The 1967 Twins closed August with a bang, claiming a 10-9 walkoff win over the defending World Series champion Baltimore Orioles on the month’s final day. It took a dramatic come-from-behind victory to keep the Twins within a half-game of first-place Boston, and they had rookie first baseman Rich Reese to thank for that.
 
The disappointing Orioles, 56-70 going into the game, scored three times in the top of the ninth to take a 9-8 lead. But after Twins relief ace Ron Kline had been touched for an RBI double by Davey Johnson and a two-run homer by Curt Blefary, the lefthanded-hitting Reese drilled a 410-foot, two-run shot off O’s righty Moe Drabowsky.
 
The Twins, according to St. Paul Pioneer Press beat writer Arno Goethel, showed “more elasticity than a matron’s spanking new girdle” in squeezing out a victory with the fifth lead change of the night.
 
It might not have happened without Cesar Tovar’s one-out chopper in the ninth, which took long enough to come down to allow the speedster to race across first base before Drabowsky could field it and throw. Twins skipper Cal Ermer then called on Reese to pinch-hit for catcher Jerry Zimmerman, and the rookie quickly made his skipper look like a genius.  
 
Reese, who batted .317 (13-for-41) as a pinch-hitter in 1967, ripped a shot into the bullpen in right-center field at the Met. The homer was his fourth of the year in 87 at-bats—and his fourth game-winning blow of ’67. No. 4 kept the Twins from falling into a second-place tie with the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers, both a game-and-a-half back of the front-running Red Sox.
 
“Ermer kept saying ‘what a lift Reese gave us with his homer’ for nearly an hour after the game,” Goethel wrote in his game account. It was hard not to be caught up in the moment.
 
That kind of excitement would be a constant in a wild and wacky September.  
 
 
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, culled from the upcoming and tentatively titled The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s. I also post on my author page on Facebook. 
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During the final August weekend in 1967, the American League pennant race took two interesting twists.
 
After Minnesota’s early-August sweep of the first-place Chicago White Sox at the Met, the Twins had grabbed the top spot in for the first time in 1967. The White Sox had led the league for two months—and the Twins ruled the roost for a week after sweeping the Sox—but first place soon become a game of musical chairs.
 
Chicago jumped back in front after the Twins lost three of four in a pair of doubleheaders at Tiger Stadium on August 22 and 23, but on August 25, the Twins opened a weekend series by sweeping a twinbill in Cleveland to regain the lead. In Game 2, pitching 50 miles from his home in Wooster, Ohio, Dean Chance tossed the lone no-hitter of his major league career.
 
An historic performance seemed unlikely early on. Chance walked the first two batters he faced—Lee Maye and Vic Davalillo—and wild-pitched Maye home before the first inning was over. He walked five in the 2-1 victory, secured after Cleveland starter Sonny Siebert balked home the eventual winning run in the sixth inning. Chance finished strong, retiring the last 10 Cleveland batters he faced, seven on infield grounders and two via strikeouts.
 
Interestingly, Chance’s no-no came less than three weeks after he held Boston hitless on August 6, a rainy Monday night at the Met. The 26-year-old righthander worked five perfect innings before the game was called with the Twins in front 2-0. The teams had sat through a 25-minute rain delay in the fourth inning, but the weather won out an inning later. When the game was called with one out in the bottom of the fifth, Chance called his no-hit effort a “cheapie.”
 
“I had good stuff, particularly my curveball,” Chance said after the game, “but who can honestly tell whether you’ve got no-hit stuff or not? I doubt I could have thrown a no-hitter.” If anyone was a good judge of whether he had the stuff, Chance was the guy. He had thrown 18 no-hitters in high school, four of them perfect games.
 
Chance’s gem against Boston, however, doesn’t appear in the record books as a no-hitter. Major League Baseball ruled in 1991 that a hitless start must go at least nine innings to be recognized.
 
Despite the five walks he allowed in his recognized no-no, Chance, in the Twins clubhouse after the game, said: “I thought I had no-hit stuff.” Jerry Zimmerman, his catcher both nights, said Chance was wild with both his fastball and curveball in the opening frame, but otherwise flashed the no-hit stuff that the catcher said he had seen nearly every time his battery mate took the mound.
 
On that night, Zimmerman said Chance “was just wild enough to be effective... The ball was really moving.” Nearly 50 years later, Chance joked about the oddity of his outing: “I threw a no-hitter and gave up a run. And the damn run was earned, of all things. Hard to believe!”
 
The Twins were back in first place—momentarily. They fell to Cleveland the following day, and when the Red Sox roughed up White Sox ace Joe Horlen in a 6-2 victory, they claimed first place. Their lead over the Twins was a mere half-game, but it was a noteworthy day for the Boston franchise. That day, August 26, 1967, marked the first time the Red Sox sat atop the American League standings at day’s end since the final days of the 1949 season.
 
That fall, the Red Sox held a one-game edge over the New York Yankees when they headed to Yankee Stadium for the final two games of the season. On Saturday, Yankees left fielder Johnny Lindell, an unlikely hero, homered in the eighth inning to break a 4-4 tie and secure a New York victory. With the two teams tied atop the standings on Sunday, the Yankees defeated Boston 5-3 to claim the 1949 pennant, the first of 10 in Casey Stengel’s 12 seasons at the helm.
 
It would be another 18 years—in 1967—before the Red Sox caught a whiff of first place late in a season. After such a long wait, sole possession of first place lasted a single day. The Red Sox and White Sox split a doubleheader on August 27 while Twins lefty Jim Merritt improved to 10-4 with a complete-game effort in Cleveland. The 72-56 Twins now led the league by percentage points over Boston.
 
