Ted Breitenstein

Ted Breitenstein held the opposition hitless in his first major league start, did it again seven years later, and lost more games than almost any pitcher of his time, all for the love of one city. A St. Louis left hander who never wanted to pitch anywhere else, he spent his best years on dreadful St. Louis teams that turned strong pitching into losing records, and he won 20 games anyway whenever the club gave him a sliver of a chance. He led the National League in earned run average in 1893 and finished under .500 that same year, the story of his career in a single line. A craftsman with a deceptive change of pace and a hometown's devotion, he watched the losses pile up around him through no fault of his own. The Hall of Fame has passed him by, but St. Louis never did.

The St. Louis Lefty

Breitenstein was born in St. Louis on June 1, 1869, and he belonged to the city for the whole of his life. A left hander of medium size, he grew up on the local sandlots and pitched his way onto the hometown Browns as a young man, a St. Louis boy throwing for the St. Louis team. The fans took to him at once and never let go, and he returned the affection, turning down the chance to leave more than once to stay where he was loved. He was theirs, plainly and permanently. Few players of the era were so bound to a single place.

A Hitless Debut

On October 4, 1891, in his first start in the major leagues, Breitenstein pitched a game for the ages. Working for the American Association Browns against Louisville, he held the Colonels without a hit and won 8 to nothing, allowing a single walk and nothing more, one of the rare pitchers ever to throw a hitless game in his first time out as a starter. He had worked in relief earlier that season, so the feat came with an asterisk to the careful, but the achievement was real enough. A hometown kid of 22 had announced himself with a performance almost no one in history could match. It was the kind of beginning that should have launched a charmed career.

Hitless Again

By 1898 Breitenstein had moved on to Cincinnati, and on April 22 he did it again. He held Pittsburgh without a hit and won 11 to nothing, the second hitless masterpiece of a career few pitchers in any era could match for even one. The day carried an odd footnote, because Jay Hughes of Baltimore held a lineup hitless that same afternoon, the first time two such games had come on a single day in major league history. Breitenstein had now bookended his prime with hitless gems seven years apart, in two different leagues and two different cities. The big games were never his trouble, only the teams behind him were.

Losing for Von der Ahe

What kept Breitenstein out of the spotlight was the company he kept, the chronically awful St. Louis clubs of owner Chris Von der Ahe, whose Browns had been a dynasty under Bob Caruthers a decade earlier and were now a laughingstock. The Browns of the middle 1890s ranked among the worst teams in baseball, poorly run and poorly paid, and they hung loss after loss on a pitcher who deserved far better. In 1893 he led the entire National League in earned run average at 3.18, and his record for the year was a losing 19 and 24, the cruel arithmetic of pitching well for a bad team. He won 27 games in 1894 and 19 in 1895, the latter nearly half of his club's victories, carrying a sinking ship on his back. The losses on his ledger belonged to the men around him, not to the man on the mound.

The Craftsman

Breitenstein got his outs with guile more than power, a thinking pitcher in a brawler's game. He leaned on a deceptive change of pace, studied the hitters, and pitched to contact on purpose, using his eight fielders to spare an arm he meant to make last. Willie Keeler, no easy man to fool, said he was one of the few left handers who could find the plate whenever he wanted to. The craft kept him effective for a decade against the odds his teams stacked against him. Drink was the one opponent he could not always outthink, and it shadowed his career even at its height.

New Orleans

When the major leagues were done with him after 1901, Breitenstein was not done with baseball. He went south to the New Orleans Pelicans and pitched brilliantly in the high minors for the better part of a decade, posting an earned run average near a single run in 1908 and helping the club to pennants. He kept pitching into his early forties, then stayed in the game as an umpire in the Southern Association. Counting the minor league victories with the major ones, he won well over 300 games as a professional. The arm that St. Louis loved simply refused to quit.

Hometown to the End

Breitenstein lived out his life in the city that had always claimed him, a beloved local figure long after his pitching days. His wife Ida died in the spring of 1935, and eight days later, on May 3, Breitenstein died too, at 65, as if he had seen no reason to stay on without her. The Hall of Fame gave him a single half percent of the vote the one time his name appeared, the short shrift a pitcher draws when his losses outnumber his wins. The record never quite captured him, because it counted the defeats his teams handed him as his own. St. Louis knew better, and St. Louis remembered.