Ask baseball enthusiasts what the year 1927 means to them, and they’ll all give the same answer: the Yankees, the greatest team in history. Someone must have forgotten, however, to tell that to Horace “Hod” Lisenbee. In only his second major league appearance as pitcher for the Washington Senators in the summer of 1927, Lisenbee was called out of the bullpen to face Babe Ruth with the count already at three balls and no strikes. Three pitches later, the Babe was heading back to the dugout. In fact, Lisenbee would go on to strike out Ruth two more times that game and beat the mighty Yanks all five times he pitched against them that season. A native of Montgomery County, Lisenbee came to baseball late in life. “I never had a baseball in my hands until I was twenty-one,” he recalled. After a stint in the minors in 1926, Lisenbee was sold by Memphis to the big leagues to play for the Washington Senators. After two seasons with Washington, he spent four with the Red Sox. Cincinnati persuaded him to come out of retirement in 1945 to help its wartime club, and four years later Lisenbee rounded out his baseball days as pitcher, owner, and coach for the Clarksville Colts of the Kitty League. He finally retired from baseball to his Tennessee farm in 1950. “Hod” Lisenbee passed away in 1987 at the age of eighty-nine, the man who struck our Babe Ruth three times in one game.
