What’s the greatest game a hitter has ever had?
Well, Joe Adcock had that game when he hit four home runs and a double off the wall. Mark Whiten had four homers, twelve RBI’s against the Reds. Shawn Green had a 6-for-6 with four bombs. Gehrig hit four and…well, this isn’t any fun.
Most of those games are blowouts. Looking at four-homer games: thirteen men have hit four homeruns in a modern major league game. The combined scores of those games are 182-96, which averages out to 14-7. Blowouts. The only team that lost a 4-homer game was the 1986 Braves, who lost despite Bob Horner’s four bombs.
Alright…let’s rephrase things a little bit: what is the most a hitter has ever done to help his team win? In a single game, that is? What’s the most a hitter has done to carry his team to victory?
First, the metric. Then a countdown. And, just for kicks, we’ll end this one with a heart-breaker.
WTF is WPA?
Well, most of you know that WPA stands for Win Probability Added. Actually, the guy who inventedthe metric, Tom Tango, posts here sometimes, usually to give Bill a hard time.
Baseballreference.com describes Win Probability Added as “the sum of the difference in win expectancies for each play the player is credited with.” Basically, everything that happens in a game raises or lowers the odds of a team winning that game. Hit a solo homerun in the first, and WPA will tell you how often a team that is winning 1-0 in the 1st will eventually win that game. WPA will tell you how much the guy who hit the homer improved his team’s odds.
Let’s look at the Adcock game: in the top of the second, with the score knotted at 1-1, Adcock hit a solo shot off Don Newcombe of the Dodgers, putting the Braves up 2-1. Adcock improved his team’s odds of winning the game about 10%. Adcock’s WPA total reflects this: he is credited for .100 WPA (more or less).
In the third, with the score at 5-1, Adcock doubled to left. That was the only one of his hits that stayed in the yard. The double increased the Braves chances of winning a little more than 1.5%...they go from having an 84% chance of winning to having a an 86% chance. Adcock gets about .015 WPA points for that. Tallying things, he’s at .115 WPA.
In the 5th, with the Braves up 6-1, Adcock hit a three-run homer, driving in two guys named Hank and Eddie. But the Braves were already at 97% to win the game…Adcock’s homer moved them to 99%...he gets another .020 points for that.
In the 7th, with the Braves up 9-1, Adcock hit a two-run homerun…the shot did almost nothing to improve the chances that the Braves would win the game. The Dodgers were at the ‘act-of-God’ stage of things: it’d take divine intervention for the Braves blow the lead.
In the 9th, Adcock, who was just pilling on, hit a fourth homerun…it was a solo shot that makes the score 13-6. Again, this did little to improve the Braves odds…they were near 100% to win before Adcock’s last homer, and they were near 100% afterwards.
All things tallied up, Adcock gets a WPA score of .125 for the game. That’s not bad, but he hardly carried the day.
The biggest play of the game? In the bottom of the second, with the Dodgers trailing 1-4, Walt Moryn came in to pinch-hit for Don Newcombe, with the bases loaded and one out. This decision was Morynic at best, as Newcombe was a fine hitter, about on par with his replacement. Plus he could pitch a little bit.
Moryn grounded into a double play, which squandered Brooklyn’s chance of catching up. That grounder improved the Braves chances of winning 15%. So Walt Moryn carried the team…the wrong team.
So here’s our question: who has tallied the highest Win Probability Added in a single game? Who did the most to swing the game in his team’s favor?
Let’s count it down.
#10 – Dwight Evans – June 23, 1990
I remember this game. Actually, I still have the Boston Globe sports section for this game: I was eleven years old when this game happened, and I remembered to keep the newspaper.
As a kid growing up near Boston, Dwight Evans was my favorite player. I collected his cards, emulated his weird batting stance, and argued to anyone who cared that he was a better player than Jim Rice. I loved Dewey.
This game was his last hurrah with the Red Sox…his last shining moment, in his last season with the ballclub.
It was a Roger Clemens start: Evans often came up with big hits for the Texan: as a few of you know, it was Evans’ three-run bomb in the 7th that gave Clemens a win during that first 20-strikeout game.
