Bill Hutchison

Bill Hutchison threw more innings in three years than most pitchers throw in ten, and the workload made him a star and then unmade him. A Yale man who came to professional baseball late, he led the National League in wins, innings, and games pitched for three straight seasons, winning 41, 44, and 36 games for Cap Anson's Chicago from 1890 through 1892. In 1892 alone he worked 622 innings, the last pitcher in history to cross 600, an arm asked to do what no arm could do for long. When the rules moved the pitcher back five feet in 1893, the effect on Hutchison was swift and merciless, and a great pitcher became an ordinary one almost overnight. His career was brief and enormous, the kind that splits a Hall of Fame argument straight down the middle.

The Yale Man

Hutchison was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 17, 1859, and took a path to baseball that almost no player of his era shared. He went to Yale, sang in the glee club, joined the secret societies, and captained the baseball team, a college man in a game built by sandlot toughs. He did not reach the major leagues for good until he was nearly 30, having spent his twenties in cotton mills and railroad offices and on minor league mounds. The late start cost him years a longer career might have used. When he finally arrived, though, he arrived all at once.

Anson's Workhorse

Hutchison became the ace of Cap Anson's Chicago Colts, a contending team in the early 1890s that leaned on his right arm more heavily every year. He was not subtle, a hard thrower with a fastball that writers compared to a streak of moonlight, and he simply took the ball and kept taking it. Anson, who managed his pitchers the way a farmer works a mule, found in Hutchison a man who would pitch every second day and ask for the third. The Colts rode him as far as he could carry them. For three years, he carried them very far indeed.

Three Years of Forty

From 1890 through 1892 Hutchison did things with a pitching arm that look impossible now. He led the National League in wins all three seasons, going 41 and then 44 and then 36, and he topped the league in innings and games pitched every year besides, pacing it in strikeouts in 1892 with 314. That 1892 season remains a monument and a warning both, 622 innings of work, the last time any pitcher would reach 600 in a year. He started both ends of doubleheaders, relieved between his starts, and pitched on no rest as a matter of routine. No one since has matched the sheer volume of those three years, and no arm was ever built to survive them.

Forty Wins Twice

Hutchison won 40 games in a season twice, in 1890 and 1891, one of the last pitchers in the history of the game to do it even once. The totals belong to a vanished version of baseball, when a staff was one man and a spare and the ace pitched until his arm came off. He thrived on the load for a while, a powerful, durable workman in his early thirties throwing harder than anyone cared to face. The wins piled up because Anson handed him every chance to collect them, start after start after start. Then the game changed its rules, and the arm that had carried so much finally had nothing left to give.

Sixty Feet Six Inches

In 1893 baseball moved the pitcher back, and the change broke Hutchison faster than it broke almost anyone. For years a pitcher had delivered the ball from a box whose back line stood about 55 feet from the plate, and the new rule pushed the rubber to 60 feet 6 inches, where it has stayed ever since. The added distance stripped Hutchison of the overpowering quality that had made him, his strikeouts falling by half and his walks climbing, and the nickname Wild Bill fastened onto a man who had once owned the strike zone. He went 16 and 24 that first season at the new distance, a workhorse suddenly pulling an empty wagon. The huge early workload and the longer mound together finished what either alone might not have.

The Decline

After 1893 Hutchison was never again the pitcher he had been. He hung on with Chicago through 1895 and made a brief return with St. Louis in 1897, but the dominance was gone for good. He finished his major league career with 182 wins and 163 losses and an earned run average of 3.59, a record that holds a giant peak and little around it. The numbers tell the whole arc, three seasons of greatness wrapped in a handful of ordinary ones. He had spent everything he owned in the early 1890s, and there was nothing left to draw on.

The Railroad Man

Hutchison left baseball and went back to the working world he had known before it, taking a post as a freight agent for the Kansas City Southern Railroad. He was an unusual man for his rough trade, a lifelong bachelor active in his church who did not drink or smoke or swear and would not pitch on Sundays. He died in Kansas City in March 1926 at 66, a Yale man and a railroad agent who had once been the most overworked pitcher in baseball. His Hall of Fame case rises and falls on those three towering seasons, magnificent and far too few. No pitcher ever burned so bright for so short a time.