Myril Hoag

June 6, 1934. Fenway Park, first game of a doubleheader. Babe Ruth was 39 years old and playing a part-time schedule in what would be his last season as a Yankee, so a 26-year-old reserve outfielder named Myril Hoag got the start in his place. Hoag came up six times that afternoon. He got a hit all six times -- singles, every one of them -- and the Yankees routed Boston 15-3. Nobody in the American League had done that in a nine-inning game since 1932. Nobody wearing pinstripes had ever done it at all.

That's the headline moment of Myril Hoag's career, and it's a good one. It's also not the whole story. Hoag spent parts of eight seasons in the Bronx as a backup outfielder buried behind Hall of Famers, got run over by a rookie named Joe DiMaggio in a collision that nearly killed him, and still walked away with three World Series rings. Not bad for a guy who spent one of those eight years exiled to Newark because the big club simply didn't have room for him.

The $75,000 Afterthought

Hoag broke in with the Sacramento Solons of the Pacific Coast League as an 18-year-old in 1926, and by 1930 he'd turned himself into a real prospect -- .337 with 17 home runs and 121 RBI that season, numbers that got the Yankees to pay a reported $75,000 for him amid plenty of fanfare. That was a serious price tag for a corner outfielder in 1930.

Then he got to New York and ran into a problem no bonus check could fix: the outfield was already full. Ruth, Earle Combs, and Ben Chapman all hit .315 or better that year. Hoag made his debut on April 15, 1931, and the Yankees found him all of 28 at-bats across 44 games. Big money, small role. He spent 1932 in largely the same spot -- available, useful in flashes, mostly out of the way -- and it was enough. The Yankees swept the Cubs that October, and Hoag had his first ring without doing much to earn it on the field.

The organization optioned him to the Newark Bears for all of 1933, where the International League club won 102 games and the pennant with a young Red Rolfe and a young Johnny Murphy on the roster too. A year in the minors wasn't a demotion so much as a parking spot. Hoag was back in the Bronx by 1934.

Six Singles and a Piece of History

That's the season the six-hit game happened, and it's worth being precise about what it actually was. Zaza Harvey had gone 6-for-6, all singles, back in 1902. Doc Cramer matched it in 1932 -- two years before Hoag ever touched Fenway that afternoon. So Hoag didn't invent anything on June 6, 1934. He tied an existing American League record, and he became the first Yankee in franchise history to pull it off. Cramer would do it again in 1935. Nobody in pinstripes matched it again until Johnny Damon in 2008, and even Damon needed a walk-off single to get there.

Six singles isn't a glamorous way to make history -- no doubles, no triples, nothing over the fence, just line drive after line drive finding grass. That's sort of the whole Myril Hoag story in miniature: never the loudest thing on the field, but somehow always in the box score when it mattered.

The Collision

The 1936 Yankees were loaded -- a rookie center fielder named Joe DiMaggio had just arrived and was hitting like he belonged on the same roster as Lou Gehrig and Bill Dickey. On July 28, in Detroit, Tigers slugger Goose Goslin drove one into the right-center gap. DiMaggio came over from center, Hoag came over from right, and neither man heard the other coming. They collided at full speed. Both were knocked out cold. Goslin circled the bases for an inside-the-park home run while two Yankees outfielders lay on the grass.

Hoag walked it off, or seemed to. He played the next day and even picked up a hit. Then, on July 30, he collapsed in his hotel room with a blood clot on the brain. Surgeons at Harper Hospital in Detroit operated, successfully, but his season was over. He'd been hitting .320 with 37 RBI at the time -- the best stretch of his career, cut off in the middle of July because a routine fly ball turned into a collision nobody walked away from clean.

He came back in 1937 and played 110 games, batting .302, as if nothing had happened. It hadn't cost him his career. It would eventually cost him something else -- headaches and dizzy spells that followed him for years, the kind of thing 1930s medicine didn't have a great answer for.

Two More Rings

The 1937 World Series against the Giants was Hoag's best October. He played all five games, went 6-for-20, and hit a home run in Game 5 that gave the Yankees their first run in a 4-2 clincher. That's a championship-winning at-bat from a guy who'd been buried on the bench three years earlier. The following October, the Yankees swept the Cubs again, and Hoag got into Games 2 and 4 -- on base when Frankie Crosetti went deep in Game 2, aboard again on a Stan Hack throwing error in Game 4. Three rings, all with real, if modest, contributions attached to each one.

That 1938 sweep was his last World Series. On October 26, 1938, the Yankees traded Hoag and catcher Joe Glenn to the St. Louis Browns for pitcher Oral Hildebrand and outfielder Buster Mills -- Hildebrand was the guy New York actually wanted, and he went on to win 10 games for a 1939 club that finished 106-45 and swept the World Series (without Hoag on the roster for the first time in three tries). Hoag was the throw-in. And in one of those quirks that sums up a role player's career, he had his best individual year after he left the Bronx. He hit .295 with 142 hits, 10 home runs, and 75 RBI for St. Louis in 1939, good enough to make the American League All-Star team. He'd never come close to an All-Star nod in seven years wearing pinstripes. Sometimes a change of scenery just works.

He kept playing into the 1940s -- Chicago White Sox, a stint in the Army Air Corps that ended with a medical discharge in November 1943 (the headaches from 1936 hadn't gone away), then a return to the majors with the White Sox and finally the Cleveland Indians before he retired after the 1945 season. Thirteen years, four organizations, one very famous six-hit game, and three rings that started with a guy who couldn't crack the lineup and ended with a guy who kept getting on base in October.

Six singles in one afternoon, a piece of the record book, and a career that never had one signature Hall of Fame season to hang it on -- just three championship rings and a whole lot of quiet, useful at-bats in between. That's about as good a career as a bench outfielder ever put together in pinstripes.