This game, against the Orioles, was a pitcher’s duel, a close contest. In the bottom of the 8th inning, with the Red Sox down 2-1, Evans hit a solo homerun to deadlock the ballgame.
The 9th inning passed with the score tied 2-2. In the top of the 10th, Mickey Tettleton hit a solo homer for the O’s. Tettleton, as a player, was a lot like Evans: he had a low batting average but a high secondary average because he walked a lot. Like Evans, Tettleton was underrated as a ballplayer, and like Evans, Tettleton had a weird batting stance. If anything, Tettleton’s was weirder than Dewey’s…Dewey did this thing where he pointed the heel of his left foot at the pitcher and slung his bat almost horizontal to his shoulder. Evans was a disciple of Walt Hriniak, the Sox hitting coach during the early 1980’s, and Evans developed the stance under Hriniak’s tutelage: old baseball cards and photos of Evans show him hitting with a conventional stance, but by the early 1980’s Evans had adopted a more exaggerated stance.
Tettleton looked, frankly, like he didn’t know what was the hell was going on: the pitcher would be going into his windup and Tettleton would be standing there looking like he was watching a streaker in centerfield: he was paying attention to something, but he didn’t look like he was about to swing. He kept his hands right at his sternum and just waited with the bat horizontal with the letters on his uniform. Then the ball would come in and he’s extend his arms way back and wave the bat forward and then hack at the pitch…it was a little astonishing that he hit anything, but he was a fine hitter.
I wonder if the stance was what kept Tettleton out of the majors for so long. He didn’t play 100+ games until 1989, when he was twenty-eight years old. He got the catching/DH job for an Orioles team that lost 107 games the year before, so it wasn’t like they had a lot to lose. His minor league record is spotty…I don’t know if the stance kept him from reaching the majors sooner, but it could have.
Getting back to the game…In the bottom of the 10th inning the Orioles brought on their closer, Gregg Olsen.
Gregg Olsen…I should stop for a moment to talk about Gregg Olsen: Olsen was the Orioles 1st-Round pick in 1988…the fourth overall pick of the draft. He came up to the big leagues that year for a few weeks, and by early 1989 he was the Baltimore closer. Olsen was fantastic that year: he posted a 1.69 ERA and struck out 90 hitters in 85 innings. He won the Rookie of the Year award easily (ahead of Ken Griffey Jr. and Tom Gordon); he was the first AL closer or the first closer period to win the award. Actually, he did very well in the tallies for the other hardware, finishing 6th in the Cy Young voting and 12th in the MVP vote. He was twenty-two years old, and people were talking about him as the best closer in baseball.
One interesting fact: Olsen gave up one homerun during that brilliant 1989 season…he faced 356 major league batters, and he allowed just one long-ball. People mentioned this all the time…I am about 60% sure one of his baseball cards mentioned this.
Any guesses to who hit that homerun? Right…Dwight Evans. On April 15th, 1989.
Olsen finished the rest of the 1989 season without giving up another one. He didn’t give up any homeruns in April of 1990, either. Or May. In fact, entering the ballgame on June 23rd, Olsen hadn’t allowed a homerun in 114.2 major league innings. And he posted an ERA of 0.86 over that time.
The first batter for the Red Sox in the 10th inning was Jody Reed. Grounded out. The second batter was Mike Greenwell. Fly out. The third batter was Tom Brunansky. Singled.
That brought up Dwight Evans…the last player to have homered against Olsen, and one of only two players, at that point, to ever homer off Gregg Olsen (Steve Babloni was the other, way back in 1988).
Evans came into that game hitting .240 with five homeruns. His contract with Boston was about to expire, and there were signs that the Red Sox weren’t bringing him back. He was thirty-eight years old, and with Burks, Greenwell, and Brunansky in the outfield, he was already a full-time DH. There wasn’t room for him on the team.
That at-bat was a study of contrasts: on the hill you had a kid whose future was a shining road. Standing in against him was the aging veteran, four months away from being released by the team he had played nineteen seasons for. The script writes itself.
Olsen’s first pitch was wild. Brunansky advanced to second base.
At this point, Olsen could have walked Evans. But youth suffers to vanity; Olsen went after Evans.
