August 28 has been a busy date in White Sox history, and a few of the wildest entries came with bases loaded in the oddest ways imaginable.
Back in 1909, Washington’s Dolly Gray put together one of the strangest innings you’ll ever see in the opener of a doubleheader at South Side Park. In the second inning, he set two major league records against the White Sox: eight walks in the inning, and seven straight.
Patsy Dougherty opened with a single, Frank Isbell either sacrificed him to second or made an out, and then the walks started rolling in. Lee Tannehill drew one, and the parade kept going all the way back through the order to Dougherty.
The White Sox scored six runs in the inning, and every one of them was “driven in” by walks.
By the time Dougherty came up again, six straight walks had already piled up, and manager Billy Sullivan had a suggestion for him: leave his bat in the dugout. Dougherty was the only White Sox player to get a hit in the game, and Chicago still won 6-4.
Gray allowed that one hit and issued 11 more walks, so the bases were busy all afternoon. It was also the third time Dougherty had been his team’s only hitter in a game, with one more such outing still ahead in his career.
The White Sox also took the nightcap, 2-1, and walked just twice.
Fast forward to 1936, and Luke Appling put his name at the top of the franchise record book. In a 6-5 win over the Senators, Appling went 2-for-3 and stretched his hitting streak to 23 games, breaking Eddie Collins’ previous mark of 22.
Over that run, he had 30 hits, hit .337, and posted a .427 on-base percentage and .888 OPS. He would keep hitting safely for four more games, and his 27-game streak stood as the team record for 68 years before Carlos Lee edged it by one.
The 1938 club survived a brutal run that still sounds almost impossible. Rainouts forced the White Sox into six straight doubleheaders on six straight days from August 23 through August 28.
On the road, they played four games against the Yankees in two days, six against the Red Sox in three days, and two against the Athletics. For the month, they were stuck with 13 doubleheaders.
Even so, they finished August 16-22.
August 28, 1955 brought a big crowd and a split with the Yankees in front of 50,990 fans at Comiskey Park, the 15th-largest crowd in White Sox/Comiskey Park/Chicago history. The White Sox dropped the first game 6-1, then bounced back for a 3-2 win. The split left them 77-51 and a half-game behind New York in the American League race, though by their next game - a 7-5 win over Boston on August 30 - they were back in first, if only briefly.
The 1960 game in Baltimore was the kind that lingers. Chicago entered the day 2 ½ games behind the Yankees and trailed the Orioles 3-0 going into the eighth.
Then, with two outs, Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox and Roy Sievers delivered consecutive singles to cut the deficit and put the tying runs on base. Al Lopez sent Ted Kluszewski up to pinch-hit, and Big Klu smashed Milt Pappas’ pitch into the right-field stands for what looked like a three-run homer.
But third base umpire Ed Hurley called time. Nobody remembered seeing it happen, and he wouldn’t reverse himself.
Fox was ejected during the argument, Lopez finished the game under protest, and Hurley later explained that he had called time to tell Floyd Robinson and Earl Torgeson they were warming up in the wrong area. The next day, he told newspapers, “I wish to heck I hadn’t called it; I’d gladly take it back ...”
The Sox lost 3-1 and fell three games behind the Yankees. Kluszewski later said it was the game that broke the team’s spirit that season.
In 1977, Wilbur Wood had one of the shortest starts of his career in a 10-1 loss to the Brewers. He recorded just one out before being chased after the White Sox fell behind 4-0, and the big blow was a roof shot by Sal Bando at Comiskey Park.
It was the 21st and final “true” home run on the roof, before home plate was moved up eight feet ahead of the 1983 season. The last White Sox “true” roof shot before that came on June 4, 1977, off the bat of Richie Zisk.
Six years later, Greg Luzinski finished his own “downtown Triple Crown” in style. On August 28, 1983, he launched a pitch from Boston’s Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd over the Comiskey Park roof in left-center field.
It was his third roof shot of the season, after earlier ones against the Twins and Yankees, and he would finish his White Sox career with four rooftop home runs. Chicago beat Boston 6-2.
Then came August 28, 1990, when Frank Thomas hit the first home run of his big-league career. Thomas went deep in the ninth inning at the Metrodome off Minnesota’s Gary Wayne, though the Sox lost 12-6. Thomas would eventually finish with 448 home runs in a White Sox uniform.
And in 1995, the White Sox dealt José DeLeón to the Montreal Expos for Jeff Shaw, the second time they swapped DeLeón. Shaw’s stint in Chicago was brief and rough: nine games, a 6.52 ERA and -0.1 WAR. He later moved to Cincinnati in the offseason, and then his path helped set up a move that eventually brought Paul Konerko to the White Sox, after Shaw was traded to Los Angeles in 1998 as part of a package that included Konerko.
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Benintendis bat has cooled in August after a stronger start earlier in the season, and the White Sox are hoping the time away helps him reset. Theres a natural wear-and-tear question here too, because the grind of the season can sneak up on hitters late, and Chicago would love to see him come back looking fresher just as the games start to carry more weight. [Read more 🡒]