Ted Williams becomes last player to hit .400

Year
1941
Month Day
September 28

On September 28, 1941, the Boston Red Sox’s Ted Williams plays a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics on the last day of the regular season and gets six hits in eight trips to the plate, to boost his batting average to .406 and become the first player since Bill Terry in 1930 to hit .400. Williams, who spent his entire career with the Sox, played his final game exactly 19 years later, on September 28, 1960, at Boston’s Fenway Park and hit a home run in his last time at bat, for a career total of 521 homeruns.

Williams was born on August 30, 1918, in San Diego, and began his major league career with the Red Sox in 1939. 1941 marked Williams’ best season. In addition to his .406 batting average–no major league player since him has hit .400–the left fielder led the league with 37 homers, 135 runs and had a slugging average of .735. Also that season, Williams, whose nicknames included “The Splendid Splinter” and “The Thumper,” had an on-base percentage of .553, a record that remained unbroken for 61 years, until Barry Bonds achieved a percentage of .582 in 2002.

In 1942, Williams won the American League Triple Crown, for highest batting average and most RBIs and homeruns. He duplicated the feat in 1947. In 1946 and 1949, he was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player and in June 1960, he became the fourth player in major league history to hit 500 homers. He was selected to the All-Star team 17 times.

Williams played his last game on September 28, 1960, and retired with a lifetime batting average of .344, a .483 career on-base percentage and 2,654 hits. His achievements are all the more impressive because his career was interrupted twice for military service: Williams was a Marine Corps pilot during World War II and the Korean War and as a result missed a total of nearly five seasons from baseball.

Williams, who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966, managed the Washington Senators (renamed the Texas Rangers in 1972) from 1969 to 1972. In 1984, the Boston Red Sox retired his uniform number (nine). Williams died of cardiac arrest at age 83 on July 5, 2002, in Florida. In a controversial move, his son sent his father’s body to be frozen at a cryonics laboratory.

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First televised Major League baseball game

Year
1939
Month Day
August 26

On August 26, 1939, the first televised Major League baseball game is broadcast on station W2XBS, the station that was to become WNBC-TV. Announcer Red Barber called the game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York.

At the time, television was still in its infancy. Regular programming did not yet exist, and very few people owned television sets—there were only about 400 in the New York area. Not until 1946 did regular network broadcasting catch on in the United States, and only in the mid-1950s did television sets become more common in the American household.

In 1939, the World’s Fair—which was being held in New York—became the catalyst for the historic broadcast. The television was one of the fair’s prize exhibits, and organizers believed that the Dodgers-Reds doubleheader on August 26 was the perfect event to showcase America’s grasp on the new technology.

By today’s standards, the video coverage was somewhat crude. There were only two stationary camera angles: The first was placed down the third base line to pick up infield throws to first, and the second was placed high above home plate to get an extensive view of the field. It was also difficult to capture fast-moving plays: Swinging bats looked like paper fans, and the ball was all but invisible during pitches and hits.

Nevertheless, the experiment was a success, driving interest in the development of television technology, particularly for sporting events. Though baseball owners were initially concerned that televising baseball would sap actual attendance, they soon warmed to the idea. In particular, they embraced the possibilities for revenue generation that came with increased exposure of the game, including the sale of rights to air certain teams or games and television advertising.

Today, televised sports is a multi-billion dollar industry, with technology that gives viewers an astounding amount of visual and audio detail. Cameras are now so precise that they can capture the way a ball changes shape when struck by a bat, and athletes are wired to pick up field-level and sideline conversation.

READ MORE: Who Invented Baseball? 

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Babe Ruth retires

Year
1935
Month Day
June 02

On June 2, 1935, Babe Ruth, one of the greatest players in the history of baseball, ends his Major League playing career after 22 seasons, 10 World Series and 714 home runs. The following year, Ruth, a larger-than-life figure whose name became synonymous with baseball, was one of the first five players inducted into the sport’s hall of fame.

