Red Sox in 5s and 10s by Bill Nowlin

Author:Bill Nowlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Earl Webb still holds the major-league single-season record for two-base hits. Leslie Jones photograph, Boston Public Library.

Webb hit 16 more in May, including one remarkable stretch when he hit 6 in two days (one of which was a doubleheader). From May 28 through June 5, however, he doubled only once in nine games. By the end of July, his doubling was being noted in newspaper headlines. But in August, he hit a stretch where, for fourteen games in a row, he didn’t double at all. He hit only 6 doubles in the whole month of August. That didn’t seem like anything special. They still accumulated, though, and on the morning of September 17 (his thirty-fourth birthday), he was at 63, 1 shy of the record. The Indians were in Boston for a doubleheader. Webb doubled once in the first game and once in the second game, tying and breaking the record. In his nine final games, he doubled just twice more.

TRIPLES

As far as three-baggers go, here is the single-season ranking for Red Sox batters. Tris Speaker hit 22 triples in 1913. Ten years earlier, Buck Freeman had led the team with 20, in the pennant-winning year of 1903. It was one more than he’d hit the year before. There are four players tied with 19 triples apiece: Buck Freeman in 1902, both Freeman and Chick Stahl in 1904, and Larry Gardner in 1914.

Note the years. For more than one hundred years, no one has hit that many triples for any Red Sox team. Had tripling gone out of fashion? Some suggest that Earl Webb padded his doubles record by stopping at second base at times when he could have tripled. (He hit 6 triples in 1930 and 9 in 1932, but only 3 in 1931). But that’s perhaps neither here nor there. It’s safe to assume no one ever held up to secure a triple when they had a shot at an inside-the-park home run.

Working backward, there are recent seasons, such as 2006, when no one on the team hit more than 2 triples. The most recent time any Sox player banged out more than a dozen was 2003, when Nomar Garciaparra hit a baker’s dozen (13). In 1978, Jim Rice hit 15.

SACRIFICE FLIES

The king of sacrifice flies for the Red Sox is either Jackie Jensen or Carl Yastrzemski. It depends on whether you’re talking a single season or a career. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Yaz holds the team record for most sacrifice flies in a career. He had 105 of them. But given how many years he played, that’s really only 4.6 per year.

Sac flies were apparently not a big feature of the Red Sox attack. Among the single-season leaders, the top thirty-nine American League batters are all non–Red Sox players. The most that any player had in a season was 17 (Bobby Bonilla and Roy White). For the Red Sox, though, the highest number any player hit in a year was Jackie Jensen (12). He did this twice, once in 1955 and again in 1959.

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