what’s in a box

If you love baseball and you love history, you look up box scores. It’s what you do. There is a profound delight in ferreting out an old box, whether it’s in a newspaper clipping or, more likely these days, a data base on a website. You’re bound to find something that will suck you in and take you back to a bygone time. To wit: Joe Gibbon, the former Ole Miss star from Hickory who died on Wednesday, made his big league debut on April 17, 1960. How’d it go? Thanks to baseball-reference.com, you can pull up the box score and find out in rich detail. It was Game 2 of a Sunday doubleheader at Forbes Field, Cincinnati vs. Pittsburgh. There were 16,000-plus in the park at the start of the day. Gibbon came on for the Pirates in the eighth inning of a game the Bucs trailed 5-0. The big lefty worked two scoreless innings, yielding three hits and a walk, against a Reds lineup that included Frank Robinson, Billy Martin and Vada Pinson. Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski and Dick Groat played for Pittsburgh that day. In the bottom of the ninth, the Pirates scored six times. Hal Smith, pinch-hitting for Gibbon, hit a three-run homer. Bob Skinner hit a two-run, game-winning blast off Ted Wieand. Gibbon got the win. You can’t tell from the box score how he felt, but it had to be pretty darn good. And it was just the start of a magical rookie season that culminated with a World Series championship.