Red Sox lose American League tie-breaker game
Two years after losing the World Series in seven games, Ted Williams and the Red Sox were back in the thick of things in 1948. All season, the American League was a dogfight between the Sox, New York Yankees, and the Cleveland Indians and when the dust settled and the season finished, the Yankees had bowed out while the Red Sox and Indians found themselves tied with identical 96-58 records.
That set the stage for a one-game tiebreaker. In previous years, a tie at the end of the season was handled with a best-of-three series (see the 1946 St. Louis Cardinals). However, because he thought the injury Ted Williams suffered during that layoff was the reason the Red Sox had lost the ’46 World Series, then-manager Joe Cronin had petitioned the league to make the next tiebreaker a single game.
Cronin got his wish and the American League adopted the single-game tiebreaker format (the National League continued to use best-of-three series until switching to the single game format after the 1962 season). The Sox and Indians faced off with fans across New England hoping for a Red Sox win and an all-Boston World Series (the Boston Braves had already won the National League pennant).
Unfortunately, the Red Sox played terribly in the game and Cleveland raced out to a 6-1 lead after five innings. For reasons that are unknown and still debated, Boston manager Joe McCarthy started Denny Galehouse instead of Mel Parnell who had already beaten the Indians three times earlier in the season. Cleveland cruised to an easy 8-3 win to capture their first pennant since 1920; they’d go on to defeat the Braves in the World Series.
Meanwhile, the Red Sox and their fans experienced another bitter disappointment in losing the game. Had Cronin left the best-of-three format as is, the Red Sox would have had two more chances to win the pennant. As Oscar Wilde said: “there are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, the other is getting it.”
Fans had been dreaming of an intercity World Series and Williams was trying to get back to the World Series, but neither were to be. It would end up being the Red Sox last appearance in a postseason game until the 1967 World Series.