And Evans, fourteen months removed from that last homer against Olsen, hit another one. Game over. Red Sox win.
The headline on the Globe the next day said, “Daylight Savings Time for Evans.” That’s what it was: the clocks were turned back and for a little while Evans was the great slugger he used to be. And the spell lasted a bit longer: the next day Dewey came up big again, hitting a solo homerun in the 7th to break a 0-0 deadlock against the Orioles, and adding an insurance run with a sacrifice fly in the 9th. Two games, and Evans had carried the Red Sox both times.
I was happy to see Evans appear on the list of the highest WPA in a single game…I was happy because I remembered the game so well. I was happy, too, because Evans doesn’t show up too much. He isn’t high on any of the all-time lists, and he didn’t win an MVP or a batting title. He led the league in homeruns once, in a strike year, when he tied for the lead with three other guys. I’d like for him to be in the Hall of Fame, but I can’t say that he’s as deserving as Raines or Santo, and he’s off the ballot anyhow. He was my favorite, but there aren’t a lot of reasons to write about him.
When that game happened I thought: no one is going to remember it. It happened in a lost season, and Gregg Olsen never became the great reliever everyone expected him to be. I don’t know how many people remember Olsen as ever being a great player, because the stretch when people perceiving his greatness was so short.
Dewey had a total WPA of 1.143 that day, the tenth highest total any player has ever posted in a game. Twice he snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat, and his second homerun came against the toughest pitcher in baseball to hit a homerun against. He doesn’t get extra credit for that: WPA doesn’t take into account Olsen’s stinginess with the long ball. It doesn’t take into account one of the last great moments of a great player’s career. It’s objective: objectively, Dwight Evans had a game that almost no one has ever matched.
#9 – Hank Aaron – September 10th, 1971.
This game had two guys who would win 300 games starting against each other, Gaylord Perry and Phil Niekro. Both guys had brothers who also pitched quite well. Both guys threw weird pitches. Both guys were journeymen.
This game also had two players who’d finish with 600+ homeruns playing first base: Aaron was at first for the Braves, while Willie Mays was at first for the Gigantics.
Actually, that’s interesting: I always sort of think of Perry and Niekro, for all those similarities listed above. If I’m trying to remember the 300+ game winners, I always think of Niekro and Perry one after the other. The same is true of Aaron and Mays: I always think of them together, somehow. Anyway…
In the bottom of the 8th, the score was 3-1 to the Giants. Ralph Garr, the leadoff hitter for the Braves, singled. Hank Aaron doubled him in, making the score Giants 3, Braves 2. Aaron advanced to third on a wild pitch by Niekro (imagine that), and he scored on Earl Wilson’s sacrifice fly. The game was knotted up, 3-3.
Nothing happened in the 9th inning.
During the top of the 10th, the Giants squeezed across one run….Bobby Bonds walked, advanced to second on catcher interference, and scored on a single by Jim Ray Hart. Hart was replaced by pinch-runner Bernie Williams…I had no idea Bernie Williams had such a long career.
In the bottom of the 10th, with one out, Hank Aaron hit another double. Hammerin’ Hank scored when Mike Lum singled two batters later….the 10th ended with the score tied 4-4.
In the 11th the Giants again scored a run…Ken Henderson walked, stole second, advanced to third on a throwing error, and scored on a balk by Jim Nash…the run lowered the Braves chances of winning to 18%.
In the bottom of the 11th, the Braves first batter singled. The second batter walked. At this point, down a run but with runners on first and second and no outs, the odds on the game were 50-50….the Braves had drawn even.
The third batter of the inning, Ralph Garr, struck out. That was a big swing, dropping the Braves chances to 32%. The double play was now in order, but Hank Aaron was batting again.
You know what happened: Aaron plunked a three-run homer. Game over.
Aaron gets a 1.159 WPA for the game: he got a big hit in the 8th and then scored the tying run. He scored a tying run in the 10th. Then he hit the game-winner in the 11th. Mays had a lousy game: he had chances to win it for the Giants and he didn’t. But we’ll hear from Willie again.
