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LARRY GILBERT |
THE 1914 "MIRACLE" BRAVES
The Braves shoot the Cardinals to pieces
May 27, 1914 ... Three little infield hits, which nobody could handle, a real hit by Hank Gowdy, a base on balls to Johnny Evers, and a home run by Rabbit Maranville with the bases
loaded, gave the Braves six runs in the second inning of today's game at Robison Field in St. Louis. Slim Sallee was the Cardinals pitcher that suffered. He gave up five hits in the inning and seven hits in the three innings he pitched. After the disaster in the second inning, every one of the Braves players had hit Sallee.
Manager Miller Huggins took him out in the third inning, and the Braves scored another run, chiefly by the singles of Larry Gilbert and Jack Martin, to make another run off the reliever, Bill Steele. Steele pitched two innings for the Cardinals, in which two hits were made, and Casey Hageman
pitched the last four, getting away with two hits and no runs.
Dick Rudolph took the mound for Boston, and although hit for 11 safe hits, he managed to keep them scattered. As may be imagined, the game was not very interesting after that second inning. The Cardinals might as well have stopped the play, but kept it on for the rest of the game. The late
innings were highlighted by the injection of Lee Magee for questioning the decisions of umpire Rigler in the eighth-inning, and Braves Captain Johnny Evers, was tossed out for addressing abusive language to the stands, as he was going to bat in the ninth-inning. These little diversions were
the only cases of interest in the rest of the game.
Sallee started off well enough until little bounders by Gilbert, Martin and Leslie Mann unsettled him and fill the bases in the second inning. Gowdy lined a single after Butch Schmidt had sacrificed Gilbert to second, and scored. Then Martin and Mann hit balls back to the mound that were
deflected away, allowing both batters to reach base. Rudolph popped up for the second out of the inning. Then Sallee made the mistake of letting Evers reach first base on a walk. After that, the mighty mite, named Maranville, hit a ground ball smash down the left-field line to the furthest
corner of the grounds for an inside-the-park home run. That settled it.
In the third, Gilbert led off with a single to left and was sacrificed to second, scoring on Martin's it to center field. The Cardinals managed to get three runs in the fifth and that rally was stopped when Cozy Dolan charged into the gigantic Butch Schmidt while trying to return to first
base on a pickoff attempt from Rudolph. He bounced off Schmidt like a sparrow, and was declared out. The Cardinals scored their fourth and last run in the ninth-inning to make the final 7 to 4 in favor of the Braves. |