George Herman Ruth was born February 6, 1895, into a poor family in Baltimore. As a child, he was sent to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a school run by Roman Catholic brothers, where he learned to play baseball and was a standout athlete. At 19, Ruth was signed by the Baltimore Orioles, then a Boston Red Sox minor league team. Ruth’s fellow teammates and the media began referring to him as team owner Jack Dunn’s newest “babe,” a nickname that stuck. Ruth would later acquire other nicknames, including “The Sultan of Swat” and “The Bambino.”

READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Babe Ruth

Ruth made his Major League debut as a left-handed pitcher with the Red Sox in July 1914 and pitched 89 winning games for the team before 1920, when he was traded to the New York Yankees. After Ruth left Boston, in what became known as “the curse of the Bambino,” the Red Sox didn’t win another World Series until 2004. In New York, Ruth’s primary position changed to outfielder and he led the Yankees to seven American League pennants and four World Series victories. Ruth was a huge star in New York and attracted so many fans that the team was able to open a new stadium in 1923, Yankee Stadium, dubbed “The House That Ruth Built.”

The southpaw slugger’s final season, in 1935, was with the Boston Braves. He had joined the Braves with the hope that he’d become the team’s manager the next season. However, this dream never came to pass for a disappointed Ruth, who had a reputation for excessive drinking, gambling and womanizing.

Many of the records Ruth set remained in place for decades. His career homerun record stood until 1974, when it was broken by Hank Aaron. Ruth’s record of 60 homeruns in a single season (1927) of 154 games wasn’t bested until 1961, when Roger Maris knocked out 61 homers in an extended season of 162 games. The Sultan of Swat’s career slugging percentage of .690 remains the highest in Major League history.

Ruth died of throat cancer at age 53 on August 16, 1948, in New York City. His body lay in state at Yankee Stadium for two days and was visited by over 100,000 fans.

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Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record

Year
1974
Month Day
April 08

On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hits his 715th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714 homers. A crowd of 53,775 people, the largest in the history of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, was with Aaron that night to cheer when he hit a 4th inning pitch off the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Al Downing. However, as Aaron was an African American who had received death threats and racist hate mail during his pursuit of one of baseball’s most distinguished records, the achievement was bittersweet.

Henry Louis Aaron Jr., born in Mobile, Alabama, on February 5, 1934, made his Major League debut in 1954 with the Milwaukee Braves, just seven years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier and became the first African American to play in the majors. Aaron, known as hard working and quiet, was the last Negro league player to also compete in the Major Leagues. In 1957, with characteristically little fanfare, Aaron, who primarily played right field, was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player as the Milwaukee Braves won the pennant. A few weeks later, his three home runs in the World Series helped his team triumph over the heavily favored New York Yankees. Although “Hammerin’ Hank” specialized in home runs, he was also an extremely dependable batter, and by the end of his career he held baseball’s career record for most runs batted in: 2,297.

Aaron spent his 23-year big league career with two organizations. He was with the Braves from 1954 to 1974—first in Milwaukee and then in Atlanta, when the franchise moved in 1966—and closed it out with two seasons back in Milwaukee for the Brewers. 

Aaron hung up his cleats in 1976 with 755 career home runs—a record that stood until 2007, when it was broken by controversial slugger Barry Bonds (Bonds admitted to using steroids in 2011). Aaron’s achievements didn’t end when his career did, though. He went on to become one of baseball’s first African American executives, with the Atlanta Braves, and a leading spokesperson for minority hiring. Hank Aaron was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982.

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Yogi Berra is the AL MVP

Year
1951
Month Day
November 08

On November 8, 1951, Yankees catcher Yogi Berra (1925-2015) is voted the American League’s most valuable player for the first time in his career. St. Louis Browns’ ace pitcher and slugger Ned Garver almost won the award—in fact, a representative from the Baseball Writers Association of America phoned him and told him that he had won it—but after a recount it turned out that Berra had edged Garver out by a nose. “It’s great to be classed with fellows like DiMaggio and Rizzuto who have won the award,” Berra told reporters that night. “I sure hope I can win it a couple of more times, like Joe did.” He went on to be the league MVP twice more, in 1954 and 1955.