#8 – Jim Hickman, May 28, 1970
A few Hall-of-Famers in this one, too: Billy Williams, Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski, and Willie Stargell. Leo Durocher was the Cubs manager. Ron Santo played…he’s in the Hall, right? He should be.
Jim Hickman was having an outlier year…he’d finished the 1970 with a Triple Crown line of .315/32/115. Aside from those totals, Hickman’s career highs were a .272 batting average, 21 homeruns, and 64 RBI’s. But he was eating his Wheaties in 1970.
This was a back-and-forth game…the Pirates would score a few runs, and then the Cubs would even it up. The Bucs would score a few more, and then Cubs would draw it even. A see-saw game, except the Cubs never had the lead…not until the very end.
Hickman didn’t have an obvious impact early…in the 4th inning, with the Cubs down 3-0, Hickman singled with a runner on first…he didn’t drive in a run, and he didn’t score, but the single advanced a runner to third, and that runner scored on a double play grounder. Hickman’s single didn’t look big, but it improved his team’s odds about 10%.
In the 7th, with the Cubs down 4-6, Hickman hit a two-run homerun to deadlock the game. That was a big blow…29 percentage points.
In the 9th, with the Cubs down 7-6 and Billy Williams on first, Hickman homered again...another walkoff homerun. That’s three walkoff homeruns….I suspect that almost all of the big games will be walkoff homers, because a walk-off homerun is the ultimate Win Probability Added: it pushes the odds from 20% or 72% to 100%.
#7 – Carlos May, September 3, 1973
Third straight game of the 1970’s…it was the decade of the big game, I suppose.
Carlos May had three huge hits…three hits that dragged the White Sox from the brink:
-In the bottom of the 7th inning, with the White Sox down 6-3 to the Rangers, May hit a three-run homerun, tying the game.
-In the bottom of the 9th, with the White Sox down a run, May came up with two outs and a runner on third base. He singled home the run, drawing the White Sox for the second time.
In the bottom of the 11th, with the game still tied and two runners on base, May hit a double to centerfield, winning the game for the White Sox.
Like the Hickman game, this is a game where the winning team never had the lead until the very end. In Hickman’s game, the end came in the 9th. In this game, the end came in the 11th.
#6 – Willie Mays, May 26, 1962.
The Mets lost 120 games in 1962. It is very likely that this was their worst loss of that year.
Casey Stengel managed the losers in this one. Whitey Herzog managed the losers of the Lee May game. Leo Durocher managed the winners of the Jim Hickman game…we’ve looked at five games, and three of the ten managers involved are Hall-of-Fame skippers. Is that just a fluke, or is there something to it?
Willie Mays…in the bottom of the 8th, Mays hit a solo shot to draw the Giants even with the Mets…the score was 5-5 then.
Starting off the top of the tenth inning, Felix Mantilla of the Mets hit a solo homerun off Don Larsen…the math says that at that point the Mets were about 82% to win…but again, the system is objective, and we’re talking about those Marvelous Mets.
In the bottom of the tenth, Mays hit a two-run homerun off pitcher Jay Hook, who was the Mets starter for the day…one wonders why Casey left Hook in for so long, as he hadn’t been pitching brilliantly before the tenth inning. If anyone needed a quick Hook…
Jay Hook lost 19 games in 1962…that was good enough for third on the team in loses. His teammate Roger Craig lost 24 games…he was the biggest loser. Another teammate, Al Jackson, lost 20 games. Craig Anderson lost 17 games, most of those coming out of the bullpen.
The 1962 Mets…I should spend more time on this, but the 1962 Mets weren’t a terrible team. Don’t get me wrong: if you lose 120 games you’re obviously doing something you shouldn’t be doing. But the Mets had some quality players: Frank Thomas, Gil Hodges and Richie Ashburn had good years. Their offense wasn’t great, but they scored 3.83 runs in that park, which was better than Houston and just a little worse than the Cubbies, who played in a much better park for hitting. The pitching was bad…
Partially, the reason the Mets lost so many games is because there were scads of really good teams in the NL that year: the Giants and Dodgers won 103 and 102 games between ‘em. The Reds won 98 games. The Pirates won 93. The Braves won just 86 games in 1962: they had Aaron and Mathews and Spahn and Adcock and they could barely finish above .500.
