Background
Edward Augustine Walsh was born in Plains, Pa. , in the heart of coal country, to Michael and Jane Walsh.
Edward Augustine Walsh was born in Plains, Pa. , in the heart of coal country, to Michael and Jane Walsh.
In 1902, after a brief period at the University of Pennsylvania, Walsh signed with the Wilkes-Barre team of the Pennsylvania State League. Because a miners' strike made it a financial burden for fans to go to games, the league folded; but Walsh's catcher, Frank Burke, wrote C. J. Danaher, a stockholder in the Meriden club of the Connecticut League, and Danaher offered Walsh $125 a month to play there. Walsh demanded $150 a month and got it. He joined the Chicago White Sox in 1906. Though only a rookie, he became one of the team's leaders, winning nineteen games and leading the "Hitless Wonders, " as the punchless team was called, to the American League pennant. In the 1906 World Series against the Chicago Cubs, Walsh won two games, striking out seventeen batters in the fifteen innings he pitched. That year the series ended in a four-two victory for the White Sox. Pitching between 1906 and 1913 during the "dead ball" era, Walsh won 194 games for the weak-hitting White Sox. He shut out the opposition 58 times, and his career earned-run average, 1. 82 runs per nine innings, is a major league record. Walsh was one of a handful of successful spitball pitchers. He learned to throw the pitch from teammate Elmer Stricklett when Walsh joined the White Sox in 1906. Stricklett himself learned to throw it from its discoverer, George Hildebrand. It was this pitch that made Walsh a star. In Larry Ritter's The Glory of Their Times (1966), Detroit Tiger Hall of Famer Sam Crawford described what it was like facing Walsh: "I think that the ball disintegrated on the way to the plate, and the catcher put it back together again. I swear, when it went past it was just the spit that went by. " At six feet, one inch and 190 pounds, Walsh was a strong right-hander who never seemed to tire. Twice he pitched and won both games of a doubleheader (1908), allowing just one run in the two games. On August 27, 1911, Walsh threw a no-hit game against the Boston Red Sox. A detailed account of the game is given in James T. Farrell's 1936 novel A World I Never Made. After Walsh's successful rookie year in 1906, he won twenty-eight games, and in 1908 he compiled one of the greatest single-season records in the history of the game. That year Walsh won forty games. Only Jack Chesbro, with forty-one wins in 1904, has won more. Walsh finished 40-15 in 1908, pitching in sixty-six games, completing fifty-two of them, and pitching 464 innings, a major league record for innings pitched in a season. In 1908 Walsh was earning a salary of $3, 500, but Chicago owner Charles Comiskey at the end of the season rewarded Walsh's excellence with a $3, 500 bonus. Walsh's forty wins were not enough for the White Sox to win the pennant in 1908, however. The team was in the race until the final week, when on October 2, in one of the classic games of baseball history, Cleveland star pitcher Addie Joss defeated Walsh 1-0 to end Chicago's pennant chances. Walsh allowed four hits and one run on an error and a wild pitch. Joss pitched a perfect game, retiring all twenty-seven White Sox batters. After Walsh won twenty-seven games each in 1911 and 1912, his arm gave out in 1913. That year he appeared in only sixteen games, winning eight of them. His career effectively was over, though he fought to stay in baseball as a player. Walsh was traded in 1917 to the Boston Braves, with whom he was but 0-1. He pitched in the minor leagues in 1919 and 1920. After spending 1922 as an American League umpire, Walsh rejoined the White Sox as a coach from 1923 to 1925 and from 1928 to 1930. In 1926 he coached baseball at the University of Notre Dame. Ed Walsh died in Pompano Beach, Fla.
From 1906 to 1912, he had several seasons where he was one of the best pitchers in baseball. Walsh holds the record for lowest career earned run average, 1. 82. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946. In 1999, Walsh was ranked number 82 on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and was nominated as a finalist for the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
Quotations:
"Ball parks are smaller and baseballs are livelier. They've practically got pitchers wearing straitjackets. Bah! They still allow the knuckleball, and that is three times as hard to control. "
"I threw my best to every hitter I faced, and I found I had the strength to go all the way. "
