On October 2, 1978, a light-hitting shortstop named Bucky Dent hit a three-run homer over the Green Monster at Fenway Park, and the Boston Red Sox have never quite recovered. It is still the most famous swing in the history of baseball's greatest rivalry.
DID YOU KNOW?
Dent hit the home run with a borrowed bat. He had fouled a pitch off his own foot earlier in the at-bat, and while he hobbled around, teammate Mickey Rivers handed him a different bat. The next pitch went over the wall.
The setup was already absurd. In mid-July, the Red Sox led the Yankees by 14 games, and the season looked buried - Billy Martin was gone by late July, replaced by the unflappable Bob Lemon. Then the Yankees got hot, Boston collapsed, and after 162 games both clubs stood at 99-63. One game at Fenway, winner takes the American League East.
The Game
Boston started like they meant to end the argument early. Carl Yastrzemski homered off Ron Guidry - 24-3 coming in, on his way to 25 - and the Red Sox led 2-0 into the seventh. Mike Torrez was cruising for Boston, which carried its own sting: Torrez had won two World Series games for the Yankees just one year earlier before leaving for Boston as a free agent.
Then came the seventh. Two on, one out, and Dent - a shortstop who hit singles for a living - worked the count and fouled a pitch off his foot. After the bat change, Torrez came back with a fastball, and Dent lifted it toward the Green Monster. It barely cleared. It did not need to clear by much. Yankees 3, Red Sox 2, and you could hear the air leave the ballpark on the broadcast.
Reggie Jackson added a home run in the eighth - the run that would prove to be the difference - and then it got tense. Boston rallied in the ninth, and with Rick Burleson and Jerry Remy on base, Goose Gossage got Jim Rice out before Yastrzemski came up as the tying run. Yaz popped to Graig Nettles in foul ground. Final: Yankees 5, Red Sox 4.
What It Became
The game made Dent a permanent folk hero in New York and gave him a profane new middle name in New England that has followed him for nearly fifty years. The Yankees went on to beat Kansas City in the playoffs and the Dodgers in the World Series, where Dent - naturally - was named Series MVP.
Context makes the swing immortal: a 14-game comeback, a one-game playoff, at Fenway, against a pitcher who had beaten them in pinstripes the year before, off the bat of the last guy in the lineup anyone feared. The rivalry has produced a century of moments. This is the one Boston would most like to forget and the one Yankees fans will describe to you pitch by pitch, unprompted, forever.
Ask anyone who was listening that afternoon where they were. They remember.
Watch: The 1978 AL East tiebreaker - Red Sox vs. Yankees (MLB)
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Sources: Baseball-Reference.com (October 2, 1978 box score) · MLB.com ("Rewatch Bucky Dent 1978 Game 163 home run") · SABR Games Project (1978 AL East tiebreaker) · Boston Globe (October 3, 1978) · Baseball Hall of Fame (game retrospective)
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