fter Gil Hodges hit his walk-off home run to give the New York Mets a sweep of a doubleheader against the Milwaukee Braves on May 12, 1962, pitcher Craig Anderson stepped out of the dugout and looked into the crowd for his wife Judy. She held up two fingers and Anderson did the same.
They were signaling each other the right-handed Anderson won both games that day, which happens more often than you would think.
New York won the first game when Hobie Landrith hit a game-winning pinch-hit home run off Warren Spahn. Those two victories are in the record books: it was the first time a team had swept a doubleheader by hitting walk-off home runs.
“You sure about that?” asked Anderson, now 84 and one of 15 still-living members of that first-year expansion squad. He pitched two scoreless innings in the first game and a scoreless frame in the second.
There are several ways to win two games in one day: start both games of a double headers, win both games of a double header as a reliever (Mariano Rivera did that six times); win a suspended game and then the regularly scheduled game later in the day.
