[洋基] Nothing Doing
Nothing Doing
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/07/07/080707ta_talk_angell
by Roger Angell
The New Yorker
July 7, 2008
With the Yankees’ pitching in a perpetual flummox and the distraction of a
home All-Star Game looming into view in the last summer of baseball up at the
Stadium, this is a good time to bring up a vivid, semi-obscure Yankee team
record that almost rivals those fabled thirty-nine pennants and twenty-six
World Championships. Telling it only takes a minute. On Sunday, August 2,
1931, the Yanks were shut out on the road by the Red Sox, 1–0, in a game
played, mysteriously, at Braves Field, the home of Boston’s National League
club in those days. The Yanks were not shut out again, away or at home, until
August 3, 1933, a span of three hundred and eight games, or, as measured back
then, exactly two seasons. Zeroes are baseball’s most insistent number, but
no other major-league team has come anywhere close to this astounding skein.
The parallel record in the National League, for instance, is the Cincinnati
Reds’ two hundred and eight games not-shut-out, between April 3, 2000, and
May 23, 2001. Last year’s Yankees were shut down eight times, while last year
’s Twins were goose-egged fourteen times.
The statistically minded might suppose that the endless connivings of chance
played a role in the Yankees’ great run, but any eleven-year-old interested
enough to punch up the 1931-33 Yanks on his bedroom iMac would know better
the moment he saw that their starting lineup in those days included six
regulars subsequently voted into the Hall of Fame: catcher Bill Dickey, first
baseman Lou Gehrig, shortstop Tony Lazzeri, third baseman Joe Sewell, and
outfielders Earle Combs and Babe Ruth (who was nearing the end of his
career). There were also three future Hall of Fame pitchers on the Yankee
roster—Herb Pennock, Red Ruffing, and Lefty Gomez—although, with one
exception, the Yankee pitchers didn’t play much of a part in avoiding
shutouts. The exception is Ruffing, who, on August 13, 1932, blanked the
Washington Senators over a scoreless nine innings—scoreless for both teams—
in their home park, Griffith Stadium.
Allowed to bat again in the tenth (he was good enough at the plate to be
called on regularly as a pinch-hitter), Ruffing hit a solo home run, and then
closed out the Senators in the bottom half, to preserve the win and the
string. Ruffing, the Yankees’ ace, had slitted eyes and high cheekbones, and
held further interest for every New York boy fan of that time because he’d
lost four toes on his left foot in a mining accident, back home in Illinois,
at the age of fifteen. Now he had accounted for both scores in the same game.
No other pitcher has matched this extra-innings deed in the ensuing
seventy-six—well, almost—years.
But how come the Yankees played at Braves Field on the day of their last
previous zero? For the answer, we called up Seymour Siwoff, the founder and
proprietor and chief enthusiast of the Elias Sports Bureau, the Fort Knox of
sports statistics, and put the question.
“Back in a minute,” he said, and 2.316 minutes later he was back. “Sunday
blue laws!” he cried. “Oh, I love this place—we have everything! You couldn
’t play ball on Sunday at Fenway because there was a church within a
thousand feet of the park. Maybe more than one. So they’d go over and play
at Braves Field instead. The Monday game, back at Fenway, was the beginning
of the Yankee streak. Listen, do you know who ended it—who shut them out
finally? Should I look that up?”
“It was Lefty Grove,” we said, naming the Philadelphia Athletics grandee,
the primo starter of his era.
“Grove, of course!” said Siwoff. “I had an inkling. I almost knew.”
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