September 28, 1960

 In the bottom of the eighth inning, with Boston trailing Baltimore 4-2, Ted Williams cracks a home run off Jack Fisher into the Fenway bleachers in the final at bat of his career.  Williams circled the bases with his head down, neither tipping his cap nor acknowledging the crowd, and did not come out of the dugout for a curtain call.  (“Gods do not answer letters,” wrote John Updike in his account of the game for The New Yorker whose title is quoted in the headline here.)  Carroll Hardy replaced Williams in left field for the top of the ninth. 

A few random facts about this game:

·         The attendance of 10,454 was about one-third of Fenway Park’s capacity, a not-unusual crowd for a midweek game featuring two teams eliminated from the pennant race. 

·         Though it was known to be Williams’s last game, it was not Boston’s last of the season; he had already decided not to make the final three-game road trip to New York. 

·         Williams’s OPS in his last year was 1.096 in 390 plate appearances; that would have been good enough to lead the American League in thirty-one of the next thirty-three seasons. 

·         It may not have been the most significant home run allowed by Jack Fisher; two days shy of a year later, Fisher gave up Roger Maris’s 60^th homer, the one that tied Babe Ruth’s single-season record. 

·         Carroll Hardy, a week before this game, became the only man ever to pinch-hit for Ted Williams; Williams fouled a pitch off his own instep in his first at bat, limped to the clubhouse, and Hardy took his place.  The next year, Hardy pinch-hit three times for Carl Yastrzemski.  Hardy also played in the NFL, catching four touchdown passes from Y.A. Tittle, and hit his first major-league home run as a pinch-hitter for Roger Maris in 1958.