[Big Six]

Boston Globe, August 30, 1940

O’FARRELL SHAKY, BUT WINS #20 ANYWAY
Eleven Consecutive Wins For Red Sox Righty

CHICAGO—If a pitcher is a winner, he finds a way to get a victory for his team on days when his stuff is not its best.

Mike O’Farrell yesterday demonstrated that he is, indeed, a winner. The White Sox hit him harder than he’s been hit in some time, but like a boxer with a granite jaw, he took the best shots his opponent could give without falling.

O’Farrell kept his Boston team in the game long enough for its bats to awaken in the eighth inning, when they scored four runs to ice a 7-5 victory over Chicago.

The victory was O’Farrell’s eleventh in a row, and it was his twentieth of the 1940 season. He is now tied with Gene Schott of the Yankees and Hugh Mulcahy of the Senators for the league lead in victories.

O’Farrell left the game in the top of the eighth inning, when manager Bill Carrigan did something he rarely does. Carrigan pinch-hit for O’Farrell, a .277 hitter for the season. Babe Dahlgren made Carrigan look like a Svengali when he roped a double that plated the two-run margin of Boston’s victory.

“Mike was tired, and I played a hunch with Dahlgren,” Carrigan said. “Babe is a .300 hitter, after all, and he’s been very good coming off the bench.”

Indeed, Dahlgren has been a pinch hitter deluxe for the Red Sox this season, hitting .359 in that role with fourteen hits and twelve RBI.

Jim Henry and John Fritsch pitched a scoreless inning each to preserve O’Farrell’s victory. Fritsch earned his sixth save of the season and, despite his callow youth, is now clearly Carrigan’s choice when a game is on the line in the final innings.

The Red Sox and the Yankees, therefore, finish the day where they started, and where they have been almost every day for two weeks now: in a flat-footed tie for first place.

Said O’Farrell about his big day: “Sure, it’s swell to win twenty games in a season. I’ve never done it, at any level. It’s even more fun to match Hugh Mulcahy, because we played against each other in high school.

The best part, however, is the fact that we didn’t let the Yankees get ahead of us.”

Spoken like a true winner, Mike.