Top 50 Cal Sports Moments -- No. 14: Jensen's Impact

The first collegiate indication of Jackie Jensen's athletic prowess came in the 1947 College World Series, when he helped Cal win a national baseball championship

Jackie Jensen as a member of the Red Sox / Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics

As the Pac-12 Conference era comes to a close after more than a century, we count down the Top 50 moments involving Cal athletics.

THE MOMENTS: Two moments in the 1947 College World Series were harbingers of things to come for a Cal freshman named Jackie Jensen. On June 27, 1947, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Jensen entered the first game of the best-of-three national championship baseball series against Yale as a pinch-hitter in the seventh inning and delivered an RBI single to tie a game the Bears eventually won.  The next day, June 28, 1947, Jensen was the starting pitcher in a game Cal won to claim the NCAA baseball championship.

Pitcher Jackie Jensen / Photo courtesy of Cal athletics

THE STORY: Jackie Jensen would finish fourth in the 1948 Heisman Trophy voting while helping Cal land a Rose Bowl berth that year. But his first athletic fame at Cal came on the baseball diamond in the first College World Series, in 1947, providing an indication of the stardom he would achieve in Major League Baseball with the Red Sox.

Jensen spent nearly two years in the Navy after high school, and as a 20-year-old Cal freshman he was primarily a pitcher and pinch hitter for a strong Cal baseball team that qualified for the inaugural eight-team NCAA baseball championship.  Jensen was the starting pitcher opposite Texas’ Bobby Layne, a future star NFL quarterback, in the Western playoff finals, and Cal handed Layne his only loss of the season in an 8-7 victory that qualified the Bears for the best-of-three title series against Yale in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Cal trailed Yale 4-2 entering the seventh inning of Game One on June 27, 1947, but Cal scored one run to cut the deficit to 4-3 in the top of the seventh and had two runners on base when Yale opted to walk eighth-place hitter Doug Clayton to get to the pitcher’s spot in the order.  Jensen pinch-hit for the pitcher and laced an RBI single that tied the game and began a run-scoring binge that ended with Cal winning the game 17-4.

Despite Jensen’s youth, he was sent to the mound to start Game Two, and he worked his way through the Yale order for four innings while Cal built a 7-2 lead. His RBI double accounted for one of the Bears’ runs, and his blazing fastball was too much for most of the Bulldogs hitters. That included Yale first baseman George H.W. Bush, the future U.S. president, who was retired twice by Jensen and went 0-for-7 in the series.  

Jensen ran out of steam in the fifth, when Yale scored four times to get within 7-6, knocking Jensen out of the game with Cal holding the lead.  Yale tied the game in the sixth, but a throwing error by Yale catcher Richard Felske allowed Cal to score the go-ahead run in the seventh. Bears pitcher Virgil Butler got the final out in the ninth to complete the 8-7 victory and the Cal sweep.

For the series, Jensen went 2-for-2 with two RBIs at the plate and was the starting pitcher in the clinching game. He hit .385 for the season, and, after being academically ineligible in 1948, he was a third-team All-American in baseball in 1949, his final year at Cal.

Nine years later, as an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, Jensen would be named the 1958 American League Most Valuable Player after hitting .286 with 35 homers and a league-leading 122 RBIs. (Mickey Mantle finished fifth in the MVP voting that year, and Ted Williams was seventh.)  However, Jensen played just two more years of major-league baseball, a fear of flying and reported personal issues being the reasons for his early retirement. Jensen would later manage Cal’s baseball team for four seasons beginning in 1974.

*Top Cal Moment No. 15: Rose Tackle, 1958

*Top Cal Moment No. 16: Joe Cool, 1977

Only specific acts that occurred while the team or athlete was at Cal were considered for the Top 50 list, and accomplishments spanning a season or a career were not included. 

Leslie Mitchell of the Cal Bears History Twitter site aided in the selection of the top 50 moments.

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