Babe Ruth won three World Series titles as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, compiling a 3–0 record and a 0.87 ERA across the 1915, 1916 and 1918 campaigns. His performance included a then-record 29⅔ consecutive scoreless innings, a mark that stood unmatched for more than four decades.
A 14-inning arm and a single mistake
The streak found its truest test at Braves Field on 9 October 1916. Brooklyn’s Hi Myers struck an inside-the-park home run off Ruth with two outs in the first inning of Game 2. It was the only run Ruth would concede that day, and in World Series competition, the last run he would allow for 23 months.
Ruth squared off against Sherry Smith in a duel that stretched into the 14th inning. He delivered 13⅓ scoreless frames after that opening slip, keeping Wilbert Robinson’s Dodgers silent until Del Gainor’s pinch-hit won it for Boston, 2–1, and seized a 2–0 series lead.
Streak ends on a wounded hand in Fenway
The 1918 Series opened under wartime shadow at Comiskey Park on 5 September. Ruth hurled a six-hit shutout to beat Hippo Vaughn and the Cubs, 1–0, before an attendance of just 19,274 — the smallest crowd of that autumn, in the only World Series ever played entirely in September.
Four days later he took the mound for Game 4 at Fenway Park with an injured pitching hand, hurt in horseplay aboard the train back to Boston. He carried a shutout into the eighth inning, pushing his runless streak to a record 29⅔ frames — breaking Christy Mathewson’s 28-inning standard — before the Cubs scored twice to end it.
Ruth’s own fourth-inning double drove in two runs. Boston held on to win 3–2, and clinched the Series in six games despite hitting just .186 as a team, still the lowest average ever recorded by a champion.
A pitcher’s record buried by a slugger’s shadow
That scoreless streak would last until Whitey Ford surpassed it across the 1960 and 1961 World Series. Ruth’s nine regular-season shutouts in 1916, the most by an American League left-hander, remained unequalled until Ron Guidry matched it 62 years later — longer than either of his home-run records survived.
When asked about the hand that nearly kept him from the mound, Ruth told a Boston Globe reporter that “it was not the finger that was troubling him, but the stuff that was on it, and the stuff that was on it was putting too much stuff on the ball.” The remark captured a pitcher who was already becoming a legend, long before the bat took centre stage.
The three Boston rings belong to a version of Ruth that baseball’s later chapters almost erased — a left-handed ace whose October dominance set a benchmark it took generations to break.
