Photo Sleuth: 1970s Jim Rice

Written by: Jere Smith on 1st June 2009

Photo Sleuth: 1970s Jim Rice | read this item

I saw this picture recently on the Red Sox team site, and since it’s from my favorite era and features one of my favorite players, Jim Rice, I started trying to figure out the game the shot was from. Some things jump out immediately: Fenway Park, night, packed house, vs. the Twins, and of course, the 70s pajama uniforms. Those unis were only worn between 1972 and 1978, and they only had the red hats/helmets from ’75 to ’78. So there’s our four-year span.

The bicentennial patch was worn on the left sleeve in ’75 and ’76, and I don’t see it, though it could be hidden in this shot. But I really got the feeling this pic was from ’77 or ’78. Then I thought to click the link to the story, and it had an un-cropped version of the picture which provided a key clue:

rice02

Do you see it? That’s right, Rice has red cleats on. The team only wore these in ’77 and ’78. So now we’re down to two years. And the catcher, with “AR” and a “6″ visible, has to be Butch Wynegar.

So I started looking for Twins/Sox night Fenway games from ’77 and ’78, in which Rice and Wynegar played. I couldn’t really nail it down definitively, but then I went back to the article again and saw a photo gallery. The picture appears yet again, this time with a caption:

rice03

Okay, if you believe this, it has to be one of the ’78 games. There were two night games in May, but each only saw the park half full, so we can eliminate these. All that’s left is a four-game series in July. Game one was a day game. Games two and three were a Sunday doubleheader, with the second game ending at 7:26–so it wasn’t even dark when the game ended. Game four, July 17th, was a Monday night game, starting at 9:43 PM, which led me to believe it was an ABC Monday Night Baseball game. A news search showed it was, and was to start at 8:00, and another showed that it was a “rain-plagued” game (retrosheet.org does not show a delay, but I have noticed they don’t catch all of them), which explains the even later starting time. So all of Rice’s at bats took place in the dark, in front of this sell-out crowd.

It looks like he’s hitting a ball to the left side. He did this twice in the game, grounding to third in the sixth, and singling to left in the eighth. I like to think the hit is what we’re seeing, thinking that a picture is more likely to be published if it’s an important play in the game. I mean, why would the photographer have even given this shot to the paper if it was the groundout? “Here’s a pic from that exciting extra-inning win–it’s Rice grounding out!” Then again, I really have no idea if this was even a picture for a newspaper–it could just be a random picture. And that would be a lot of people sticking around if it was the eighth inning, considering this game ended at 1:00 in the morning and had a long delay. Then again, there’s not much difference between being there in the sixth and being there in the eighth. And what about the fact that this could be a foul ball down the left field line in the first inning? We may never know which at bat it was, but I’m almost positive we’ve got the game–July 17th, 1978. Thanks for playin’.

(Retrosheet, Baseball Reference, and Baseball Almanac were crucial to this piece, as usual.)

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Topics: photo sleuth jim rice boston red sox fenway park 1978