A Second on the Triple Play

J.P. Stormcrow comments :

It was back in 1920, player named Bill Wambsganss - (to be an Indians fan you learn to go way back and seize on whatever you can - can I add Tris Speaker to my fantasy team?)

Mr. Wambsganss, a.259 lifetime hitter and perhaps not fully internalizing his likely position in history without the play, once lamented:

Funny thing, I played in the big leagues for 13 years, 1914 through 1926, and the only thing that anybody seems to remember is that once I made an unassisted triple play in a World Series. Many don't even remember the team I was on, or the position I played, or anything. Just Wambsganss-unassisted triple play! You'd think I was born on the day before and died on the day after.

Forgotten yet essential players of Major League Baseball, each and every one of the quartet of them who participated in the World Series's only unassisted triple play.


The lot of them have unremembered names, in the main known only to specialists in baseball lore. Only the player who delivered the rarity, Wambsganss, a name that should be remembered for its own kind of rarity, for being the name of anything at all, is commonly mentioned in the unlikely event converstion turns to triple plays and someone bring up the one in the World Series. The story about the triple play in the world series is named for him, he has a Wikipedia page, which is likewise an unlikely name for a Wikipedia page.

In the fifth inning of Game Five of the 1920 World Series played at League Park, Wambsganss caught a line drive batted by Clarence Mitchell, stepped on second base to retire Pete Kilduff, and tagged Otto Miller coming from first base, to complete the first triple play, completely unassisted, in World Series history. Earlier in the game, Wambsganss' teammate Elmer Smith hit the first grand slam in World Series history off Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Burleigh Grimes, in the first inning with none out. The historic blast scored Charlie Jamieson, Wambsganss, Tris Speaker, and Smith. After managing to score a run in the ninth inning, Brooklyn fell to the Indians in an 8–1 loss. Cleveland winning pitcher Jim Bagby also helped himself by hitting a three-run home run in the third. It was the first home run hit by a pitcher in modern World Series history.

The lot of them are identified in an image from the Library of Congress on the Wikipedia page, the four of them off slouching by the dugout where the camera takes a good look at them for posterity. Each of them essential to the play, of course, each needing to be stationed just so for the utter rarity of an unassisted triple play to be consumated. The names of Miller and Kilduff and Mitchell commonly go unsaid, subsumed in the likier mention of the unlikely name of Wamsganss.

Bill Wamsganns played in the American League for 13 seasons from 1914 to 1926, mostly for the Cleveland Indians, but also for the Boston Red Sox and the Philadelphia Athletics. He was a second baseman who made 375 errors, hit seven home runs, and batted .259 in that time.

375 errors, even spread as thinly as possible over thirteen seasons, is a lot of errors each season. A whole lot of errors. However much he sustained the game by suiting up each day for thirteen years in the service of keeping American League baseball going, and however much those seven home runs must have come in handy at the time, still, would he really rather be remembered for a career of commonly chancy fielding or for having had an uncommon chance at fielding, making him the unlikely-named thing for that named unlikely thing, the unassisted triple play in the World Series?