The Mets weren’t the worst expansion team…not by a mile. They lost 120 games because they broke into an incredibly tough league: they had no chance. But they weren’t nearly as bad as they looked.
#5 – Mel Hall, June 27th, 1984,
Mel Hall is in prison for sexually assaulting a young girl, so you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t spend too much time on his day in the sun.
In the 8th inning, with the Indians down 3-1 to the Twins, Hall doubled in two runners to knot the score. The game stayed tied through the ninth, and in the top of the tenth Gary Gaetti scored a run. In the bottom of the tenth, with two on and two outs, Hall hit a three-run homerun to win the game.
There’s an obvious pattern here: the guys with the big games are playing at home, and their team is down some number of runs in the bottom of the climactic inning.
Hall gets a few extra points because he singled to lead off the second inning and then stole second: the score was tied then, and though Hall didn’t score, he gets a few bonus points there.
The Indians, that day, had Brett Butler and Julio Franco batting 1-2…Butler in centerfield and Franco at shortstop.
Let’s ignore pitching for a moment: you can break up the non-pitching part of putting a team together into two tasks: figuring out where to put your fielders and figuring out how to put together your batting order.
Actually, you can look at those things, batting orders and defense, as questions you have to answer. Who’s on first? Who hits clean-up? I Don’t Know’s on third. What the Hell gets platooned.
Some questions are easier to answer, and some are harder: it’s easy to find a first basemen on your team: you have ten guys and nine of ‘em can play first in a pinch. It’s tougher to find a catcher: who in the hell wants that job. Same thing holds for batting order: it’s easy to figure out who should bat ninth: your worst hitter should bat ninth. But who bats first? Who bats third? Tougher…
The Indians had Butler and Franco: that answers a lot of the tough questions. Defensively: if you’re the manager you can plug Butler into center, or right, or left. As for that Franco kid, he can play shortstop. Or second base. Maybe they won’t be great in those positions, but they can do the job. They can answer the question, if you need them to.
Same thing with the order: Butler hits well, walks a ton, bunts extremely well, runs very fast, and steals a good deal of bases. He can hit leadoff, or if you have someone better for the leadoff spot, he can bat second. Or third, really…if you don’t mind the lack of power. Franco was the exact same hitter: fewer walks, but the same characteristics.
With Butler and Franco, the Indians had a lot of questions answered: they covered some big defensive positions and had answers in the lineup. They had speed. By 1985, Joe Carter was a regular on the team, as were Tony Bernazard and Brooks Jacoby…the Indians had a lot of questions answered.
But they couldn’t figure out the pitching.
In 1984 they traded Rick Sutcliffe, who went to Wrigley and won a Cy Young. In August of 1985 they traded Blyleven to the Twins for nuthin’. They did sign Phil Niekro as a free agent…when Niekro was forty-seven years old. The rotation for the Indians was Tom Candiotti and…who can we throw out there today?
They got Joe Carter for Sutcliffe…if they had kept Sutcliffe and Blyleven I wonder if they might’ve won something. Their pitching was awful…in 1985 and 1987, when the Indians lost 100+ games, the pitching was terrible. And it probably didn’t help that their cleanup hitter had an on-base percentage hovering around .300.
You get two guys like Butler and Franco, and the rest gets a little easier. But the Indians never managed to figure out the rest.
#4 – Bobby Grich, July 15, 1979
In his first at-bat against Guidry, Grich lined out to left. In the bottom of the 3rd, with the Yanks up 4-0, Bobby Grich singled in a run. In the 5th inning, Grich again singled, though the Halos failed to plate anyone. In the 7th, with two runners on, Grich doubled off Guidry, scoring both runners and putting the Angels within a run of the Yanks, 4-3.
Billy Martin was managing the Yankees then, and he couldn’t being Gossage in. Gossage had pitched the day before, and he hadn’t been particularly successful against the Angels, allowing 5 runs in 3.2 innings. So Martin let Guidry face Grich.
Grich homered. The Angels won 5-4, and Bobby Grich drove in all five of the runs.
