Tim McCarver's Grand Slam that Wasn't

It's a shame that nothing like YouTube was around in the 1970s.  Because if it were, I'm sure that the play I want to discuss would have gone viral.  It was that unusual, and it was that entertaining.  It happened on July 4, 1976, when I was about two weeks shy of my fifth birthday.  So I don't have any independent memory of it.  But, it gave my father and my grandfather such a kick, that they talked about it for years afterward.  And that is Tim McCarver's grand slam that wasn't.

Most young baseball fans know Tim McCarver as a broadcaster.  He only retired seven years ago.  But before his TV career, McCarver was a fan favorite among the Phillies faithful.  In fact, he was the player who introduced the world to the Phillie Phanatic in 1978, on the popular local kids' TV show on Channel Six, Captain Noah and His Magical Ark.

McCarver had two stints with the Phillies.  The Phillies first acquired McCarver in 1970 from the Cardinals.  He was part of that infamous monster trade where the Phillies gave up Dick Allen, Cookie Rojas and Jerry Johnson, were supposed to receive Curt Flood, along with Joe Hoerner, Byron Browne and McCarver.  But Flood, having seen how the Phillies fans treated Dick Allen, refused to report to the Phillies, and instead fought to do away with the reserve clause and to get recognized as a free agent.  Flood, unfortunately, never won that battle.  But he is remembered today as laying the groundwork for eventually eliminating the reserve clause, and bringing about the era of free agency.

In 1972, the Phillies traded McCarver to the Expos.

He returned in 1975, this time signing with the Phillies as a free agent.  Since he had been with the Cardinals in the 1960s, he was familiar with the Phillies' superstar pitcher, Steve Carlton, who had also played with the Cardinals before joining the Phillies in 1972.  In fact, McCarver and Carlton had been reunited a brief time in 1972, until the Phillies traded McCarver in June of that year.

The Phillies began using McCarver to give their young catcher, Bob Boone, a spell of relief by having him catch for Carlton every fifth day.  The joke was that McCarver had become Carlton's personal catcher.  McCarver even joked that when he died, they should bury him sixty feet, six inches away from Carlton.  But they must have done something right, because Carlton had a record of 81-45 when McCarver was behind the plate, for a winning percentage of .643.  Carlton's lifetime winning percentage was .574.

In 1976, the Phillies, and the City of Philadelphia, was all set to celebrate the nation's bicentennial.  In fact, the Phillies had landed baseball's All-Star Game that year, due not only to the fact that the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, but also because the first National League game had been played in Philadelphia one hundred years before on April 22, 1876.

But back to 1976, while the City of Philadelphia rang in America's 200th Independence Day with a ceremony hosted by Charlton Heston, and featuring President Gerald Ford, followed by a five hour parade, the Phillies spent the day playing a double-header in Pittsburgh.

The young Phillies team was just coming into their own.  After the great collapse of 1964, the Phillies had only had three winning seasons.  But the team had an influx of talented, young players from their farm system, such as Larry Bowa, Greg Luzinski, Bob Boone and Mike Schmidt.  By 1975, the Phillies had climbed to second place in the National League East, finishing behind these same Pirates by six and a half games.  On July 4, 1976, the Phillies began the day in first place, a full nine games ahead of the Pirates.

The first game began with Steve Carlton on the mound, and so Tim McCarver started behind the plate.  The game was scoreless, when the Phillies came to bat in the top of the second inning.  Left fielder Greg Luzinski hit a triple, followed by a Dick Allen walk.  Luzinski scored on a Jay Johnstone double, with Allen advancing to third.  Pirates Pitcher Larry Demery intentionally walked center fielder Garry Maddox, in order to get to McCarver, and set up a possible double-play.

With the bases loaded, and no outs, McCarver, came to the plate.  McCarver hit a ball to right field that cleared the fence.  He had hit a grand slam!  Excitedly, McCarver began rounding the bases.  Garry Maddox, however, was not sure whether the ball was going to clear the fence or be caught, and had begun to return to first base.  As Maddox was returning to first, McCarver passed him in the base path.  For passing the runner ahead of him, McCarver was called out.  However, he had already touched first base, therefore, McCarver was credited with single, and three RBIs. 

The Phillies won that first game by a score of 10-4.  Indeed, the Phils would go on to win the NL East for the first time, amassing 101 wins, the most ever for a Phillies team at the time, in the process.  The Phils would fall to the Big Red Machine, the eventually World Series winners, in the NLCS, who swept them in three games.  But the 1976 season marked the first of three consecutive NL East championships, and the core of the team would go on to win the franchise's first World Series in 1980.  In fact, McCarver, who had retired in November of 1979, was brought back by the Phillies in September of 1980, and was technically part of the that ball club that won the World Championship.

The same play has only happened once before.  On July 9, 1970, when the Detroit Tigers played the Boston Red Sox in Detroit, Dalton Jones of the Tigers passed teammate Don Wert on the base path, and was called out.  He was also awarded a 3-run single.

In the fifteenth inning of Game Five of the 1999 NLCS, on October 17, 1999, the game was tied 3-3 when Robin Ventura of the New York Mets hit an apparent walk-off grand slam against the Atlanta Braves.  However, the runner on first, Todd Pratt, picked up Ventura as he ran the bases.  Excited by the win, Ventura's teammates mobbed him between first and second, preventing Ventura from touching all of the bases.  Ventura was ruled to have hit  single, and only the runner on third was ruled to have scored.  The Mets still won, but of a score of 4-3.  This play is also referred to as a grand slam single.



By:  William J. Kovatch, Jr. 

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Rules

Current Rule 5.09(b) states:

"(b) Retiring a Runner

Any runner is out when:

***

(9) He passes a preceding runner before such runner is out"

Office of the Commissioner, "Official Baseball Rules: 2019 Edition," p. 46 (2019).

References

Official statistics and box scores were obtained from Baseball-Reference.com.

"Grand Slam Single," Baseball-Reference.com (site visited July 7, 2020).

Eggert-Crowe, Madison and Knowles, Scott Gabriel, “Bicentennial(1976),” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (2013).

"McCarver Loses Grand Slam When He Passes Maddox," This Day in Baseball (site visited July 7, 2020).

Shenk, Larry, "Carlton, McCarver a pair for the ages," MLB News (August 24, 2017).

"Today in Philly Sports History: McCarver's Grand Slam Single, 1976," NBC Sports Philadelphia (July 4, 2009).