September 3, 1908: Rube Marquard, the $11,000 Beauty, throws minor-league no-hitter for Indianapolis

In the first chapter of Lawrence S. Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times, published in 1966, pitcher Rube Marquard recounts how a perfect game he authored in September 1908 precipitated a record-setting sale of his contract from the American Association’s Indianapolis Indians to the National League’s New York Giants.1 An impressive tale, but the Hall of Famer jumbled the details.

The Giants indeed paid Indianapolis the highest fee ever reported to that point for a pitcher – $11,000 – but in July 1908, not September. Permitted to remain with Indianapolis for the remainder of its season, Marquard fashioned a no-hitter, not a perfect game, on September 3 against the Columbus Senators. Weeks of cautious pitching after his sale to New York had earned Marquard complaints from across the Hoosier state, but he silenced his critics with a string of dominant performances, capped off by that no-hitter, as the Indians reeled in a pennant.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Marquard was a dominant semipro pitcher who spent his teenage years as a summertime batboy for the Cleveland Naps at League Park. He briefly pitched for two minor-league teams in 1906, but neither offered him a contract. Marquard’s bat-collecting days paid dividends prior to the 1907 season, when former Naps infielder Charlie Carr, a Cleveland sporting goods store owner and player-manager of the Class A Indianapolis Indians, signed the recently-turned-20-year-old to a contract. Optioned to Canton of the Class B Central League, Marquard tallied a league-high 23 wins, earning him a ticket to Indianapolis for the 1908 season.

Marquard’s 17-6 record  over the first two months of that campaign demonstrated his ability to dominate at the highest level of the minor leagues. Indians owner W.H. Watkins saw an opportunity to cash in on the youngster’s success. He agreed to trade Marquard to the Detroit Tigers, but the deal fell through at the eleventh hour.

Undaunted, days later Watkins hosted a live auction of Marquard’s contract.2 Representatives from the Giants, Tigers, Cincinnati Reds, New York Highlanders, and Chicago Cubs submitted bids. Watkins hoped he could get $12,000 for Marquard, but was happy with the highest offer, $11,000 from Giants owner John T. Brush. Expecting Marquard could use more experience before joining New York manager John McGraw’s pitching stable, Brush agreed to allow Marquard to finish out the Association season with Indianapolis.

Newspaper reports of Marquard’s acquisition trumpeted the price New York paid to get him, with a United Press report declaring, “This is the greatest amount ever paid for any pitcher for any team in America and it was paid in cash.”3 Excited at the prospect of earning victories for New York, Marquard said, “[I]n the meantime I’ll go right on winning games for Indianapolis. That’s a habit I do not care to get away from.”4

Unfortunately for Marquard, not winning is what he mostly did over the next six weeks. He dropped six of seven decisions with performances that were lackluster; his only victory notably came in a game that Brush attended. A rumor developed that during a trip Marquard made to Chicago shortly after his acquisition, McGraw instructed him to “develop a slow ball” (i.e., save your arm by not throwing hard) and that “his American Association record for remainder of the season would make no difference to the New York club.”5 The Richmond (Indiana) Palladium and Sun-Telegram passed along an accusation that Marquard was “‘laying down’ on the Hoosiers so his arm will be in good shape when he joins the Giants.”6 

Surely stung by these accusations, Marquard turned things around. The “$11,000 beauty,” as a Syracuse, New York, newspaper first called him,7 won his next three starts in dominating fashion. After Marquard allowed only three hits each in a pair of wins on the road in Kansas City, the South Bend Tribune attributed his slump to overwork and published a ringing endorsement from former New York Highlanders manager Clark Griffith.8 Marquard held the Columbus Senators to a single hit in his next outing, on August 30, prompting the Indianapolis News to open its game summary by mocking those who doubted him: “Pitcher Rube Marquard has blown up again.”9

Knocked out of his next start, on September 1, in the third inning,10 Marquard was back on the hill two days later. The second-place Indians – or Browns, as the Indianapolis Star invariably referred to them – were in Columbus at Neil Park to face the third-place Senators. Both teams had 80 wins and were breathing down the neck of first-place Louisville.

