Spirits were high and buoyed even further in the nation's capital when it was announced by Bucky Harris that Walter Johnson would start the fourth game. Given the Nats' 2-1 lead in the Series, this made good strategic sense. If Johnson won, the Senators would obviously be in the driver's seat, but if he lost, he'd be available for a seventh game with sufficient rest. Johnson's opponent would be lefthanded submariner Emil Yde, who'd enjoyed a superb 16-3, 2.83 season the previous year but had slipped to 17-9, 4.13 on a pennant winner in '25. Yde would be gone from the big-league scene before the end of the 1920s, and the imminent fourth game of the World Series would prove a precursor to his demise.
Yde gave up a couple of walks in the first inning, and Johnson allowed runners to get to second and third in the second, but there were no runs. After the Big Train had retired the Pirates in order, the Nats struck in the bottom of the third. The damage they wreaked, however, would be insignificant compared to the negative impact of the play that happened next. Walter Johnson, the first batter of the inning, hit a clean single to left and the great man, trying gallantly to stretch the hit into a double, stretched a leg muscle. After the next batter, lead-off man Rice, beat out an infield single, Bucky Harris hit what might have been a double-play ball toward George Grantham at first. Grantham, who, as mentioned earlier, was really a second baseman, made a good relay but Glenn Wright dropped the ball.
The play opened the floodgates, and Goose Goslin then unleashed a huge blast into the left centerfield bleachers, a shot of well over 420 feet, his second home run of the Series. Moon Harris, the next batter, then hit one nearly as far into the bleachers in left, his second homer of an outstanding World Series for him. With the Senators suddenly up 4-0, Joe Judge coaxed a walk out of Yde, who was out of what would turn out to be his one and only World Series game after getting just seven batters out.
Johnson, who'd stayed in the game despite being bandaged after his ill-fated slide into second, pitched from the stretch but otherwise showed no ill effects the rest of the way. He gave up just four more hits through the last six innings after the incident, two of them to the infield. He's surrendered only six singles, and walked just two, as only one Pirate reached third base all day. The 4-0 shutout had the Nats just one win away.
The Big Train had not had the usual dominance and struck out just two, compared to the ten he'd racked up while getting his first win in game one. At 37 years, 11 months, he set the still-standing (as of 2000) record as the oldest pitcher to throw a complete-game World Series shutout. It had taken him a long time, but after 17 mostly disheartening seasons in the majors, he was now just one win away from a second straight World Championship . . . no team had ever lost a World Series after holding a 3-1 lead in games.
Sam Rice scoring on Goslin's home run:
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