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| Topps got his name wrong on this 1956 baseball card, but Washington Senators reserve catcher Ed Fitz Gerald made a name for himself when he broke up Billy Pierce's bid for a perfect game June 27, 1958, with a two-out double. It was Fitz Gerald's first extra-base hit of the year. |
By Phil Ellenbecker
Billy Pierce entered the night of June 27, 1958, already having compiled an impressive dossier of pitching for the Chicago White Sox during the 1950s. He'd won 20 games the previous two years, 18 another; four times an American League All-Star, three times a starter, two times The Sporting News' American League Pitcher of the Year; led the league in wins, ERA and strikeouts one time each and three times leader in complete games.
And he'd thrown a pair of one-hitters. On this night, before 11,300 at Comiskey Park, he nearly put a cherry on top of everything he'd done previously.
With two out in the top of the ninth inning, Pierce was working on a perfect game, bidding to become the first left-hander in major league history in the modern era to achieve perfection, and the first to throw a perfect game in the regular season since fellow White Sock Charlie Robertson in 1922.
But Ed Fitz Gerald, who managed a middling 12-year career as a reserve catcher with a .260 lifetime batting average, managed immortality of sorts when he stroked a first-pitch opposite-field double to right. He was batting for pitcher Russ Kemmerer, only the second substitution in the game. It was Fitz Gerald's 10th hit of the season.
(Fitz Gerald was not unfamiliar with rising to the occasion. In fact, he had grown accustomed to heroism on a larger scale when he was responsible for single-handedly capturing two German soldiers on the Rhine during World War II.)
“The book on Fitz Gerald was that he was a fastball hitter on the first ball and liked it inside where he could pull it," Pierce told sports writer Bill Madden in 1982. "So we threw him a curve away and he hit it into right field for a solid hit. . . . I didn’t feel that badly about it, really. It didn’t mean much at the moment. But now . . . well, now I wish I had got it. It would have been nice.” After Pierce struck out Albie Pearson on three pitches to close the game for his third straight shutout, he had to settle for yet another one-hitter as the White Sox won 3-0. He pitched another one-hitter next year.
The performance perhaps typifies Pierce, at 5-foot-11, 160 pounds a power pitcher who had a great career but came up a bit short of perhaps moving into Hall of Fame standards.
But he was Hall of Fame material this night. He had the Senators continually beating the ball into the turf with 12 ground-ball outs while racking up nine strikeouts as he improved to 7-5 on the season in a contest that lasted 1 hour, 46 minutes. He went to a three-ball count on only two batters and allowed six balls to be hit out of the infield. He retired the Senators on just nine pitches in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth.
There were some close calls. With one out in the fourth inning, Rocky Bridges sent a liner down the right-field line that was foul by a foot. Bridges then hit a bouncer up the middle that Gold Glove winner Luis Aparicio flagged down from his shortstop position behind second. He spun and then "wheeled like the top of a swivel chair, his feet rooted to the ground" to throw out Bridges, as writer Bob Addie described it in the next morning's Washington Post.
At the start of the sixth, third baseman Billy Goodman had to glove on a short-hop a hard shot by Ken Aspromonte but easily retired him. Aspromonte threatened again in the ninth when he sent a dart toward second leading off the inning, but it was Little Louie to the rescue again as he speared the ball and threw to Ray Boone at first for the first out. Ken Korcheck struck out. One out from history. Then Fitz Gerald spoiled it, as he "sliced the first pitch down the right-field foul line, fair by anywhere from a foot to five feet," wrote Jim Bigham in the Society for American Baseball Research's Game Project account. "(The distance becomes shorter with each passing year.)" Bigham added. Comiskey anguish followed. From a 2009 article on the game in the Chicago Reader by Steve Bogira: "The crowd 'let out a dismal wail of the doomed,' " Addie would write in his Washington Post account. "Fitz Gerald, standing on second with his first extra-base hit of the season, was booed lustily. Though 'a kindly, family man,' Fitz Gerald' will be remembered in Chicago with such All-Star villains as Hitler, Benedict Arnold, Rasputin and the income tax collector,' Addie predicted."
While Pierce was mowing 'em down, Kemmerer was matching him nearly goose egg for goose egg, and for most of the night it was a taut pitcher's duel. Kemmerer retired 12 of 14 batters in the fourth through seventh innings. But Chicago pushed across two runs in typical "Go-Go Sox" fashion in the eighth to give Pierce a 3-0 cushion and set the stage for ninth-inning drama.
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| Jim Landis, more known for flashing the leather as a five-time Gold Glove winning outfielder, was a hitting star for the Chicago White Sox on the night of June 27, 1958, in support of Billy Pierce's bid for a perfect game. He went 3-for-4, singled in the game's first run and scored the first in a two-run eighth inning in a 3-0 Chisox win. |
Boone struck out, but Landis and Esposito then pulled a double steal, and both scored when Sherman Lollar singled to left.
(The White Sox, led by nine-time base-stealing champion Aparicio, earned their "Go-Go" nickname by leading the AL in thefts every year from 1951 through 1961, with Aparicio copping the individual crown six times in that span).
Lollar's two-run single was more than enough with Pierce on cruise control.
Pierce gave himself enough when he scored the game's first run in the third. A lifetime .183 hitter, he led off with a double to left-center, and Landis followed with a single to left-center that chased Pierce across home plate.