Columbus manager Bill Clymer sent a Rube of his own to the mound, eventual 20-game winner Rube Geyer, in a rematch of Marquard’s one-hitter the previous Saturday.11 Indianapolis wasted little time getting started before a “fair-sized” crowd of roughly 4,000, scoring a pair of runs in the first on “clean singles” by center fielder Paul Davidson, manager Carr, and left fielder Jim Cook.12

Given an early lead, Marquard retired the side in order the first two innings, and “got stronger after that,” according to the Indianapolis News. “He worked deliberately, but not slowly, and with just enough confidence to make him most effective.”13 By the second inning, Columbus began bunting for hits, but Marquard and company hoovered up each one, turning them into outs.14

The Indians tallied three runs in the fifth, with the first coming on a botched rundown and the others on a two-run single by Marquard’s batterymate and fellow Clevelander, Paddy Livingston. The score became 6-0 in the next inning when a double by 20-year-old shortstop Donie Bush brought in the one-day-younger Marquard, who led off the inning with a bunt single. The RBI was one of an unofficial league-leading 99 that Bush collected in 1908.15

Hitless after five innings, Columbus almost broke Marquard’s spell in the sixth when left fielder Art Kruger returned one of his offerings back up the middle. Bush, touted by SABR biographer Jim Moyes as “one of the finest defensive shortstops of the Deadball Era,” tracked the ball down behind second base and nailed the speedy Kruger at first by a step.16

The final run of the game was registered by the Indians in the seventh on Livingston’s triple to center field and an opposite-field single to right by second baseman Otto Williams. Both hits came off spitballing reliever Lee Fairbanks,17 brought into the game for Geyer that inning.

After eight innings, Marquard had yet to allow a hit, thanks to a fastball that “had excellent jump on it.”18  He had put a few runners on base, but how many is unclear. As few as three were reported by the Indianapolis News and as many as six by the Columbus Dispatch. None reached scoring position. The number of walks Marquard allowed varied by box score but all listed Columbus catcher William A. James as having been hit with a pitch. An error by second baseman Williams allowed Senators third baseman and future manager Bill Friel to reach first in the sixth.19

The first batter to face Marquard in the ninth was Fred Odwell, the elder stateman of the Columbus nine. A veteran of over 400 big-league games and the 1905 major-league home-run leader with nine, Odwell was the batter who connected for a two-out, ninth-inning double that spoiled Marquard’s no-hit bid four days earlier.20 This time he had no magic, grounding out sharply to Williams at second. Marquard then fanned Kruger for the second out of the inning and his fourth strikeout of the game. Bunk Congalton, the Senators best hitter, grounded weakly to second for the game’s final out. After four one-hitters and several two-hitters, Marquard had his no-hitter.21

The Columbus crowd mobbed Marquard, “soothing their injured feelings that they lost through wonderful pitching and such sparkling fielding that it was almost resistible.”22 The Indianapolis Star called Marquard “the biggest man in town tonight,” adding, “They are all taking off their hats to him.”23

Marquard’s no-hitter was the fifth thrown in the American Association that season. One of them was authored by an 18-year-old Kansas City Blues hurler who 10 days before this game made his major-league debut with the Boston Americans: Smoky Joe Wood.24

Pulling to within a game of Louisville with this victory, Indianapolis won 11 of its final 13 to overtake the Colonels for the American Association crown. Lightly used down the stretch, Marquard reported to the first-place Giants fresh and eager to contribute.25 He made his major league debut on September 25, losing to the Reds at the Polo Grounds. The next-to-last batter of that game was pinch-hitter Fred Merkle,26 who two days earlier turned certain victory over the second-place Chicago Cubs into a controversial tie with a baserunning blunder later dubbed “Merkle’s Boner.” Relegated to the bench for the season’s final two weeks, Marquard could only watch as Chicago overtook the Giants for the National League pennant. 

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Mike Huber and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the Sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Joseph Wancho’s Rube Marquard biography in the SABR Biography Project, Larry D. Mansch’s Rube Marquard: The Life and Times of a Baseball Hall of Famer (Jeffersonville, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998), and game summaries published in the Indianapolis Star, Indianapolis News, and Columbus Dispatch. He also obtained pertinent information from the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites.

Notes

1 Lawrence S. Ritter, The Glory of Their Times (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 13.

2 “New York Secures Marquard,” South Bend (Indiana) Tribune, July 1, 1908: 9.

3 See, for example “Rube Marquard Sold to Brush for $11,000,” Columbus (Indiana) Evening Republic, July 1, 1908: 1.

4 “Marquard Will Not Join Giants at Once,” Brooklyn Standard Union, July 3, 1908: 4.

5 “Marquard’s Change of Form Public Puzzle,” Indianapolis News, August 10, 1908: 10.

6 “Affairs of the Sporting World,” Richmond (Indiana) Palladium and Sun-Telegram, August 17, 1908: 2.

