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after batter—26 in a row after the man was caught stealing, to complete a Red Sox no-hitter. In fact, Shore got credit for a perfect game for more than 70 years, before a baseball committee ruled in 1991 that it couldn’t be regarded as a perfect game, since Shore hadn’t started it.
    Shore, who retired with 65 victories in seven seasons, went on to become a county sheriff in North Carolina, and he enjoyed the notoriety of his distinctive performance. He died in 1980, before his status as a perfect-game pitcher was downgraded to a combined no-hitter.
    “Practically everyone has heard of me,” Shore told Sports Illustrated in 1962. “People are always asking me about that game. I can’t say I really mind.”

    Real estate tycoon Joseph Lannin became sole owner of the Red Sox in 1914. He brought Babe Ruth to Boston, which helped the club capture World Series wins in 1915, 1916, and 1918. Lannin sold the team to Harry Frazee in 1917, setting the stage for The Curse.
     
    That was considerably more than Fenway could accommodate, so the Sox were content to accept the Braves’ offer to use their new playpen for the 1915 World Series. In case Carrigan and his teammates needed an added incentive, they had to stand and watch the Athletics raise the 1914 pennant on Opening Day at Shibe Park. Though injuries hobbled them early—the Sox were in fourth place at the end of May—their superior pitching eventually came into play. “I still believe, as do most of the other players in the circuit, that Boston is the really dangerous club,” Tigers star Ty Cobb said in the Globe on June 27.
    After sweeping three home doubleheaders in three days from the Senators in early July, the Sox were on the move and by July 19 had taken over the lead from Chicago. By then the Braves were making another surge up from the cellar and for a couple of months the city was daydreaming about a Trolleycar Series, but the defending champions couldn’t catch the Phillies.
    The Sox essentially had wrapped things up by September 20 after taking three straight at home from the Tigers to go up by four games. “Goodby, Ty Cobb. You failed to show,” taunted the Globe . Before they went on the road for the final seven games of the season, the Sox practiced for three days at Braves Field to get a feel for its supersized dimensions and found them suitable, if initially strange.
    By the time the club faced the Phillies in the Series, it found its temporary autumnal home quite comfortable. Sox pitchers Dutch Leonard and Ernie Shore each baffled the visitors by 2-1 counts to give the Sox a 3-1 Series advantage. As it turned out, the Fens would have been overrun by the crowds, which numbered 42,300 and 41,096 for the two games at Braves Field, with thousands still outside when the gates were locked. When Boston closed out the Series in Philadelphia, it marked the beginning of a mini-dynasty, with three championships in four years.
    Though he could have raised ticket prices in the wake of the championship, as most clubs do, Lannin actually lowered them for 1916, reducing a box seat from $1.50 to $1 and all but the first five rows of the grandstand to 75 cents. But even with Wood sitting out the season and Speaker dealt to the Indians, the Sox managed to repeat behind an extraordinary pitching staff. Ruth, who outdueled Washington legend Walter Johnson four times, posted a 23-12 mark, followed by Leonard (18-12), Carl Mays (18-13), Shore (16-10), and Rube Foster (14-7).
    For the only time in franchise history, two Sox pitchers threw no-hitters at Fenway in the same season. “The Broadway tribe had about as much chance of getting a base knock off the Oklahoma farmer as they have of changing the situation in Mexico,” the Globe reckoned after Foster blanked New York, 2-0, on June 21. By the time Leonard squelched St. Louis, 4-0, on August 30, Boston was firmly in first place. “Their specialty for two years now has been beating pennant rivals in the pinch,”