Tommy Davis hit the century mark in RBI with four more for LA. Tommy would reach the fabled number of 153--kind of a talismanic number in the formless minds of some, given its inversion of the core group of odd numbers. Odder still is the fact that Tommy had the highest RBI season ever for a player who never drove in 100 runs ever again during his career. (It's also likely that the gap between his best RBI year and his second best RBI year--64--is the highest in baseball history--but we haven't verified that for you. Fact-checkers, get busy!)
Stan Williams continued to bend, not break in July, and recovered from a shaky first inning to pitch solidly before going wild in the eighth. Ed Roebuck bailed him out. Final score: Dodgers 8, Cubs 2.
OVER in Pittsburgh, the Giants locked horns with the Pirates just as the 1960 World Champs were peaking, having won 30 of their last 40 games despite a rag-tag offense. Soon to become known as a team dominated by its batters, the Pirates in the early 60s were developing a second tier of highly promising pitchers to complement their "big three" of Bob Friend, Vern Law and Harvey Haddix. Three pitchers in particular--lefty Joe Gibbon and righties Earl Francis and Al McBean--seemed to have the right stuff to give the Bucs one of the deepest rotations around. And so they did--for 45 days in the late spring/early summer of 1962, when the Pirates found a soft seam in the schedule and soared up to meet the top two teams in the NL.
Gibbon, the most promising of the three newcomers, hurt his arm in 1962 during spring training and tried to pitch through it, causing him to miss much of the year and suffer a career plateau that forced him into the bullpen, where he would turn in a creditable career. Francis would sustain an arm injury early in 1963 that caused him to alter his motion and sent his career into a slow but irrevocable tailspin. McBean would quickly demonstrate that the rigors of starting pitching would periodically deplete him, leaving him vulnerable to an uncomfortably high percentage of games where he was just too hittable. He'd be moved to the bullpen in 1963, where he'd fashion a highly successful career over the next five years (38-19, 138 ERA+) before suddenly fading out once he turned thirty.
In a future post, we'll show you what happened to these guys (and to the other members of the pitching staff) as the Pirates returned to playing the better teams in the league.
On this night at Forbes Field, the Giants polished off Vern Law via the long ball--homers from Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, and built a 4-0 lead after three innings. Jack Sanford was not pitching all that well for SF, however, putting too many men on base, surviving thanks to two double plays turned behind him and poor hitting with RISP by the Pirates. Don Larsen would bail him out in the seventh, preventing the tying run from coming across the plate.
In the eighth, Dr. Strangeglove (the enigmatic, inimitable Dick Stuart) made his 16th error of the year at first base, which led to two unearned runs for the Giants. Stuart's off-year (.228, 16 HRs after hitting 35 the year before) and his ongoing defensive antics would soon cause him to be benched during the Pirates' upcoming "fall from grace" and he'd be traded to the Red Sox over the off-season, where he'd make even more errors at first, but at least hit more homers. Final score: Giants 6, Pirates 3.
SEASON RECORDS: LA 64-34, SFG 63-35, PIT 59-36
