October 13, 1971, The Pirates Win The First Ever World Series Contest To Be Played At Night

On October 13, 1971, the first ever World Series game to be played at night took place in Pittsburgh. The hometown Pirates knocked off the defending champion Baltimore Orioles by the score of 4-3. After the O's took the first two games of the series the Pirates bounced back with a win in Game 3 then evened the series with a 4-3 winner. It didn't start the way the way the 51,000+ at Three Rivers Stadium hoped for, the Pirates starter Luke Walker got lit up for three runs in the first and didn't even make it out if the inning, fortunately for them the bats were up to the task and so was their bullpen. Danny Murtaugh summoned in Bruce Kinson to take over for Walker and he took care of the last out of the inning before pitching six scoreless innings while allowing just one hit. The Pirates recovered from the rough start quickly, in the bottom of the first Willie Stargell and Al Oliver connected with back to back RBI doubles cut the lead to 3-2 then in the third Oliver tied the ballgame with an RBI single. The scored stayed knotted at 3 all until the bottom of the seventh when backup catcher Milt May came into pinch hit for Kinson and delivered with an RBI single to give the Pirates the 4-3 edge in the contest. Dave Giusti came in and pitched two perfect innings to close the ballgame out. With the momentum shifted back toward the Pirates they took a lead in the series with  a Game 5 victory, then the Orioles won Game 6 to force a winner take all Game 7. The Pirates took the decisive game and became Champions for the first time since 1960, it was coincidentally on the anniversary of Bill Mazerowski's game winning homer in Game 7 of the 1960 Fall Classic.

Check out the box score: http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PIT/PIT197110130.shtml

Read about Mazerowski's shot in 1960 here: http://tinyurl.com/9ojbvtq