Chisox HR Yanks, 2-0, in 15

June 4, 1965 - When Danny Cater was leading the league in batting and winning every other game for the White Sox, he knew it was too much to expect of himself. That’s the trouble with hitting .380 for the first month of the season when you’re a guy like Danny Cater.

“I never expected it to last,” Cater said tonight in a Texas drawl. “But then I never expected this either.”

The White Sox had outlasted the Yankees, 2-0, in 15 innings tonight, and Cater’s fifth homer of the season on the first pitch of the 15th broke the tie. “The home runs are as much a surprise to me as they are to anybody else,” Cater said.

There are a lot of surprising things happening around Yankee Stadium these days. This was the kind of game White Sox manager Al Lopez has seen the Yankees take from him for the last 15 years. When a game goes that long, only the Yankees have enough manpower to win it. This time, it was the Yankees who ran out of players and had to play men out of position to keep from forfeiting.

The way the pitchers were going, it didn’t look as if anybody was going to score before the Stadium lights were turned off at daybreak, and at about 11 o’clock, the fans decided that was the situation. After 11 innings, the crowd began to file out.

The last faithful few were standing in the aisles on the way out when Yankee manager Johnny Keane made his last gesture to the bench. He sent Whitey Ford to pinch hit for the first time in his career. The Yanks had two outs left to tie the score, and one of them had to be risked on a pitcher.

That doesn’t sound like the Yankees.

“We were about out of players, too,” Lopez protested. The way he looks at things, he’ll take almost any opposite point of view to avoid saying he thinks the Yankees have had it.

Anyway, Ford lined out, and Phil Linz struck out, and that was the ballgame.

“The Yankees have a team batting average of .216?” asked Chicago starter Joel Horlen with wonder. “That’s hard to believe.”

The Yanks had runners as far as second five times in 15 innings, as far as third once. They had two hits in an inning only once.

Keane sat in his office afterward looking very tired and discouraged.

“You can’t let it discourage you,” he said quietly.

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