Berra had had a great season, for the most part—he’d been the Yanks’ leading slugger, with 27 homers and 88 RBI—but he’d had a dramatic slump near the end of the year. His teammate Allie Reynolds, meanwhile, had pitched two no-hitters in 1951, and Garver had won 20 games and batted .305 for the Browns, a “collection of old rags and tags” that had only managed to win 32 games that Garver wasn’t pitching. In the face of these performances, Berra was sure he wouldn’t win the award. “I was afraid I had blown it with the bad finish,” he said.

In fact, it was one of the closest MVP races ever. Each member of the baseball writers’ association voted by naming the league’s 10 best players and then ranking them. A first-place vote got a player 14 points; second place was worth nine, third place eight, and so on. When the votes were tallied, the player with the most points overall won the MVP. Berra, Garver and Reynolds actually had the same number of first-place votes—six each—but Yogi squeaked by on his second-, third- and fourth-place points. (His final score was 187; Garver’s was 157; and Reynolds’ was 125.)

Berra was only the second catcher to win the AL MVP prize. (Mickey Cochrane was the first.) That same year, another catcher—Roy Campanella of the Dodgers—was the NL MVP.

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New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle dies

Year
1995
Month Day
August 13

Former New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle dies of liver cancer at the age of 63. While “The Mick” patrolled center field and batted clean-up between 1951 and 1968, the Yankees won 12 American League pennants and seven World Series championships.

Mantle was born in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, on October 20, 1931. He grew up in nearby Commerce, and played baseball and football as a youth. With the help of his father, Mutt, and grandfather, Charlie, Mantle developed into a switch-hitter. Mutt pitched to Mantle right-handed and Charlie pitched to him left-handed every day after school. With the family’s tin barn as a backstop, Mantle perfected his swing, which his father helped model so it would be identical from either side of the plate. Mantle had natural speed and athleticism and gained strength working summers with his father in Oklahoma’s lead mines. “The Commerce Comet” eventually won a scholarship to play football for the University of Oklahoma. However, baseball was Mantle’s first love, so when the New York Yankees came calling, Mantle moved to the big city.

Mantle made his debut for the Yankees in 1951 at age 19, playing right field alongside aging center fielder Joe DiMaggio. That year, in Game 2 of the World Series, Willie Mays of the New York Giants hit a pop fly to short center, and Mantle sprinted toward the ball. DiMaggio called him off, and while slowing down, Mantle’s right shoe caught the rubber cover of a sprinkler head. “There was a sound like a tire blowing out, and my right knee collapsed,” Mantle remembered in his memoir, All My Octobers. Mantle returned the next season, but by then his blazing speed had begun to deteriorate, and he ran the bases with a limp for the rest of his career.

Still, Mantle dominated the American League for more than a decade. In 1956, he won the Triple Crown, leading his league in batting average, home runs and runs batted in. His output was so great that he led both leagues in 1956, hitting .353 with 52 home runs and 130 runs batted in. He was also voted American League MVP that year, and again in 1957 and 1962. After years of brilliance, Mantle’s career began to decline by 1967, and he was forced to move to first base. The next season would be his last. Mantle was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974 in his first year of eligibility.

Mantle’s father and son both died in their 30s, the result of Hodgkin’s disease. Mantle was sure the same fate would befall him, and joked he would have taken better care of himself if he knew he would live. In 1994, after years of alcoholism, Mantle was diagnosed with liver cancer, and urged his fans to take care of their health, saying “Don’t be like me.” Although he received a liver transplant, by then the cancer had spread to his lungs, and he died at just after 2 a.m. on August 13, 1995, at the Baylor University Cancer Center in Dallas.

At the time of his death Mantle held many of the records for World Series play, including most home runs (18), most RBIs (40) and most runs (42).

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Willie Mays breaks National League home run record

Year
1965
Month Day
May 04

On May 4, 1965, San Francisco Giants outfielder Willie Mays hits his 512th career home run to break Mel Ott’s National League record for home runs. Mays would finish his career with 660 home runs, good for third on the all-time list at the time of his retirement.

Willie Howard Mays was born May 6, 1931, in Westfield, Alabama. The “Say Hey Kid” learned baseball from his father, who played semi-professionally with a team from his steel mill. Willie joined the steel mill team at age 14, and then began his professional career at 16 with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Southern League. He played home games for the Barons from 1948 to 1950, skipping road trips during the school year so he could attend high school. Upon graduation he was signed by the New York Giants, and made his debut at the Polo Grounds on May 25, 1951. Mays went hitless in his first 12 at-bats, hitting his first big league homer in his 13th. That season, he was named Rookie of the Year and helped the Giants to the National League pennant.

