Dave Foutz

Dave Foutz won 41 games as a pitcher one year and drove in 108 runs as a hitter another, sometimes in the same season, one half of the best two way tandem the 1880s produced. Tall and thin enough to earn the nickname Scissors, he starred for the great St. Louis Browns beside Bob Caruthers, the two of them pitching and hitting their team to four straight pennants. A line drive dislocated his throwing thumb in 1887 and took his curveball, so he simply moved to first base and kept hitting for another decade. He managed Brooklyn, won more pennants there, and died young, at 40, of the asthma that had shadowed him his whole life. For a man who did two jobs as well as anyone of his day, he left remarkably little noise behind.

Scissors

Foutz was born David Luther Foutz on September 7, 1856, in Carroll County, Maryland, and grew up tall and reed thin, six feet two and barely 160 pounds, a build that earned him the nickname Scissors. He drifted west as a young man, played and prospected for a while in Colorado, and pitched his way to the notice of the St. Louis Browns, who signed him in 1884. He arrived as a pitcher with a sharp curveball and an easy motion, and he could have made his living on the mound alone. What made him rare was the bat that came with him. From his first full season he both pitched like an ace and hit like a regular, a combination the game almost never produced.

The Two Way Tandem

The Browns of the middle 1880s had not one two way star but two, and Foutz and Caruthers made the pairing famous. They pitched at the front of the rotation and hit in the middle of the order, traded turns on the mound, and carried owner Chris Von der Ahe's club to four straight American Association pennants from 1885 through 1888. Caruthers got the better nickname and the bigger legend, but Foutz was nearly his equal, and on some days his better. The two were friends and teammates for eight seasons, the twin engines of the best team the Association ever fielded. No club before or since has run out two players who could each win twenty games and bat in the heart of the lineup.

The Best of the Browns

Foutz's finest pitching came in 1886, when he went 41 and 16 and led the American Association in both wins and earned run average, at 2.11. He had won 33 the year before and would win 25 the next, a three year run of front line pitching that put him among the most valuable arms in the league. The Browns met the National League champions in the postseason series of those years, the rough forerunner of the World Series, and Foutz was in the middle of the fight each time. For three seasons he was as good a pitcher as the American Association had. Then, in a single instant, the pitching was over.

The Two Way 1887

The 1887 season was the fullest expression of what Foutz could do, and it reads like two players' work folded into one. He won 25 games on the mound, and he batted .357 and drove in 108 runs at the plate, a two way line almost no one in history can match. That summer he was both a front line starter and one of the best hitters on a pennant winner, doing in a single year what most teams need two men to do. The Browns won the pennant and lost a long postseason series to Detroit's Big Four, but Foutz had made the point. A man really could pitch and hit at the top level at the same time, and he was the proof.

The Broken Thumb

What ended Foutz's pitching wasn't his arm but his hand. On an August afternoon in 1887 a line drive off the bat of the young shortstop Ed McKean smashed into his throwing thumb, dislocating it and robbing his curveball of its old bite. He kept pitching for a while, diminished, then made the move that defined the rest of his career, setting down the ball and taking up a first baseman's job full time. The thumb cost him his best weapon, but it didn't cost him his place in the lineup. He'd always been able to hit, and now hitting was all his team asked of him.

Brooklyn

When Von der Ahe broke up his champions, he sold Foutz and Caruthers together to Brooklyn for a small fortune, and the two stars carried their winning ways east. Foutz helped Brooklyn to the American Association pennant in 1889 and the National League pennant in 1890, a fourth and fifth pennant for a player who seemed to collect them. He settled in as the everyday first baseman and a steady run producer, and in 1893 the club made him its manager while he still played. He ran Brooklyn for four years, never finishing higher than the middle of the pack, a kind and easygoing man whom some thought too soft to handle a rough clubhouse. The winning slowed, but the regard for him never did.

Waverly

Asthma had troubled Foutz his whole life, and it caught up with him fast once his playing days ended. He retired after the 1896 season, went home to the Baltimore suburb of Waverly, and died there the next spring, on March 5, 1897, at just 40, after an asthma attack at his mother's house. The men who had played with and against him remembered him the same way, a kind, decent, plainspoken man and one of the finest ballplayers of his time. He had won 147 games on the mound at a .690 clip and batted .276 over thirteen seasons, two careers in one body, and he'd done it without ever seeming to strain. Few players have done so much and asked for so little notice.