July 9, 2019

OTD July 9

Blefary made his MLB debut in 1965 with Baltimore and won the AL Rookie of the Year Award that same season, batting .260 with 22 HR and 70 RBI in 144 games for the Orioles.

OTD (On This Day) in 1971, Oakland A’s catcher Curt Blefary scored the winning run in the bottom of the 20th inning, giving the A’s a 1-0 win over the California Angels. The game would set an AL record for the longest shutout in league history. The unheralded Blefary was a reserve outfielder (who occasionally caught) for the A’s in 1971 and he would retire from baseball in 1973. However, Blefary started his career as a highly touted outfield prospect for the Yankees & Orioles. Blefary’s pro career started in 1962 in the Carolina League playing for the Greensboro Yankees. In Curt’s first game with Greensboro, he hit 2 home runs. Blefary started the next year, 1963, again with Greensboro totaling a .268 batting average with 39 HR and 106 RBI in 154 games with Greensboro across parts of 2 seasons before he was sold to the Baltimore Orioles. He made his MLB debut in 1965 with Baltimore and won the AL Rookie of the Year Award that same season, batting .260 with 22 HR and 70 RBI in 144 games for the Orioles. In 1966, Blefary won the World Series with Baltimore, playing in all 4 games of the Orioles sweep of the Dodgers.

Overall in his MLB career, Blefary played 8 seasons collecting 699 hits and 112 RBI in 2,947 AB. But what baseball historians remember most about Blefary is in regards to his 1 season with the Houston Astros in 1969. As noted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, during road trips for the Astros, Blefary paired with Houston teammate and friend, pitcher Don Wilson to share a room on the road. Blefary was white and Wilson was black. While baseball was desegregated in 1947, Blefary and Wilson made history by becoming the first regularly paired interracial roommates in the history of the NL in 1969. Wilson was quoted in the newspaper saying, “It’s just hard for them to get it through their heads that we are just two human beings trying to make a living in the same game.”


Box score of AL’s longest recorded shutout in 1971: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/OAK/OAK197107090.shtml


Baseball-Reference: Curt Blefary’s career stats

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