In 1952, Mays was drafted into the Army. The Mays-less Giants barely missed the pennant in 1952, then felt his absence more acutely in 1953, when they finished the season with a 70-84 record. Upon his return in 1954, the Giants defeated the Cleveland Indians to win the World Series, during which Mays made what many fans consider to be the greatest catch in history. In Game 1, Indian first baseman Vic Wertz hit a fly ball to deep center field. Mays turned and ran, then caught the ball over his shoulder with his back to the infield, spinning and firing the ball back into the infield to keep the runners from advancing. When he was later asked about the play, Mays famously replied, “I don’t rank ‘em, I just catch ‘em.”

After more than 20 years with the Giants, first in New York and then in San Francisco (the team relocated), Mays was acquired by the New York Mets on May 11, 1972. He spent the next two seasons as a Met under former Yankee catcher Yogi Berra as manager. The team won the National League pennant in 1973, though by then, Mays’ skills had eroded, and he could not catch up to the fastballs he once deposited into bleachers on both coasts.

In addition to winning the National League MVP in 1954 and 1965, Mays played in 24 All-Star games, winning the All-Star MVP in 1963 and 1968. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. His base running, power, fielding, ability to hit for average and outstanding arm in the outfield made him the prototype “five-tool” player for whom baseball scouts search. Any argument over who deserves the title “greatest baseball player in history” has to include Willie Mays.

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A miraculous home run wins the pennant for NY Giants

Year
1951
Month Day
October 03

On October 3, 1951, third baseman Bobby Thomson hits a one-out, three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the National League pennant for the New York Giants. Thomson’s homer wrapped up an amazing come-from-behind run for the Giants and knocked the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Giants’ hated inter-borough rivals, out of their spot in the World Series. The Giants went on to lose the Series to the Yankees, but Thomson’s miraculous homer remains one of the most memorable moments in sports history.

The Giants weren’t even supposed to be in the pennant race–they were 13 1/2 games behind the legendary Dodgers by the middle of August, and everyone thought they were finished. But then they won 16 games in a row. By October, they’d won 37 of their last 44 games and had tied Brooklyn for the lead. It was time for a playoff.

New York won the first game; in the second, the Dodgers crushed them 10-0. The third game, before 34,320 people at the Polo Grounds in Washington Heights, was crucial, and by the ninth inning, it seemed like a lost cause. The Dodgers were winning 4-1. People in the stands were gathering their belongings and heading for the subway. But then the Giants came to life. Al Dark and Don Mueller hit respectable singles to right field. Then, after a Monte Irvin pop-up, Whitey Lockman doubled to left and sent Dark safely home. Now the score was 4-2, with runners on second and third.

While Bobby Thomson waited to bat, the Dodgers sent in relief pitcher Ralph Branca. Thomson was a reliable hitter, and since first base was open and the new rookie Willie Mays waited on deck, many thought that Branca would throw a deliberate walk. He didn’t. The first pitch was a called strike. Thomson drilled the second into the left-field stands.

“The Giants win the pennant!” radio announcer Russ Hodges howled. “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” He kept screaming until he lost his voice. Meanwhile, inside the Polo Grounds, pandemonium reigned. Fans flooded the field. Thomson took curtain call after curtain call. People in Manhattan and Brooklyn made so many phone calls in the half-hour after Thomson’s homer that New York Telephone nearly lost service in the two boroughs.

The next day, the momentum continued: The Giants beat the Yankees 5-1 in the first game of the World Series. Then the Yanks came back, winning the next three games and the series. In 1954 the underdog Giants swept the World Series in four straight games, thanks in part to Willie Mays’ stupendous first-game over-the-shoulder catch in center field. But by the end of the 1950s, both the Giants and the Dodgers had moved to California, and an incredible era in New York baseball history was over.

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Ted Williams hits home run in last major league at-bat

Year
1960
Month Day
September 28

On September 28, 1960, at Boston’s Fenway Park, Red Sox star Ted Williams hits a home run in the last at-bat of his 21-year career.

