Mel Parnell

Sport: Baseball

Induction Year: 1963

Induction Year: 1963

Mel Parnell was a first baseman at S.J. Peters High in New Orleans, but his coach, Al Kreider, allowed him to pitch batting practice when the team was going to face a lefthander.

Parnell, called “Dusty” because many of his pitches were low, was surprised when Kreider selected him to pitch an important game with Behrman. He responded by striking out 17 batters in a 5-0 victory.

Red Sox scout Ed Montague liked what he saw that day, and Parnell signed a contract for $90 a month.

Parnell was 15-6 at Centerville, Md., and 16-9 at Canton, Ohio, before his baseball career was interrupted by a three-year stint in the Army Air Corps in World War II. After the war, he was 13-4 with a 1.30 earned-run average before the Red Sox called him up to the big leagues.

Two years in a row, the Red Sox were one victory away from the World Series. But those were the two biggest disappointments in Parnell’s baseball career.

The first time, when the Red Sox played the Cleveland Indians in a one-game playoff for the American League pennant at Fenway Park, manager Joe McCarthy didn’t give Parnell a chance to pitch.

McCarthy checked the wind blowing out toward left field and chose 36-year-old righthander Denny Galehouse.

“The elements are against the lefthander today,” McCarthy told Parnell.

“I thought I was going to pitch,” said a disappointed Parnell. “Hell, I’d pitched a lot of games with the wind blowing out.”

Cleveland manager Lou Boudreau ignored the elements and picked a lefty – Gene Bearden, who had been presumed dead when torpedoes sank his cruiser Helena in World War II. Bearden was rescued two dates later in a lifeboat, and he pitched the Indians to an 8-3 victory in the 1948 playoff game.

One year later, after a season in which he led the big leagues in wins (25) and complete games (27), Parnell couldn’t hang on to a 4-0 lead over New York at Yankee Stadium.

The Red Sox could’ve wrapped up the pennant by winning one game in a doubleheader with the Yankees.

Parnell epitomized the popular expression “stylish lefthander” in his major career. His lifetime record was 123 victories, 75 losses and a 3.50 earned-run average. In the 10 seasons immediately following World War II, only seven other pitchers won more than 120 games.

In his best two chances to pitch in the World Series, however, it was so close – and yet so far away.

With its “Green Monster” in left field, Fenway Park was traditionally poison to lefties. The distance to the left field fence was listed at 315. (“We once measured it at 297,” Parnell said.) But he had more trouble with the lack of foul territory than the left field fence. Foul popups that would’ve been caught in other parks went into the stands at Fenway.

McCarthy’s Red Sox had a one-game lead with two games remaining in the 1949 season, and the aces of his pitching staff were ready to go. But Parnell couldn’t get past the fifth inning of the first game, and McCarthy lifted Ellis Kinder with the Red Sox trailing 1-0 in the eighth inning of the second game.

An eighth inning home run by reserve outfielder Johnny Lindell gave the Yankees a 5-4 victory in the opener, when 70,000 fans turned out for “Joe DiMaggio Day.” DiMaggio, who missed the first half of the season with an injury, started the comeback with a double off Parnell. The Yankees won the finale 5-3 on a blooper by Jerry Coleman that dropped barely inside the right field foul line for a three-run double in the eighth inning.

Earlier, McCarthy – who hadn’t used Parnell with three days rest the previous year – brought back to the mound with no rest. He gave up a homer to Tommy Henrich and a single to Yogi Berra. Then McCarthy called in Tex Hughson.

When the game ended, Yankees coach Bill Dickey jumped up, banged his head against the top of the dugout and knocked himself unconscious.

Boston had five .300 hitters, three men driving in more than 100 runs and two 20-game winners on the pitching staff. Ted Williams was the Most Valuable Player, leading the league in home runs and runs batted in – and coming within one hit of a triple crown. Four decades later, Williams would recall the 1949 loss to the Yankees as the biggest disappointment of his career.

Trailing by 12 ½ games on July 4, the Red Sox took the lead with a 19-5 run in September. They set a record with a 61-16 performance at Fenway Park. But when the pennant was within their grasp, they came up short for the second year in a row.

Parnell had plenty of success against the Yankees on other days. His 25th victory of the 1949 season was a four-hit, 4-1 win over the pinstripes. In 1953, he shut them out four times (three times at Yankee Stadium) – the first time any pitcher accomplished that feat since Walter Johnson did it in 1908. But on Oct. 1, 1949, the big one got away, and Parnell never made it to the World Series.

He had arm problems his last three years because he had thrown the screwball so much, but Parnell went out with a bang. On July 14, 1956, he threw a 4-0 no-hitter against the Chicago White Sox in the middle of his last season.

It was the first no-hitter by a Red Sox pitcher since 1023, and the first by a Red Sox lefthander since 1916.

“You have to have something working for you on days when you pitch a no-hitter,” Parnell understated. “That was one of those days I had a good screwball. I was setting up the hitters with my slider, then throwing the screwball.”