A Good Day For Aces (60 Years Ago, July 29, 1956)

On Sunday, July 29th, 1956 (sixty years ago), Billy Pierce won his 16th game of the year and Don Newcombe and Brooks Lawrence won their 15th.

A Good Day for Aces (60 Years Ago, July 29, 1956)

In Chicago's Comiskey Park, southpaw Billy Pierce surrendered 7 hits to run his record to 16-4 as the White Sox beat up on the Red Sox, 11-2. Pierce was the ace of the Chisox staff and one of the best pitchers in baseball. With two months to go in the season, Pierce was well on his way toward being a 20-game winner for the first time in his (so far) nine-year career. The most games he had ever won was 18 in 1953, but Pierce also had three 15-win seasons for Chicago, including 1955—the previous year—when he was 15-10 and led the majors in both ERA (1.97) and fewest hits plus walks (1.1) per inning . 

Meanwhile in Brooklyn, the Dodgers' Don Newcombe pitched a 5-hit, 1-0 shutout to go 15-5 on the season as the Dodgers downed the Cubs. The only run of the game was a home run by Pee Wee Reese, his 7th, off Chicago starter Jim Davis to break up a scoreless pitching duel in the eighth. Dee Fondy, with a pair of doubles, was the only Cub to reach second base; nobody made it to third. It was Newcombe's second shutout of the season. The first was also against the Cubs, back on May 8 at Wrigley Field, when he shut them down on only three hits. Only one Cub got as far as second base in that one.

Big Newk's victory was his 14th in 21 starts. He also got a win in his only relief appearance, which happened to be . . . against the Cubs, right here at Ebbets Field back on May 20. Having given up 6 runs in 2⅓ innings the previous day, Brooklyn manager Walt Alston called on him with one out in the fourth inning and two runners on, the score tied at 2-2, to get the Dodgers out of the inning. He got a double play and hung around for the rest of the game to pick up the win, his 6th of the year at the time, giving up an unearned run in the eighth. 

Back to July 26: we're now at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh where the Reds' Brooks Lawrence also won his 15th game, giving up just one run on four hits as Cincinnati beat the Pirates, 6-1. For Lawrence, the win was much welcomed after having lost his two previous starts, which were so far his only two losses of the season. Lawrence had gone into the All-Star break undefeated at 12-0 and improved to 13-0 on July 17 when he beat the Dodgers, 4-3. His double in the bottom of the ninth off Sandy Koufax started the game winning rally in that one. His victory that day pushed the third-place Dodgers five games back of the first-place Braves; the Reds were a game out in second.

It was four days later, on July 21 at home against the Pirates, that Brooks Lawrence suffered his first loss of the season, thanks to a three-run 9th-inning homer by Roberto Clemente that overturned a 3-1 Cincinnati lead. Two days later Lawrence won his 14th game pitching two innings of relief against the Pirates. This time he retired Clemente on a grounder to third in the eighth for his final out before being removed for a pinch hitter. The Reds won the game in the last of the eighth, making Lawrence the winning pitcher. He was now 14-1.

On just one day of rest after pitching those two innings in relief, Lawrence was back on the mound. On July 25. At Ebbets Field. In Brooklyn. Against Dodgers' ace Don Newcombe. The two right-handers hooked up in a classic pitchers' duel. Frank Robinson hit his 22nd home run of the season in the third, and Carl Furillo answered by hitting a long fly in the fourth. The game stayed tied at 1-1 until Duke Snider ended it with his 24th home run with one out in the bottom of the ninth. Both Newcombe and Lawrence now had 14 wins, and four days later they each won their 15th.

With two months to go, Newcombe and Lawrence both seemed sure bets to win 20—long the accepted standard of excellence in any given season for a pitcher. (The advanced metrics of recent years, not to mention significant changes in how pitchers are used, including the notion of 6-inning "quality starts" and the use of dedicated 7th and 8th and 9th inning relievers to secure victories, have diminished the importance of the 20-win season.) 

Big Newk had been a 20-game winner twice before, in 1951 (20-9) and 1955 (20-5), and was on a roll since starting the season 6-3 with a 4.15 ERA through May 25. Since then, he was 9-2 with a 3.01 earned run average in 13 starts, including six in a row for the month of July. His only blemish in July was surrendering 6 runs in just 1 inning in Milwaukee in his first start after the All-Star break, but the Dodgers came back to tie the score, taking him off the hook before they eventually lost the game.

Brooks Lawrence was in uncharted territory, for him. His 15th win before the end of July matched the number of games he won as a 29-year-old rookie for the St. Louis Cardinals two years earlier. But he started only 18 games that year, while relieving in 17 others, and was 9-2 as a starting pitcher and 6-4 in relief. The next year, ineffectiveness and health issues severely compromised his season; he pitched terribly (3-8, 6.56, mostly as a reliever); he was demoted; and he became expendable. So he was traded to the Reds for a journeyman southpaw named Jackie Collum. 

Four of Lawrence's 15 wins so far in 1956 had come in 8 relief appearances. He was 11-2 in his 21 starts. After following-up Lawrence's 15th win with another victory in the second game of their Sunday doubleheader, the Reds ended the day at 56-39, 2½ games behind the first-place Braves, but a game-and-a-half up on the third-place Dodgers. Now clearly the dominant starting pitcher on the Cincinnati staff, it was on the health and continued effectiveness of Brooks Lawrence that the Cincinnati Redlegs' 1956 pennant chances arguably rested. 

