June 8, 1963 - Bill Monbouquette (pictured) pitched the Boston Red Sox to an 8-hit, 7-1 victory today over the Baltimore Orioles at Memorial Stadium. Frank Malzone, the American League’s leading hitter with a .352 average, paced Boston’s 14-hit attack with 3 singles that accounted for 3 runs. Monbouquette didn’t allow a runner past second base through the first eight innings and struck out eight in notching his seventh victory. Steve Barber, trying to become the first 10-game winner in the American League, suffered his fifth loss. It was the league-leading Orioles’ seventh defeat in nine games. Thanks to Kansas City, though, Baltimore retained its slim half-game grip on the American League lead. The Athletics edged the second-place Chicago White Sox, 7-6, tonight in Kansas City. Prior to today’s contest, the visiting Red Sox had manufactured just 1 run over 27 innings while dropping 3 straight decisions to Chicago and Washington. The Sox made up for a lot of sleepless nights for their freshman manager, Johnny Pesky, on this occasion, however. They peppered Barber, Wes Stock, a briefly effective Stu Miller, and Dean Stone for 14 blows — the most damaging of which were the run-scoring hits by Malzone, a double and two singles by Lou Clinton, a double and single each by Carl Yastrzemski and Román Mejías, a double by Dick Stuart, and a pair of singles by Eddie Bressoud. The Birds, meanwhile, failed to get out of the starting gate until large numbers of a partisan audience of 11,768 were bound for the exits. Jim Gentile finally avoided the pall of a shutout with one out in the ninth when he slammed his tenth homer of 1963 into the right-field seats beyond the 360-foot marker.
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