Triple Crown winner Yaz got a nice tie in 1967

In the seventh inning of the next-to-last game of the 1967 season, Carl Yastrzemski of the Red Sox hit his league-leading 44th home run. In the ninth inning of that game, the Twins' Harmon Killebrew hit his 44th. They finished tied for first, which didn't keep Yaz from a singular distinction.

He was credited with winning the Triple Crown as the league leader in batting average, home runs and runs batted in for a season, and still is officially considered the most recent player to have achieved that feat - even though he shared one leg of that crown with Killebrew.

The policy of Major League Baseball, in the case of ties, is to consider each of the players a league leader. "If you go through, say, the home run leaders year by year, if there is a tie, everybody is listed," said Frank Labombarda, a member of the baseball staff at the Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician of Major League Baseball.

That is, players involved in a tie aren't called "co-leaders." Each is seen as a title- holder. So baseball never attached an asterisk to Yastrzemski's achievement, although some purists consider Frank Robinson's Triple Crown in 1966 to have been the last pure one.

Robinson, who did not respond to requests for an interview, has suggested as much in the past.

"It says you must 'lead the league' in all three," Robinson told the Seattle Times in 2003. "He didn't. He tied. Is that really winning the Triple Crown?"

The paper did add that "Robinson's eyes were twinkling when he said it."

In any case, Yastrzemski's feat lived for many years in a restaurant on Main Street in Bridgehampton, his hometown. Billy's Triple Crown was decorated with much Yaz memorabilia, collected and displayed by the proprietor, Billy DePetris, Yastrzemski's high school teammate, with whom the Hall of Famer grew up playing sandlot ball nearby.