60 YEARS AGO/26: NOT THE WAY TO SPELL RELIEF...

Strange things crop up in every baseball season...just ask Jayson Stark, the man attuned to the game's at-the-ground-level anomalies. (Jayson is already all over the potential extremity of the 2022 Reds, and we're guessing that there is enough grist there for him to grind away until the end of the season.)

Colt Stadium, dwarfed by the "eighth wonder of the world" that soon replaced it.

But we're here to talk about 1962, actually, so enough of the present-day. On Monday, May 7, 1962, the Giants had the day off, while the Dodgers--just rained out in Pittsburgh--traveled to Houston to play their first regular season game against an expansion team.

It wasn't an ordinary game, and it was definitely unusual in terms of the results produced in the Colt .45's (later, of course, the Astros) ballpark--Colt Stadium (it would be three more years before the Astrodome would open). This was a makeshift ballpark constructed as a stopgap facility, and it quickly became known as a deadly place to be on a summer afternoon (and often just as much on a summer night, which came to include Sundays in order to keep the players from collapsing from heat stroke).

And the park was so jackleg in its looks that the best way--or, rather, the only way--to see it without testing one's gag reflex was to see it at night. 

The dimensions of the park were spacious (427' to dead center, 400' to the power alleys, 345' down the lines) and it won't be surprising when you examine the 1962 ballpark data (the sum of the stats compiled by home teams and their opponents in the 19 stadia in use for the '62 season) that Colt Stadium is the lowest scoring ballpark in the NL by a wide margin (and only a bit better than the AL's pitching park, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore).

Parks with the highest total in any stat have that highlighted in orange; parks with the lowest are highlighted in yellow. As you can see, Colt Stadium had one thing going for it: triples. (But let's not get sidetracked on that...)

No, we were talking about strangeness, and in the context of the 1962 duel between the Dodgers and Giants, that quality is located in the number of high-scoring games that the Dodgers played against the first-year Colt .45s when those games were occurring in two of the most pitcher-friendly parks in baseball.

And that's where we came in with the "no way to spell relief" teaser. Even with the extra day of rest for pitchers afforded him by the rainout, Dodger skipper Walt Alston decided to send "teenage monster" Joe Moeller to the mound (hey, it's an expansion team--who cares if they're actually playing close to .500 unlike their counterparts in New York?).

And so the teenage monster turned into a monstrosity again, going full "wild thing" (sorry, getting ahead of ourselves again...) in the second inning, but also victimized by some bad relief pitching from the usually reliable Ron Perranoski. 

To be fair to Ron, he himself was victimized by his third baseman, Daryl Spencer, who booted a grounder to the second batter Perranoski faced in relief (the first, alas, was a bases-loaded walk). By inning's end, Ron had allowed all three of Moeller's inherited runners to score, and had given up one of his own to boot. Houston led, 5-0, after two.

(But this also points up a dramatic difference in strategy that existed in the '60s that is rarely employed today--bringing in a top reliever early in the game to try to choke off a rally. When Alston brought in Perranoski--in the second inning, mind you--the score was only 1-0 Houston. The idea, of course, was to nip the rally in the bud. The idea and the reality...ahem...diverged.)

No truth to the rumor that Bob Aspromonte was descended
from the Flatheads (obligatory L. Frank Baum reference...)

But we're not through, yet--no, no, not at all. It's only the top of the third, remember. The Dodgers began chipping away at that five-run lead, scoring single runs in the third, fourth, and fifth innings (what the baseball insiders of the day termed "building a picket fence"). In the sixth, they knocked out Colts starter Dave Giusti and plated three more runs, going ahead 6-5 on the still-unsinkable Doug Camilli's RBI single. (Camilli wound up 3-for-3 on the evening, and was hitting .800 for the season--of course, it was all downhill from there).

And with a 6-5 lead, it was all downhill for the Dodgers as well--Alston brought in another rookie to pitch: lefty Pete Richert. ("Steady Eddie" Roebuck had just completed four innings of scoreless relief.) Pete had fanned six batters in a row in his debut for the Dodgers back in April, but he'd been struggling since then--and that's exactly what happened to him in the seventh, when he gave up a walk to former Dodger Norm Larker, a fly ball single to Hal Smith that some thought Tommy Davis should've caught. 

And then, another former Dodger, third baseman Bob Aspromonte. Richert fell behind 3-1, and Aspromonte hit a sharp line drive to left on the next pitch that kept carrying--and carrying. It carried all the way into the left-field bleachers for a three-run homer. The Colts were back on top, 8-6. 

The Dodgers were now being baffled by the knuckleball antics of Bobby Tiefenauer (a situation that would reverse itself the next evening--but that wasn't helping them salvage this game). Colts manager Harry Craft sent minor league outfielder Johnny Weekly up to bat for Al Spangler in the eighth: Weekly had been buried in the Giants organization behind a boatload of outfielders, but still wouldn't get much of a chance with the Astros. However, Richert was still in there and he grooved another one--and Weekly did not hit it weakly. (The despondent Richert was quoted afterwards: "I didn't think the ball would ever come back to earth.")

In the top of the ninth, Camilli kept hitting (a double) but Tiefenauer "bobbed" and weaved his way through the bottom end of the Dodger batting order to close things out and earn his first big-league win since 1955. It was the second highest total of combined runs scored in Colt Stadium during the 1962 season--a number that, even more improbably, the two teams would match on the very next night. 

The Colts would prove to be tricky opponents for the Dodgers, and given how razor-thin the pennant race got in the final days of the season, it wouldn't be surprising if a game like this one happened to crop up in the memories of players and fans alike. Final score: Colt .45s 9, Dodgers 6.

SEASON RECORDS: SFG 20-6, LAD 15-11