On the bedside table:
Marichal Vs. Spahn 7-2-63
San Francisco Giants 1, Milwaukee Braves 0
Game Played on Tuesday, July 2, 1963 (N) at Candlestick Park
MIL N 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 - 0 8 1 SF N 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 - 1 9 1PITCHING
Milwaukee Braves IP H R ER BB SO HR
Spahn L(11-4) 15.1 9 1 1 1 2 1
San Francisco Giants IP H R ER BB SO HR
Marichal W(13-3) 16 8 0 0 4 10 0
Baseball season is one week old. To celebrate America's pastime, I intend to write occasionally about some of the sport's most memorable games, complete with box scores supplied by www.retrosheet.org. We begin with one of the greatest duels in Major League history: Juan Marichal (SF Giants) vs. Warren Spahn (Milwaukee Braves) at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on July 2, 1963. The 42 year old veteran against the young Dominican, both eventually to be in Cooperstown. The crowd that night witnessed the greatest pitching performance in the history of the Stick, one of the greatest two-man duels of all-time.
For 15 innings, Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal put matching sets of zeros up on the Candlestick scoreboard. Inning after inning, deep into the night, nobody could score. Finally, the end came suddenly -- with one out in the 16th, shortly after midnight, the Giants' Willie Mays hit a home run.* Over the last eight innings, Marichal held the Braves to two hits and retired 17 in a row at one stretch.Spahn finished the night having allowed nine hits and just the one, intentional, walk. He struck out two. Marichal gave up eight hits, walked four and struck out 10. Each threw more than 200 pitches, Marichal threw a staggering total of 227 pitches.
Extra Notes: Spahn went 23-7 in 1963 (at age 42!) matching Christy Mathewson for most 20 game winning seasons: 13. He is the winningest lefty in baseball history with 363 wins.
Marichal pitched his 1st no-hitter a couple of weeks before this game, becoming the first Latin player to accomplish that feat. From 1962 through 1971 Marichal averaged 20 wins per season. He led the NL in wins in 1963 (25-8) and 1968 (26-9); in shutouts in 1965 (10) and 1969 (8); and in ERA in 1969 (2.10). A workhorse, he topped the league in innings pitched in 1963 and '68 and in complete games in '64 and '68. Pitching in eight All-Star Games, he compiled a 2-0 record and a 0.50 ERA in 18 innings. From 1963-69, Marichal, with a 154-65 record and a .703 winning percentage, won more games than any pitcher in baseball. More than Koufax, more than Whitey Ford, more than Cardinals great Bob Gibson. He also led baseball in complete games during the 1960s by a wide margin. In his career, Marichal completed 244 of his 457 starts. He ended his career, prematurely after a bad reaction to medication, with a record of 243-142 with a 2.89 lifetime ERA and 3,507 innings pitched. That's a lot of high-kick deliveries. (www.baseballlibrary.com and www.sanfranciscogiants.mlb.com)
* Note: I personally spent many a cold night at the Stick in the 1980s. The Giants used to hand out a little pin called the croix de candlestick to anyone who stayed to the end of an extra inning game. I have no idea if that tradition was in place in 1963, but if so then this would be the treasured one to have.
Be Seeing you.....
I remember listening to that game in Wisconsin as a 14-year old boy with
Blaine Walsh and Earl Gillespie doing the radio. I also remember when Bill
Rigney wanted to take out Marichal, Marichal is supposed to have said about
Spahn: " If that old man can still keep pitching, so can I." Of course,
Spahn was an orphan and a member of the 82nd Airborne on D-Day, and
pitching, I'm guessing, was one of the easier things he did in his life.