Scoreboard as Bucky Dent Comes To The Plate [Archive]

SNUSA

02 Apr 2004, 11:46 PM

A friend of mine (who doesn't use message boards, for reasons I don't get) is painting a mural of Fenway Park's Green Monster on the wall of his home office (again, for reasons I don't get).

Anyhow. He wonders if someone out there can give him exactly what the scoreboard on that big green wall read as Bucky Dent came to the plate in that famous game, whatever year it was (1979 off the top of my head, but I wouldn't put money on it).

Anyone?

kenntomasch

19 Apr 2004, 12:37 AM

It was October 2, 1978, the one-game playoff to decide the AL East championship.

I believe I read somewhere that Dent has a baseball school somewhere in South Florida that has a youth diamond with a mini-replica of Fenway (or at least the Green Monster) with the scoreboard that is permanently set as it was when he came to the plate (or perhaps just after he hit the home run, I can't remember).

Here's a photo of the scoreboard (I don't know when this was taken, or if this is exactly how it looked on October 2, 1978):

http://www.beautifulmomentsintime.com/Scoreboard.jpg

Anyway, it was a 3-run homer with two out in the 7th inning with the Yankees down 2-0 at the time (they would go up 3-2 on the HR, get another run that inning, and then go up 5-2 in the 8th before Boston scored twice in the bottom of the 8th to get within one - the final score was 5-4).

So the score by innings, at least, would have looked like this:

NY 000 000 0
BOS 010 001

The count was one ball and one strike.

The R-H-E for the game was NY 5-8-0 and BOS 4-11-0. After the homer, the Yankees got three hits, so they would have had four up to the point right before Dent's homer. The Red Sox got 6 hits after Dent's HR, so they would have had 5 at the time.

So the R-H-E at the time should be:
NY 0-4-0
BOS 2-5-0

Guidry would have been the pitcher of record at that moment for the Yankees, and he was #49, if memory serves. Mike Torrez was the pitcher who gave up the Dent HR, and he was #21 (another Boston pitcher would bring slightly more distinction to that number years later).

Chances are the out-of-town scoreboard wasn't being used, since that was the only game that day, but I don't know for sure.

The scoreboard also used to have the initials of the team's (former) owners somewhere on it in morse code (TAY and JRY for Tom A. Yawkey and Jean R. Yawkey) in two vertical stripes. I don't know where, though, but if they were there in 1978, your friend should include them.

Hope that helps.

[Some of this thanks to Retrosheet (http://www.retrosheet.org).]