Grich, Sandberg, and Whittaker were the same player, right? Second basemen with solid batting averages, great secondary averages, and good defense. Sandberg might’ve been a better defender and he stole more bases than the other guys, but he benefited from Wrigley. Grich was the best hitter of the three.
|
Runs
|
HR
|
RBI
|
BA
|
OPS+
|
Gold Gloves
|
|
Sandberg
|
1318
|
282
|
1061
|
.285
|
114
|
9
|
|
Grich
|
1033
|
224
|
1033
|
.266
|
125
|
4
|
|
Whittaker
|
1386
|
244
|
1084
|
.276
|
116
|
4
|
Here’s where Grich batted in 1979, the year in question:
|
Bat. Order Post.
|
Games Started
|
|
Batting 8th
|
66
|
|
Batting 7th
|
45
|
|
Batting 6th
|
26
|
|
Batting 1st
|
11
|
Grich hit 30 homeruns that year, posting an Adjusted OPS of 145, the 9th best total in the league. Coming into the year he had already established himself as a middle-power hitter who had two 100+ walk years under his belt.
You might think that shows the ignorance of the Angels manager, Jim Fergosi. I suspect, however, that they put Grich in the 8th spot as a sort of ‘second’ cleanup’ hitter…the 1979 Angels were a hittin’ team. Their lineup was stacked: they had above-average production everywhere except shortstop. Despite playing in a pitcher’s park, the Angels led the American League in runs scored by a decent margin.
#3 – Brian Daubach, August 21, 2000
Red Sox versus Angels this time…
With two outs in the bottom of the 9th inning and the Sox down 5-3, Brian Daubach hit a two-run homer to send the ballgame into extra innings. With two outs in the bottom of the 11th, with the Sox down 6-5, Daubach hit another two-run homerun to win the game for Boston.
#2 – Jim Pagliaroni, September 23, 1965
Jim Pagliaroni, who passed away this past April, had a career of big hits…
Pagliaroni made his major league debut with the Red Sox in 1955…when he was seventeen years old. When I was seventeen I couldn’t crack my high school team. He had one plate appearance, in the bottom of the 9th inning with two runners on: he hit a sacrifice fly to drive in Jackie Jensen. Then he went down to the minors...for five years. But he came back.
             
On June 18th, 1961, the Red Sox were playing the Senators in Fenway. By the bottom of the 9th, the Senators were whumping the Sox. The score was 12-5. It was the first game of a doubleheader, so you knew the Sox were going to kick the ninth and try again in round two.
The first batter for the Sox was Vic Wertz. He grounded out.
The second batter singled.
The third batter struck out.
That made it two outs, bottom of the ninth. The Sox were down seven runs, and they had a runner on first. Here’s what happened next:
Single.
Single.
Walk.
Walk.
Walk.
That brought the score to 12-8. And it brought the tying run to the plate.
The batter was Jim Pagliaroni.
He hit a grand slam. Tie ballgame.
The next batter was Vic Wertz. Thank God it was a doubleheader, otherwise he would’ve had to hit in a towel. Wertz walked. Don Buddin singled for the second time that inning. Finally, Russ Nixon hit the game-winning single.
Fun game: with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the Sox scored eight runs. And Pagliaroni hit the game-tying grand slam.
That wasn’t his big game…he didn’t quite carry the day.
You tie a game with a homer in the ninth, and you’re improving your team’s odds a little more than 50%....it’s tough to score much more than 50%, in an at-bat, tough to total more than.50 WPA in an at-bat.
The players on this list have WPA’s in the 1.100-1.200 range…they have two big, game-changing hits in a game, and the probably do one or two other things that help.
Pagliaroni’s big game came as a member of the Pirates, in 1965. This was another heartbreaker for the Mets.
In the fourth, with a runner on and the Pirates down 0-2, Pagliaroni singled and subsequently scored the tying run on a triple by Gene (Found An) Alley. In the bottom of the 7th, with the Bucs down 4-3, Pagliaroni hit a game-tying single. Then in the bottom of the 9th, with the Pirates again down a run, Pagliaroni hit a two-run walkoff to give the Mets their 105 loss on the season.
