3-0, Boston. There was a walk and a single before Loes could return to the dugout, but no more runs.

Williams came up to bat again in the Boston second and drew a base on balls. Loes had also walked Klaus, but the Red Sox didn’t score.

Red Sox starter Tom Brewer allowed a walk but no more in the first inning. Loes batted against Brewer in the bottom of the second, with two outs and a runner on third base, but he grounded out.

Boston scored three more runs off Loes in the top of the third. Right fielder Jackie Jensen led off with a single to left field. Piersall followed with another single. Third baseman Ted Lepcio popped up to Tito Francona in right field. Pete Daley, catching Brewer, hit a long single to center field for the fourth Red Sox run.

Brewer was up next and he “measured his shot,” hitting a “pop fly just over second baseman Billy Gardner’s head for a two-run single.”6 The Herald called it a “broken bat looper to right with the infield drawn in.”7 Both Piersall and Daley scored. With the score 6-0 in favor of the visitors, Loes got a couple of groundouts and got himself out of the inning. He pitched the fourth and fifth, with only a single in each one.

Loes was lifted for a pinch-hitter in the Orioles’ fifth, but through six, it was Boston 6, Baltimore 0, and Brewer had allowed only one base hit, a leadoff single to left-center field by Gardner in the second inning.

Brewer got his own second hit of the game in the top of the seventh off reliever Erv Palica, a Brooklyn teammate of Loes.

In the bottom of the seventh inning, Baltimore got on the board. Center fielder Jim Pyburn led off with a walk. Willy Miranda singled to right field, and Pyburn ran to third. Pinch-hitting for Palica was Wayne Causey. He hit a fly ball to right field, a sacrifice fly that enabled Pyburn to tag and score. The count went to 3-0, but Brewer battled back and struck out Grady Hatton. Francona singled, a “scratchy infield chop”8 that Brewer fielded and misplayed–a bouncer up the first-base line–earning an error on a wild throw that went into right field. The runners ended up on second and third. He struck out left fielder Bob Nieman, looking, to close out the inning. The score was 6-1. Nieman did not get another opportunity to bat; this game ended a then-team-record 20-game hitting streak. He did draw two bases on balls.

Ron Moeller, a 17-year-old left-hander making his major-league debut, threw the final two innings for Baltimore without significant incident.9 Neither team got a baserunner in the eighth.

In the ninth, Piersall led off with a single to left and Lepcio walked, but Daley’s fly ball to center field was turned into an 8-6-4 double play. Brewer, batting for himself, struck out.

Miranda hit a one-out single–his second hit of the game (he’d come into the game batting just .216)–in the bottom of the ninth, but pinch-hitter George Kell flied out to Gene Stephens in left field (Stephens had replaced Williams back in the sixth), and Hatton fouled out to the catcher, ending the game.

The game-winner had been hit by Ted Williams back in the first inning. It was his third game-winning homer against the Orioles in a one-month span. He’d hit one off Connie Johnson on August 8 and one off Morrie Martin on September 1. This one was his seventh game-winning four-base hit of the year. Two more followed, on September 11 and September 25.

Early the following year, Williams hit another first-inning home run off Loes, a solo home run at Fenway Park on April 23, 1957.

This September 8 game drew 10,476. It produced the 19th win of the 1956 season for Tom Brewer. The 20th win remained elusive; he lost his only two other decisions, finishing the season 19-9 with a 3.50 ERA. He’d only allowed four hits but had walked four. There were three errors in the game–all by the Red Sox, one of those being Brewer’s. He struck out seven. The Red Sox got 14 hits in all, with at least one by each member of the starting lineup. Brewer got two. Jensen and Piersall had three apiece.

Under manager Pinky Higgins, the Red Sox finished the season in fourth place, 13 games behind the New York Yankees but only one behind the Chicago White Sox. Paul Richards’ Orioles finished sixth, 28 games out of first place.

Acknowledgments

This game was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy edited by Mike Eisenbath.

Photo credit: Ted Williams, Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-reference.com and Retrosheet.org. Thanks to Malcolm Allen for assistance. 

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BAL/BAL195609080.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1956/B09080BAL1956.htm

Notes 

1 A “game-winning home run” is defined here as a home run that provides a game’s final margin of victory, giving the winning team at least one more run than the opposing team scored. For example, if a two-run homer increased a team’s lead from 2-1 to 4-1, and it went on to win 4-3, it qualifies as a game-winning home run. (This is different from the definition of “game-winning RBI” in baseball’s official statistics from 1980 through 1988, which counted as “game-winning” the RBI that provided a winning team the lead that it never relinquished.)

2 Joe Cashman, “Loes Jibes Williams,” Boston Daily Record, July 2, 1956: 2. At one point, while Loes was jawing with Jimmy Piersall, who he’d hit with a pitch that he said got away from him, umpire Ed Runge “suggested that Loes cut out the clowning,” to which Loes replied, “Who invited you into the act?” Later in the game, Williams was back on first base again and saw Loes gabbing with batter Mickey Vernon. He would have had second base stolen, except that Vernon fouled off the pitch.

3 Clif Keane, “Sox ‘Whodunit’ Plays Pranks on Piersall,” Boston Globe, July 8, 1956: 42.

4 Loes did come back with a strong 12-7 season in 1957 and made the All-Star team.

5 Henry McKenna, “Ted Homers as Sox Beat Orioles, 6-1,” Boston Herald, September 9, 1956: 63.

6 Hy Hurwitz, “Brewer Holds Orioles to 4 Hits for 19th Win,” Boston Globe, September 9, 1946: 42.

7 McKenna.

8 Lou Hatter, “Ted Williams Slams 19th As Bosox Whip Orioles, 6-1,” Baltimore Sun, September 9, 1956: 1D, 2D.

9 Hatter wrote, “The youngster exhibited a sharp-breaking curve ball and considerable moxie after less than two months in organized baseball.” See “Ted Williams Slams 19th As Bosox Whip Orioles, 6-1.” Moller appeared in 52 games in his four-season major-league career.