7 “M’Graw Fills Out Check to Good Purpose,” Syracuse Post-Standard, July 2, 1908: 3. The label applied to Marquard was a play on “$10,000 beauty,” a euphemism for a costly ballplayer that dated back to the 1880s. The term was coined to describe actress Louise Montague, winner in 1881 of a $10,000 prize offered by showman Adam Forepaugh in a “purported contest to find America’s most beautiful woman.” John Thorn, “Lemons and Lovelies,” Our Game website, September 14, 2020, https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/lemons-and-lovelies-852cf16fbc56; “The Handsomest Woman,” Washington Post, April 4, 1881: 4.

8 “Marquard Is Coming Star,” South Bend Tribune, August 28, 1908: 10. Griffith, who resigned from the Highlanders three months earlier, compared Marquard favorably to Christy Mathewson when Mathewson first joined the Giants. Griffith suggested that if McGraw brought Marquard to New York and game him 10 days’ rest, Marquard could be “a great factor in winning the pennant for New York.”

9 “Pitcher Marquard Has Again Gone Back,” Indianapolis News, August 31, 1908: 8.

10 “Toledo Puts Marquard in the Discard and Wins,” Fort Wayne News and Sentinel, September 2, 1908: 7. Earning the win for Toledo was southpaw Bill Lattimore, the number-one pick in the 1907 minor-league player draft who’d appeared in a handful of games for the Naps earlier in the 1908 season.

11 “The Rube Mowed ’Em Down,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 30, 1908: 10.

12  “Small Talk of the Game,” Indianapolis Star, September 4, 1908: 8.

13  A.R. Kling, “At Last Rube Hurls No-Hit, No-Run Game,” Indianapolis Star, September 4, 1908: 8.

14 “At Last Rube Hurls No-Hit, No-Run Game.” The Indianapolis Star took particular note of the defensive play of third baseman Bill Hopke, whose “snap throw[s]” on slow rollers in the first and the third helped keep Columbus hitless through the first three frames.

15 Various Indiana newspapers reported information about RBIs in 1908, but not until 1920 would Organized Baseball consider them to be an official statistic. See, for example “Satisfied with Men,” Muncie (Indiana) Morning Star, February 3, 1908: 6, or “Ganzel Thinks Well of George ‘Dodey’ Paskert,” Evansville (Indiana) Courier, March 31, 1908: 7.

16 Jim Moyes, “Donie Bush,” SABR Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/donie-bush/, accessed January 2025; “At Last Rube Hurls No-Hit, No-Run Game.” Twice compiling the highest range factor per game among AL shortstops (as calculated retroactively), Bush finished in the top five in fielding percentage among AL shortstops in every year between 1909 and 1920. Kruger finished the season with 36 stolen bases, tied for third in the American Association with teammate Joe Raidy, who played shortstop in this game.

17 No Fairbanks appears in the list of Columbus ballplayers posted at Baseball-Reference.com but statscrew.com shows a James Lee Fairbank on the roster with no statistics. The Columbus Dispatch identifies him as Lee Fairbanks, a pitcher from Utica, New York, suspended earlier in the season for reasons left unexplained. “Hess Will Join Naps,” Columbus Sunday Dispatch, September 13, 1908: 13; “Hitt Is Selection,” Columbus Evening Dispatch, May 21, 1908: 16; “Sturdy Joe Making Good Day by Day,” Columbus Evening Dispatch, July 1, 1908: 12.

18 “At Last Rube Hurls No-Hit, No-Run Game.”

19 The Columbus Dispatch and Indianapolis News box scores both showed two walks (the latter identifying them as given to Geyer and first baseman George Kihm). Only one base on balls, to Geyer, appears in the Indianapolis Star box score. “Rube Marquard at Last Pitches No-Hit Game,” Indianapolis News, September 4, 1908: 14.

20 “Pitcher Marquard Has Again Gone Back.”

21 “At Last Rube Hurls No-Hit, No-Run Game.” Congalton finished the season hitting .301, 28 points higher than any other Senators regular.

22 “At Last Rube Hurls No-Hit, No-Run Game.”

23 “Small Talk of the Game.”

24 “At Last Rube Hurls No-Hit, No-Run Game.”

25 Marquard pitched only twice before the pennant was clinched, and after it was, he worked six innings in the season finale. “Rube and Louie Report,” Indianapolis News, September 18, 1908: 18.

26 “15,000 Giant Fans Weep as Reds Knock M’Ginnity Out of the Box,” New York Evening World, September 25, 1908: 1.