Jim Pagliaroni played in a tough era for hitters, but he was a fine hitter. He had a career OPS+ of 109. Among catchers with 2000 or more at-bats, he ranks 36th in career Adjusted OPS, just ahead of Ivan Rodriguez, Lance Parrish, and Elston Howard.
#1 - Art Shamsky, August 12, 1966
Dwight Evans, on his big day, had a WPA of 1.143. This is the 10th highest total of all-time.
Jim Pagliaroni, in his big day, had a WPA of 1.284. This is the 2nd highest total of all-time.
So the difference in WPA between the #2 and #10 best games in WPA is .141.
But the difference between the #2 and the #1 best WPA totals is .209.
It ain’t even close.
Art Shamsky blows everyone else out of the water. No one else has ever carried the day quite as dramatically as Art Shamsky did in August of 1966. No one has ever come close.
And here’s the really astonishing thing: Shamsky didn’t even start the game. He came on in the 8th inning. All the other guys were starters, who had nine innings to leave their mark on the game. Shamsky came on in the 8th.
Let’s go to the tape.
Shamsky played for the Reds…he came into the game as a defensive substitute at the top of the eighth inning, going into leftfield. The Reds, the home team, were down 7-6 to the Pirates going into the 8th. The Reds pitchers managed to shut down the Pirates in order in the top of the inning, keeping the score Pittsburgh 7, Good Guys 6.
Shamsky hit third in the bottom of the 8th. With a runner on, he hit a two-run homerun to give the Reds an 8-7 lead. That hit represented a 54% swing in the Reds chances to win the ballgame…they went from having a 31% chance of winning to having an 85% chance of winning.
But the pen couldn’t hold it. In the top of the 9th, the Pirates scored a tying run…8-8. In the bottom of the 9th Pittsburgh closer Roy Face struck out the side, and the game headed into extra innings.
In the top of the 10th, Willie Stargell hit a solo shot, giving the Pirates a 9-8 lead.
In the bottom of the tenth, Roy Face struck out the first batter, Johnny Edwards. At that point Face had faced four batters, and all four had whiffed.
The next batter was Art Shamsky. Art Shamsky did not whiff. Art Shamsky hit his second home run, tying the game 9-9.
In the top of the 11th inning, the Pirates scored again. Bob Bailey hit a two-run double to give the Reds an 11-9 lead. The guy who scored that eleventh run? None other than Jim Pagliaroni, the #2 guy on our list. You have to think that he knew something was up.
So the Reds went into the bottom of the 11th inning, down two runs. Roy Face retired the first two batters. At that point, the Reds had a 99% chance of winning the game.
The next batter walked.
Which brought up Art Shamsky.
Roy Face was pulled, and Billy O’Dell, a lefty, was brought in to face the left-handed Shamsky.
Shamsky homered again, tying the game 11-11. Three at-bats, three game-changing homeruns.
Neither team scored in the 12th inning.
In the top of the 13th, the Pirates scored two runs. In the bottom of the inning, with Art Shamsky waiting in the hole, Leo Cardenas grounded into a double play to end the ball game.
So Shamsky, in addition to being the only non-starter on our list, is the only player to carry the day for a team that lost. He doesn’t fit with the others….his game was truly and utterly unique in the history of baseball.
Three times Art Shamsky came to the plate with his team starring into the jaws of defeat, and three times Shamsky hit homeruns to snatch victory from those powerful jaws. It wasn’t enough: his team lost the baseball game. But no player in history has carried the day like Art Shamsky.
Art Shamsky was an iconic player, a player who is remembered in disproportion to what he did on the field. He was a Jewish player, and was beloved by Jewish baseball fans of the 1960’s. He was a member of the 1969 Mets, and everyone from that team is remembered. According to Wikipedia, Jon Stewart named his dog ‘Shamsky’…I have no idea if that’s true, but Mr. Stewart is a Mets fan.
Lastly: if you’ve been paying attention, this is the third time the Clemente/Mazeroski/Stargell Pirates show up on this list. The Bucs were the opposition in the Hickman and Shamsky games, and Jim Pagliaroni was a Buc when he had his big day. I don’t know what to make of that, frankly.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand, where he is trying hard to understand rugby, cricket, and that strange version of football that is played with one’s feet. He welcomes comments and questions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.