Five weeks later, however, the Red Sox were positioned to play the role of the 1949 Yankees. They would return home for the final two games of the season trailing the visiting Twins by a single game with two to play. Those Twins, like the 1949 Red Sox, would need to win just one of the two games to claim the AL pennant.
 
But with five weeks to go, the 1967 pennant chase was far from over. Down the stretch all four contenders—the Twins, White Sox, Red Sox and Tigers—would hold down the top spot during one of the most dramatic finishes in AL history.
 
 
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, culled from the upcoming and tentatively titled The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s. I also post on my author page on Facebook. 
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​With the Twins opening a weekend series against the first-place Chicago White Sox on August 11, 1967, pennant fever swept through the Twin Cities. The Twins had looked like anything but a contender the first two months, but after an early-August surge, first place was on the line with the White Sox at the Met.
 
That might have been surprising news for Chicago fans as well. The White Sox had taken over first place on June 11, and despite having the Twins, Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox hanging around, had held the top spot for two months.
 
After stumbling along near .500 through much of the season, the Twins, trailing Chicago by 2.5 games, had staff ace Dean Chance on the mound for the Friday night opener. Nearly 34,000 fans turned out to see Chance go the distance for his 15th win, a 3-2 victory secured by Tony Oliva’s two-out RBI single off Chicago knuckleballer Wilbur Wood in the seventh.
 
With the Twins now 1.5 games back, the crowd swelled to almost 48,000 for the Saturday matinee, when Jim Kaat and Gary Peters squared off in a battle of southpaws. The White Sox scratched for two runs over the first four frames while Peters worked a shutout into the sixth. The Twins tied the game in the sixth and tallied four more runs in the seventh when Bob Allison drilled a three-run shot off knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm. Kaat worked a complete game in the 6-2 win, which moved Minnesota within a half-game of Chicago.
 
With first place on the line in the Sunday finale, more than 42,000 fans saw Rich Rollins drive in all three runs and Jim Merritt go the distance in a 3-2 victory that completed the sweep and bounced the White Sox from the top spot.
 
Ted Uhlaender, a terrific defender who shared center field with César Tovar that summer, protected the one-run lead in the ninth with a strong throw. When White Sox center fielder Tommie Agee, leading off the inning, tried to stretch his drive into the left-center-field gap into a triple, Uhlaender fielded the ball off the wall and rifled a strike over the head of the cutoff man that retired Agee at third. Merritt retired the next two batters to nail it down.
 
Not only had the Twins taken over first place, they had improved to a season-high 12 games over .500 at 62-50. But this race was just heating up.
 
 
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, culled from the upcoming and tentatively titled The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s. I also post on my author page on Facebook.

At the start of August 1967, the Chicago White Sox led the American League. They’d been in front since early June, and when they closed July with a 4-2 win over Cleveland, the White Sox were two games up on the surging Boston Red Sox. The Detroit Tigers trailed by 3.5, and the Minnesota Twins had stumbled to five games behind Chicago.
 
Chicago had some breathing room, but that would quickly change. The White Sox opened August by losing four of five, setting up one of the great pennant races in MLB history.
 
The Twins made their move with a 13-3 run that began on August 4, when lefty Jim Merritt shut out the second-place Red Sox, 3-0, on five hits. The 23-year-old control specialist improved to 8-3 with a league-leading 2.06 ERA. He was in the midst of a remarkable month-long stretch in which he allowed just one walk in 59.1 innings. The Twins won seven of his eight August starts.
 
The pitching staff played a key role in the August upturn. Jim Perry stepped into the rotation and worked consecutive shutouts against Washington and California. Dean Chance also blanked the Red Sox—on August 6 to complete a three-game sweep of Boston—and held them hitless as well.
 
On a rainy Monday night, the 26-year-old righthander worked five perfect innings before the game was called with the Twins in front 2-0. The teams had sat through a 25-minute rain delay in the fourth inning, but the weather won out an inning later. When the game was called with one out in the bottom of the fifth, Chance called his no-hit effort a “cheapie.”
 
“I had good stuff, particularly my curveball,” Chance said after the game, “but who can honestly tell whether you’ve got no-hit stuff or not? I doubt I could have thrown a no-hitter.”
 
If anyone was a good judge of whether he had the stuff, Chance was the guy. He had thrown 18 no-hitters in high school, four of them perfect games. On this night, he allowed only two hard-hit balls, both in the third inning. One was a liner off the bat of Boston catcher Elston Howard to Tony Oliva in right; the other was a long drive by losing pitcher Jim Lonborg, which backed Bob Allison to the warning track in left.
 
Chance’s gem doesn’t appear in the record books as a no-hitter. Major League Baseball ruled in 1991 that a hitless start must go at least nine innings to be recognized.
 
Prior to his five no-hit frames, the closest Chance had come to a big league no-no was a one-hitter he threw at Metropolitan Stadium in September 1962—as an Angels rookie. He held the Twins hitless into the eighth inning before Zoilo Versalles ended his bid with an infield single. Official or not, Chance’s five perfect innings on that rainy night completed a sweep of a red-hot Boston club.
 
During Minnesota’s 13-3 run, the first-place White Sox paid a visit to the Met. It was just the second weekend in August, but with the Twins inching closer to the frontrunner, a wave of pennant fever surged through the Twin Cities.
 
The Twins weren't the only club closing in on the White Sox, and the race was about to get interesting.
 
 
I will post about the 1967 Twins and the wild AL pennant race all summer long, culled from the upcoming and tentatively titled The Glory Years of the Minnesota Twins: Rock ‘n’ Roll, War and Peace, the Civil Rights Movement and Baseball in the 1960s. I also post on my author page on Facebook.