The Daily Gate City · Clinton, Iowa · 1914

Both pitchers were tight wads when it came to a pinch

Twelve innings, twenty-one strikeouts and one dropped throw. A pitcher named Faircloth, known as Rags of course, deserved better than what Keokuk's fifth error gave him.

Keokuk’s Daily Gate City sent this one back from Clinton, Iowa in July 1914: Bob Mitchell “won a great pitcher’s battle Wednesday afternoon” over Faircloth, 2 to 1 in twelve innings. The subhead calls it an “Argument Between ‘Rags’ and Mitchell,” and take a moment with that nickname. His name is Faircloth, so naturally the ballplayers of 1914 called him Rags. The paper doesn’t explain the joke because nobody needed it explained. Keokuk made five errors and “only one was costly, but that one cost the game.”

The writing is what gets me. “Both pitchers were tight wads when it came to a pinch,” holding runners at third with one down and letting nobody home. Clinton’s first run came in the second “when it looked like a million would be shoved across” and only one did. Keokuk’s lone tally scored when Marshall “was Johhny-on-the-Spot with a clean single to center.” Faircloth struck out eleven and even “hit the fence for a two bagger,” and it still wasn’t enough.

The costly error arrived in the twelfth. Hensling fielded the ball perfectly and threw to Stofer for the out at second, but “Stofer dropped the ball and both runners were safe.” Schliebner then “put the game on ice when he hit a hard grounder through the space between Gottschall and Hensling.” The box score runs all the way down through Umpire—Kennedy, who apparently called a clean one. Nobody yelled for his gore, or at least nobody printed it.