Ted Williams once said it was his goal in life to “walk down the street [and have] folks say ‘there goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’” He succeeded. Williams led the American League in batting average six times, home runs four times and runs batted in four times. He was one of only two men ever to win baseball’s Triple Crown twice, leading the league in home runs, runs batted in and batting average in 1942 and again in 1947. Perhaps most impressively, however, he hit .406 in 1941 (also on September 28)–he was the last man ever to hit .400. He accomplished more than that, missing three seasons to fly combat missions in the Navy during World War II and parts of two more as a Marine during the Korean War, again to fly, this time with John Glenn as his wingman. Williams would later mold himself into a world-class fly fisherman, widely respected and accomplished with the reel.

In spite of his brilliance at the plate, Williams had a tempestuous relationship with Red Sox fans and the media; to his frustration, his every move, both on and off the field, was reported in the newspapers. After being booed by the Fenway faithful early in his career, he swore never to tip his cap to the Boston fans again. In spite of the many spectacular home runs and clutch hits in his career, he never did.

After he hit .254 with a bad back in 1959, Red Sox management urged Williams to retire. Too proud to hang it up after a less-than-stellar season, he returned in 1960 at 42 years old and hit .316 for the year with 29 home runs. In the eighth inning of his final game at Fenway, played in front of a nearly empty house, Williams pulled a 1-1 pitch from Baltimore Oriole Jack Fisher into the Boston bullpen. After rounding the bases, he once again stubbornly refused to take off his hat to acknowledge his cheering fans.

John Updike memorialized Williams’ career by telling the story of his last at-bat in the short story “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” published October 22, 1960 in The New Yorker.

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Brooklyn Dodgers win their first World Series

Year
1955
Month Day
October 04

On October 4, 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers win the World Series at last, beating the New York Yankees 2-0. They’d lost the championship seven times already, and they’d lost five times just to the Yanks—in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953. But in 1955, thanks to nine brilliant innings in the seventh game from 23-year-old lefty pitcher Johnny Podres, they finally managed to beat the Bombers for the first (and last) time.

The Dodgers had lost the first two games of the series at Yankee Stadium–it was the first time in history, in fact, that a team came back to win a seven-game World Series after losing the first two–and then won three in a row at home. The Yanks came back in the sixth, forcing a tiebreaking Game 7 in front of 62,465 fans in the Bronx.

In the fourth inning of the last game, Brooklyn got its first run when catcher Roy Campanella hit a double and Gil Hodges sent him home with a well-placed single. In the sixth, a Yankee error helped the Dodgers load the bases. Even though veteran pitcher Tommy Byrne had only given up three hits, manager Casey Stengel pulled him and sent in right-handed reliever Bob Grim—but that didn’t stop Hodges from knocking a long sacrifice fly to center field. Pee Wee Reese made it safely home, and the Dodgers were winning by 2.

And then, the game’s defining moment. At the bottom of the sixth, Podres walked Billy Martin and Gil McDougald outran a bunt to first, putting two on with nobody out. Then Yogi Berra sliced an outside pitch hard down the left-field foul line–a game-tying double, for sure, until backup outfielder Sandy Amoros came running out of nowhere, stuck out his glove and snagged the ball as he careened toward the stands. He wheeled and threw to shortstop Reese, who tossed it to Hodges at first, who caught McDougald off the bag by inches. The Yanks’ sure thing had soured into a game-killing double play.

The final triumphant out came on an Elston Howard grounder to Reese, the 38-year-old team captain who’d been around for all five of the Dodgers’ losses to their cross-town rivals. Reese scooped up the ball and fired low and wide to first, but somehow–as John Drebinger wrote in the Times the next day, “Gil would have stretched halfway across the Bronx for that one”–Hodges grabbed it in time to send Howard back to the dugout and end the game.

The 1955 series turned out to be the only one the Brooklyn Dodgers would ever win. They lost to the Yanks again the next year. The year after that, the team’s owner decided he’d rather play in a swank stadium in a nicer neighborhood, so he moved the team to California. The Los Angeles Dodgers have won the championship five times.

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