Kemmerer finished with an eight-hitter with three strikeouts and one walk as he fell to 4-6. For the year he finished 6-15 with a 4.61 ERA. He went 43-59, 4.41 ERA in a nine-year career.
Pierce went on to post a 17-11 record in 1958, second-most wins in the league, with a 2.68 ERA, also runner-up.
The White Sox were in fifth place after the games of June 27 with a 31-34-1 record, 11 1/2 behind the New York Yankees. (The Kansas City Athletics were surprisingly in second, 8 1/2 back). The Senators were eighth in the eight-team AL at 28-38-2, 15 games back.
The White Sox leapfrogged Boston, Detroit and Kansas City to land in second in the final AL standings, still 10 back of New York. (The A's plummeted to seventh at 73-81, 19 behind). The Nats (first in war, first in peace, last in the American League) stayed in the cellar with a final 61-93 ledger, trailing by 31 games.
Chicago finished runner-up for the second straight season after five straight third-place finishes. The Chisox scaled the summit the next year, knocking the Yankees out of their pennant perch for the first time in five years and only the second time in the 1950s. Chicago lost 4-2 to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series after winning its first pennant since the infamous "Black Sox" team of 1919 that included eight players accused of throwing the World Series it lost to Cincinnati.
Pierce began somewhat of a decline in 1959 as he went 14-15 with a 3.62 ERA and didn't even get a start in the World Series. But after averaging 13 wins a year his final four seasons in Chicago, he redeemed himself after a trade to San Fransciso with a 16-6, 3.90 season in 1962. He also had an 8-0 shutout of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Sandy Koufax in the opening game of an NL tiebreaker playoff, and a 1-2-3 ninth gave him the save in a 6-4 series-clinching victory. He then went 1-1 with a 2.40 ERA in two World Series starts. His 5-2 Game 6 win gave the Giants a shot at the title, but they fell short in a 1-0 Game 7 loss.
Pierce had a 1.44 ERA in the postseason, but he didn't need a Frisco reprieve to salvage a career. He'd done too much over 13 years in Chitown. Pierce tops the franchise’s all-time list with 1,796 strikeouts and his 186 wins are fourth behind Hall of Famers Ted Lyons (260), Red Faber (254) and Ed Walsh (195). The White Sox retired his number 19 in 1987. He was the American League’s winningest southpaw in the 1950s.
Pierce retired in 1964 after three seasons in San Francisco. In his 18-year big league career with the Detroit Tigers, White Sox and Giants he had a 211-169 record, 1,999 strikeouts, 193 complete games, 38 shutouts and a 3.27 ERA. He has appeared on the Golden Era veterans committee ballot for consideration in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
While he wasn't quite at the elite level that guarantees automatic Hall entry, on June 27, 1978, he was about as elite, or perfect, as you can be on the pitcher's mound. The little lefty was King of the Hill, Ed Fitz Gerald or not.
Other no-hit bids
Here's how Pierce fared in his other one-hitters:
-- June 15, 1950, vs. the Yankees: Billy Johnson led off the fifth with a single in a 5-0 win.
-- April 16, 1953, vs. the Browns: Two-out double by Bobby Young in a 1-0 win.
-- March 1, 1959, vs. the Senators: Leadoff double by Ron Samford in the third inning of a 3-1 win.
More White Sox perfection
While Pierce came up short, almost 51 years to the date later, Mark Buehrle pitched the second perfect game in White Sox history, on June 23, 2009. Philip Humber added another for the Sox on April 21, 2012. The three perfect games ties the New York Yankees for the most by a team in major league history.
When White Sox center fielder Dewayne Wise tracked down a fly ball in left-center for the final out in Buehrle's perfecto, he was staring Pierce in the face. Along the wall at U.S. Cellular Park (Comiskey had been torn down in 1991 and turned into a parking area) were portraits of the eight White Sox players whose numbers had been retired, including, second from right, Pierce. That's where Wise caught it.
Wrote Bogira, " 'Lookit, he caught it right on your head!' screamed Pierce's wife, Gloria, in the living room of the Pierces' home in southwest-suburban Lemont."
Skipper to some deja vu
The guy who sent Fitz Gerald up to hit, Senators manager Cookie Lavagetto, had come through with a similarly dramatic, climactic hit 21 years earlier, in the 1947 World Series for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
With two out in the bottom of the ninth in Game 4 and the New York Yankees' Bill Bevens one out away from the first Series no-hitter in history, Lavagetto pinch hit for Eddie Stanky and delivered -- just like Fitzgerald -- an opposite-field double to the right-field corner. But this hit not only broke up a no-hitter, it won the game, courtesy the two walks Bevens dealt earlier in the inning (he had 10 in the game) that led to the tying and winning runs crossing the plate for the Dodgers on Lavagetto's two-bagger.
Lavagetto went 0-for-4 in the final three games of the Series as the Yankees prevailed 4-3. And that was it for Lavagetto's 10-year big league career.
As for Bevens, he somewhat redeemed himself with 2 2/3 innings of scoreless relief (one walk) in the Yanks' 5-2 Game 7 win. And that was it for Bevens' four-year major league career.
Sources:
Game play-by-play: https://www.
Biographical information on Pierce: https://sabr.org/
Biographical information on Fitz Gerald: http://www.
Perfect game info: https://en.wikipedia.
Ballpark info: https://www.
Additional background came from various sources on the Retrosheet and SABR Biography Project sites, as well as baseballreference.com.
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