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Pitching was clearly the Phillies’ problem, and there was not much of it available. So when Schoolboy Rowe, at age 33, became available, the Phillies rushed to sign him. Rowe was generally seen as past his prime, but so was half of baseball in 1943. Ruth was happy to add him to the team.

Fresh off his no-hitter, Paige started the first game against the Cubs, who sat in seventh place despite a six-game winning streak. The game remained scoreless through nine as Paige and Cubs starter Claude Passeau both mowed down hitter after hitter. The Cubs’ Stan Hack knocked in one in the tenth and Ruth finally lifted Paige for Rowe, who surrendered three more. Passeau sat down the Phillies in the tenth, and the visitors won, 4-0.

Si Johnson was next up in the rotation. The Cubs scored one in the first on Phil Cavarretta’s sacrifice fly and another when Si walked in a run, but Gibson got one back off of aging star Paul Derringer with an RBI double later that inning. After a Willie Wells single in the fifth, the Phillies played small ball to score him, then got two more on Willard Brown’s double to deep center. Ennis drove him in with a single to make it 5-2. But the Cubs scored five in the sixth when Johnson could not find the strike zone and went back up, 7-5. The game quickly got out of hand and the Phillies lost 14-5.

As the game the next day was being rained out, Veeck and the front office made some moves. Verdell Mathis was sent down to Utica to refine his mechanics while the Phillies claimed a former player of theirs, Cy Blanton, off the waiver wire from the Washington Senators.

Barnhill took the mound for game one of the doubleheader the next day. The Cubs got two in the third on hits by Bill Norman and Eddie Stanky, but the Phillies came right back in the bottom of the inning with three runs on Benson’s home run. Barnhill struggled with control and gave up the lead in the fourth with two more runs. The Phillies loaded the bases in the fifth and Josh Gibson unloaded them with a blast to left-center that the team later estimated went 460 feet. Bad defense—the Phillies had five errors—kept the Cubs in the game, but Blanton pitched the two final innings flawlessly to lock down a much-needed win for the Phillies.

In the second game, Si Johnson hoped to make up for his sad showing a few days earlier. He was sharper, but the Cubs took a one-run lead on Peanuts Lowrey’s RBI single in the third and gained another on pitcher Al Prim’s double in the fifth. The Phillies finally broke through on Ennis’s RBI triple off the center field fence later that inning. Cavarretta singled home one more for the Cubs in the eighth and Johnson was lifted for a pinch hitter. Brown (pictured below) yanked a two-run shot down the line that inning to tie the game.

Neither team could score in the ninth, and the game went into extra innings. Bill Nicholson homered for the Cubs off of Luis Tiant in the eleventh, but Willie Wells launched on of his own in the bottom of the inning to tie it up again. Brown sent one to the warning track in the twelfth, but just missed, sending it to the thirteenth inning. Boom-Boom Beck let the Cubs load the bases in the top of the inning and Podgajny came in to relieve him. Stan Hack scored on a sac fly, and the Phillies were once more down to their final three outs. They got two on, but Campanella fouled out to end it, making another devastating loss for the Phillies.