Nothing Doing.(The Talk of the Town)(New York Yankees)

With the Yankees' pitching in a perpetual flummox and the distraction of a home All-Star Game looming into view in the last summer of baseball up at the Stadium, this is a good time to bring up a vivid, semi-obscure Yankee team record that almost rivals those fabled thirty-nine pennants and twenty-six World Championships. Telling it only takes a minute. On Sunday, August 2, 1931, the Yanks were shut out on the road by the Red Sox, 1–0, in a game played, mysteriously, at Braves Field, the home of Boston's National League club in those days. The Yanks were not shut out again, away or at home, until August 3, 1933, a span of three hundred and eight games, or, as measured back then, exactly two seasons. Zeroes are baseball's most insistent number, but no other major-league team has come anywhere close to this astounding skein. The parallel record in the National League, for instance, is the Cincinnati Reds' two hundred and eight games not-shut-out, between April 3, 2000, and May 23, 2001. Last year's Yankees were shut down eight times, while last year's Twins were goose-egged fourteen times.

The statistically minded might suppose that the endless connivings of chance played a role in the Yankees' great run, but any eleven-year-old interested enough to punch up the 1931-33 Yanks on his bedroom iMac would know better the moment he saw that their starting lineup in those days included six regulars subsequently voted into the Hall of Fame: catcher Bill Dickey, first baseman Lou Gehrig, shortstop Tony Lazzeri, third baseman Joe Sewell, and outfielders Earle Combs and Babe Ruth (who was nearing the end of his career). There were also three future Hall of Fame pitchers on the Yankee roster--Herb Pennock, Red Ruffing, and Lefty Gomez--although, with one exception, the Yankee pitchers didn't play much of a part in ...