Jim McCormick

Jim McCormick was the first man born in Scotland to pitch in the major leagues, and he won 265 games before the sport mostly forgot him. A thick, powerful workhorse out of Cleveland, he threw more than 4,000 innings in ten seasons, won 45 games in 1880 alone, and posted an earned run average so low it places him in a club of four with Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson. He jumped leagues for money, won pennants for Cap Anson, and drank his way out of the game before he turned 31. The numbers add up to one of the better Hall of Fame cases outside Cooperstown. The man who built them had come a long way from Glasgow.

The Scotsman

McCormick was born on November 3, 1856, in Scotland, just outside Glasgow, and came to America as a boy of eight when his family left for Paterson, New Jersey, where his father made shoes. He grew into a big, strong young man and found his way onto the mound, reaching the National League with Cleveland in 1879 and becoming, by most accounts, the first player born in Scotland the major leagues ever saw. The accident of his birthplace gave him a small footnote in history, but it's the right arm that earned him the rest of it. He pitched the way the era demanded, every other day and often more, and he did it better than almost anyone. From the start, Cleveland leaned on him for everything.

The Cleveland Workhorse

For six seasons McCormick was the Cleveland Blues, the one pitcher a thin roster could not do without. He led the National League in wins in 1880 with 45, throwing 657 innings and 72 complete games and posting a 1.85 earned run average, a workload that reads now like a misprint. He led the league in wins again in 1882 with 36, and in earned run average in 1883, and he managed the club on top of pitching it for parts of those years. The innings piled up past 500 a season and kept climbing, the cost of being the only arm a team trusted. No pitcher of his moment carried more, and few carried it as well.

The Jump to the Union Association

In the summer of 1884 McCormick walked away from Cleveland for money, joining the outlaw Union Association in the middle of the season. He signed with the Cincinnati club alongside the shortstop Jack Glasscock, the two of them part of the exodus that gutted the Cleveland team and scandalized the baseball establishment, while their former teammate Fred Dunlap had already bolted to the Union's St. Louis club before the season began. McCormick was untouchable in the new league, going 21 and 3 with an earned run average under two against the thin competition. The owners blacklisted the jumpers, then took them back for a fine, and McCormick was pitching in the National League again by 1885. The money had been the point, and he made no apology for chasing it.

Anson's Ace

McCormick spent the back half of his career in Chicago, pitching for Cap Anson's White Stockings and finally winning the pennants his Cleveland teams never could. He went 20 and 4 in 1885 and 31 and 11 in 1886, the ace of a champion, throwing alongside the young battery of King Kelly and the rest of Anson's powerhouse. For two years he was a winning pitcher on a winning team at last, the reward for a decade of carrying lesser clubs. Anson, who rarely handed out praise, called him one of the best men who ever sent a ball whizzing across the plate. The Chicago seasons were the happiest of his career and very nearly the last.

A Case for Cooperstown

McCormick finished with 265 wins against 214 losses and a career earned run average of 2.43, a line that stands with almost any pitcher of his century. Only four men in the history of the game have thrown 4,000 innings with an earned run average that low, and the other three are Christy Mathewson, Eddie Plank, and Walter Johnson, all of them in Cooperstown. By the older reckoning that counts wins, he fell just short of the 300 that opens the door automatically, and his career ended too young to get there, which is most of why his name faded. The advanced numbers split on him, one modern rating system placing him near the top of all 19th century pitchers while another sees him more modestly. By either measure he belongs in the conversation, and for decades he has been left out of it.

Drink and Decline

The end came fast, and drink was a large part of it. McCormick drank hard in a game full of hard drinkers, and by 1886 his old teammate Al Spalding blamed his fading form squarely on the bottle, saying he drank about as much as all the rest of them put together. His great arm went quickly after that, and a 13 and 23 season for Pittsburgh in 1887 was the last of it, at just 30 years old. A pitcher who had thrown more innings than almost anyone alive simply had nothing left. The workload and the whiskey finished what either alone might have taken longer to do.

Paterson

McCormick went home to Paterson and into the saloon business, running a café there for some thirty years, a familiar figure among the old sporting crowd. His wife Jennie had died young of tuberculosis, and McCormick lived out his later years with his son, a city patrolman, his pitching days a generation gone. The evangelist Billy Sunday, a former teammate, kept up with him to the end and called him one of the best pals he ever had. He died in Paterson in 1918 at 61, the Scottish boy who had become one of the most overworked and underremembered pitchers the game ever produced. The record he left still waits for Cooperstown to read it.