But Lawrence had now pitched 151⅔ innings, just 7 less than he had pitched for the Cardinals in his 1954 rookie campaign. And there were two months to go, one of them the presumed-to-be-beastly hot August.

Billy Pierce

Billy Pierce passed away on Friday. One of baseball's premier pitchers in the 1950s, the southpaw Pierce, along with his teammate Minnie Minoso, was among those players from major league baseball's "golden era" being considered for Cooperstown immortality last year by the Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee. Neither player, nor anyone else on the list for that matter, was voted in. But Billy Pierce surely had much to commend him, even if his lifetime 211-169 (.555) record and 3.27 ERA are not on-the-surface Hall of Fame-impressive.

Billy Pierce

Acquired from Detroit in 1949 in what turned out to be a steal of a trade, Billy Pierce was the first piece in the Chicago White Sox building momentum towards ending their decades of baseball purgatory occasioned by the ignominy of the eight Black Sox who conspired with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series. Just as Minnie Minoso's arrival in 1951 became the foundation of the "Go-Go" Sox, Pierce was the cornerstone of a first-rate pitching staff that was essential for the White Sox to compete with the Yankees and Cleveland Indians for the American League pennant.

By 1955, the White Sox were ready to enter the fray in the pennant race. As readers of Baseball Historical Insight know, this year we are focused on that season—sixty years ago—but this article is not part of that series. It's a reminder of how good Billy Pierce really was. Suffice it to say, Pierce had one of the best years of his big-league career that year. He ended up the season with a record only 15-10, but he led the league with a 1.97 earned run average—far better than anyone else in the bigs—and was the best pitcher in the major leagues in 1955, at least according to the wins above replacement metric for pitchers. Pierce had back-to-back 20-win seasons each of the next two years. When the White Sox finally beat out the Yankees for the AL pennant in 1959, Pierce was only 14-15 with a 3.62 ERA, and did not get a start in the World Series, although he pitched in three of the six games in relief.

With all due respect to Whitey Ford, Billy Pierce was probably the best southpaw in the American League in the 1950s, if not the league's best pitcher, period. He stood only 5-10 and was slight of build, but Pierce was an agile and highly coordinated athlete whose compact motion enabled him to sizzle fastballs past batters. He led the league in strikeouts in 1953 and in strikeouts-per-nine-innings in both 1953 and 1954. The only two pitchers in major league baseball with more accumulated pitchers' wins above replacement in the 1950s were Warren Spahn and Robin Roberts, both in the other league.

If he had pitched for the Yankees, who dominated the American League in his years with the White Sox by winning pennants in all but two of them, Billy Pierce almost certainly would be in the Hall of Fame—joining his fellow small-stature lefty who did pitch for the Yankees, the aforementioned Mr. Ford. Let's pick up from 1953 and not include 1949, the year before Ford first wore pinstripes; 1950 when Ford did not arrive on the scene until July and pitched only 112 innings; and the two following years that Ford spent in the military as a draftee during the Korean War:

• From 1953 to 1961, with Pierce pitching for Chicago and Ford in New York, Whitey Ford's record was 149-62 and Billy Pierce was 137-95. That's a very big advantage for Ford.
• And Ford's .706 winning percentage relative to the Yankees' .625 for those nine years was appreciably better than Pierce's .591 winning percentage relative to the White Sox' .572. Notwithstanding that the Yankees were a much better team than the White Sox, that's another very big advantage for Whitey Ford.
• But with 33.4 pitcher's wins above replacement, Billy Pierce was by that advanced metric a more effective pitcher than Ford, whose pitcher's WAR was 29.8.
• And Pierce accumulated 2,044 innings pitched those nine years; Ford's total was slightly less at 1,925.

None of this is to say that Billy Pierce was even equally as deserving as Whitey Ford for Hall of Fame immortality based on their pitching performance in the 1950s, let alone more deserving. And the performance distance between the two widens when one considers Ford's excellence from 1962 to 1965, during which time Billy Pierce's career had come to an end after three years in San Francisco.

Pierce was 16-6 for the Giants in 1962, however, without which his new team would not have won their first pennant in San Francisco, which required winning a three-game playoff against the Dodgers. Surrendering only three hits, Pierce shut out the Dodgers in the opening game of the playoff showdown, beating Sandy Koufax. Two days later, he pitched a shutdown ninth inning after the Giants scored 4 runs in the top half of the inning at Dodger Stadium to take a 6-4 lead, sending San Francisco to the World Series. After losing Game 3 of the Series, giving up 2 runs in the seventh of what had been a scoreless game before being relieved, Pierce beat Whitey Ford in Game 6, surrendering just 3 hits, to force a decisive Game 7—the one that ended with Willie McCovey hitting that vicious line drive right at Bobby Richardson.

Again, none of this is to make an argument that Billy Pierce was even equally as deserving as Whitey Ford for Hall of Fame immortality based on their pitching performance in the 1950s . . . but had the White Sox been able to beat out the Yankees a time or two more for the pennant during those years, well       . . . Billy Pierce might well have been honored in Cooperstown last week—if he hadn't already been before.