Today in Baseball History

JOHN LOWE'S BLOG
It’s the 100th anniversary of the most perfect game
October 2, 2008

One hundred years ago today, Cleveland right-hander Addie Joss went to the mound against the Chicago White Sox.

What Joss did that day remains the greatest big-game pitching performance in baseball history.

As the crowd gathered at Cleveland’s League Park on that afternoon of Oct. 2, 1908, the home team stood in second place in the American League. Cleveland was a half-game behind the first-place Tigers and a game ahead of the third-place White Sox.

The three teams had less than a week remaining in their race for the pennant and a World Series berth.

Joss, 28, was in his seventh season with Cleveland. The team wasn’t yet known as the Indians. They were the Naps, named in honor of the team’s player-manager, star second baseman Napoleon Lajoie.

In the weeks leading up to this start against the White Sox, Joss was pitching overpowering ball to cap his best season yet. In September, he threw a one-hitter and two-hitter and at one point allowed one run in 27 innings. All those September stats come from Scott Longert in his enlightening and well-researched 1998 biography, “Addie Joss: King of the Pitchers.”

But not even another epic performance by Joss might beat the White Sox on this particular afternoon. Joss’s pitching foe was the A.L.’s dominating workhorse, right-hander Ed Walsh of the White Sox.

You know how Denny McLain is the most recent 30-game winner? In that 1908 season, Ed Walsh became the most recent 40-game winner. It helped that he threw 464 innings.

On that crisp Friday afternoon of Oct. 2, Joss retired the first nine White Sox hitters. His mates managed to get him a run in the third. What should have been an inning-ending third strike got past the catcher, allowing Joe Birmingham to score from third.

The score was still 1-0 when the late innings arrived. We pick up Longert’s description in his Joss biography:

“Entering the seventh, the realization took hold that no Chicago batter had reached first base. A drama within a drama began to unfold among the nervous crowd. Winning the game was absolutely vital, but interest began to shift toward the potential perfect game. Sportswriters observed men throughout the grandstand holding unlit cigars, completely oblivious to anything except what was happening on the field . . . One writer noted that a pin drop could be heard across the stands.”

Joss retired the top three hitters in the Chicago order in the seventh.

He retired the middle three hitters in the eighth.

Walsh kept putting up zeroes, too. Through eight innings he had struck out either 15 or 16, depending which source you check. He’d turned this match-up with Joss into what some historians consider still the best pitching duel ever.

Joss headed to the mound for the ninth, three outs from the perfect game.

If a pitcher took a perfect game to the ninth inning in his home park today, the crowd would be in a frenzy. But on this day 100 years ago, the late-inning quiet among the crowd of 10,598 deepened into something like silence. As one scribe noted, by one point of the ninth inning, “a mouse working his way along the grandstand floor would have sounded like a shovel scraping over concrete.”

Chicago manager Fielder Jones went to his bench in the ninth with the bottom third of the order due up.

Doc White grounded to second for the first out.

Jiggs Donahue swung and missed at three consecutive pitches _ a three-pitch strikeout for the second out.

John Anderson, a 14-year veteran, batted with two out. He grounded sharply to third baseman Bill Bradley, who fielded the ball cleanly, then threw low to first . . . Here is how author Cait Murphy describes the rest of the play in her book, “Crazy ’08”:

“First baseman George Stovall makes a nice pick near the dirt _ and then drops the ball. But the thirty-four-year-old Anderson lumbers like an ice wagon, and Stovall picks it up in time . . .”

Umpire Silk O’Loughlin signaled the out.

Perfect game.

And no more silence.

“The crowd let go with an explosion of noise which some claimed could be heard 10 blocks away,” Longert writes.

And in those days before radio and television, the telegraph crew could start spreading the news a lot farther than 10 blocks. As Longert noted in the setting the scene in the seventh inning:

“Telegraph operators from Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and New York signaled through the wires for constant updates. ‘Hasn’t anyone reached first?’ The Cleveland operators feared a response to the requests would break Addie’s string. ‘Wait!’ they wired back. ‘Wait til the end of the game!’ ”

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Over the last 100 years, Joss’s perfect game has gained several rivals as the greatest big-game pitching performance.

In Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, the Yankees’ Don Larsen threw a perfect game against the Dodgers.

But there are several reasons Joss’s perfect game outranks Larsen’s:

• The Yankees scored two runs that day for Larsen, compared to the one Joss got in his perfect game.

• Larsen was facing a distinguished pitcher, Dodgers right-hander Sal Maglie. But, like most pitchers, Maglie was no Ed Walsh. And indeed, Walsh - like Addie Joss - wound up in the Hall of Fame.

• The Dodgers hitters in general couldn’t have been as familiar with Larsen (who pitched in the other league) as the White Sox hitters were with Joss (who pitched in their own league).

• Many baseball people will tell you there is more pressure trying to reach the World Series (which Joss was trying to do that day) than to win the World Series.

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If Earl Weaver and not Fielder Jones had been the losing manager in Joss’s perfect game, he might have said that “momentum is tomorrow’s starting pitcher.” He would have pointed out the White Sox could still split the two-game series.

And they did. In fact, momentum was yesterday’s starting pitcher. The day after he lost to Joss, Walsh got the final outs in relief. The White Sox won, 3-2. The Indians couldn’t recover from that loss, and the Tigers won the pennant by a half-game, even though both Detroit and Cleveland finished with 90 wins. A tad imperfect, wouldn’t you say?

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Addie Joss never did get to pitch in a World Series. Two and a half years after the perfect game, as the 1911 season was about to start, he was decked by an illness in his brain known as tubercular meningitis.

He died within days, on April 14. He was 31 years old. He was buried in Toledo, which had been his year-round residence since he had pitched for the Toledo Mud Hens.

Can we take anything but sadness from how Joss’s life ended?

I think we can.

The lesson is to enjoy today for all it’s worth. It might even be perfect.

laprimamirala wrote:

Jiggs Donahue swung and missed at three consecutive pitches _ a three-pitch strikeout for the second out.

I wonder if he's my great-gradfather?

laprimamirala wrote:

Over the last 100 years, Joss’s perfect game has gained several rivals as the greatest big-game pitching performance.

With all due respect to Joss, there is no way this is the best pitched game ever. So his team scored one run. So what? Why is the game better the fewer runs your team scores? If we want to go with a team not scoring runs, that only further bolsters the case for Harvey Haddix who indeed pitched the best game ever pitched.....

On May 26, 1959 Harvey Haddix retired the side in order the first 3 inning...and the next 3...and the next 3 therefore doing a very rare feat - retiring the first 27 batters in order. This did not give him a perfect game as his teammates had scored all of 0 runs in the process. So Haddix stayed in the game and had a perfect 10th. His team failed to score once again. Haddix pitched the 11th and retired all 3 batters. Once again his team did nothing for him. In the 12th inning, Haddix retired all 3 batters and was now perfect through 12 (no one else has ever retired more than 27 straight to start a game - Haddix had now retired 36 in a row). Again, Haddix got no run support in the 12. In the 13th the first batter hit a routine grounder to Don Hoak who mad an error, thus ruining the perfect game. This run would later score and Haddix would lose 1-0 on an unearned run.

While it is nether a perfect game nor a no-hitter (he did give up one hit in the 13th) the fact he retired 9 more batters in a row to start a game than anyone else has ever done makes it the best pitched game ever.