September 7, 1899: Louisville Colonels’ ‘Mysterious Twirler’ Clay Fauver defeats Pirates for only big-league win

“Expect the unexpected,” an overused yet reliable phrase that addresses the surprising possibilities accompanying any game of baseball, proved especially trustworthy on what in advance seemed an inauspicious contest.

Neither team going into this late-season National League matchup in Pittsburgh on September 7, 1899, possessed much incentive, particularly the visiting Louisville Colonels, who stood 28 games behind the eventual champion Brooklyn Superbas. The Kentucky squad, despite fielding future Hall of Famers Honus Wagner, Fred Clarke, and Rube Waddell, ended up in the bottom half of the standings.

The Pirates, 22 games out of first, came to the meeting with a 61-59 record and were led by left-handed pitching great Jesse Tannehill, who that year posted a 24-14 record along with a 2.82 ERA. Tannehill’s career numbers (197 wins, 117 losses, and a 2.80 ERA, plus a .255 batting average) have fueled debates over his Hall of Fame status.

Tannehill got the start that afternoon while the Colonels countered with a right-hander whose actual name was not revealed until the game ended. As a Louisville Courier-Journal scribe reported:

A mysterious twirler won for Louisville to-day. On the score card he passed as Peck, but [owner] Harry Pulliam was authority for the statement that the name is an assumed one and is worn to disguise one much better known in baseball business circles. Pulliam asserted that he was bound to protect the new twirler’s secret, and as Manager Fred Clarke was also uncommunicative, the mystery remains unsolved.1

The stranger was verified later in the box score as Clay Fauver, a 27-year-old law student at Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Why the Colonels asked Fauver to jump on a train to Pittsburgh is not clear. Was Clarke’s pitching staff depleted? Did the short distance between Cleveland and Pittsburgh serve a role? Had someone recommended that Louisville look at what this pitcher might offer now and later? The fact is that Fauver was not asked to stay with the club after the game. He perhaps understood that this would be a one-and-done experience, as his quick return to Cleveland and his law studies the next day testify.

It was a rocky beginning for Fauver, whom the Pittsburg Post described as “nervous at the start.”2 Three batters into the home half of the first, the Pirates had a 1-0 lead. Ginger Beaumont led off with a walk, and singles by Jimmy Williams and Jack McCarthy brought him home. Pittsburgh added two third-inning runs on singles by player-manager Patsy Donovan, Bones Ely, and Pop Schriver. When Tannehill singled, moved up on Williams’s single, and scored on McCarthy’s sacrifice in the fourth, the Pirates had a 4-0 lead.

At that point, Fauver found his range, shutting out the Pirates the rest of the way, with just two runners getting as far as third base. “[J]ust as soon as the new man [Fauver] got over his first case of stage fright he pitched good ball, and kept the hits well scattered,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported.3

Louisville began to rally against Tannehill in the fifth, as William Hoy singled and later scored on Tommy Leach’s groundout. Aided by errors by Donovan in right and Beaumont in center, the Colonels cut the deficit to 4-3 with two runs in the sixth.

Tannehill took a one-run lead to the eighth, but singles by Louisville’s Claude Ritchey, Charles Zimmer, and Clarke and errors by Pittsburgh first baseman George Fox and catcher Schriver led to three Colonels runs and a 6-4 advantage. Singles by Walt Woods, Mike Kelley, and Billy Clingman in the ninth brought in Louisville’s final run of the day.

Clarke and Zimmer led the Colonels’ onslaught with four hits each. The most unexpected and memorable takeaway, however, was Clay Fauver’s performance: 9 innings, 0 earned runs, a win, and – as result of this being his only major-league appearance – a career winning percentage of 1.000 and a 0.00 ERA. The Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette heaped praise on Fauver’s performance, describing him as “a well-built young fellow, and he is going to make a reputation in the big league, because he knows something about the art of twirling. He has lots of speed, a good change of pace, and, better than all, a good head.”4

A doubleheader was originally scheduled, but a train wreck on the Pirates’ return route from a four-game series with the Chicago Orphans allowed only one to be played. The three-hour delay home and the absence of lunch may have contributed to the poor performance. The Post-Gazette reporter, however, was not in any mood to offer excuses:

It was probably just as well that Patsy Donovan and his Pirates did encounter a wreck on the Lake Shore road which delayed their arrival for a couple of hours, and therefore prevented a double header with the Louisville team. The Pirates had barely time to play one game, and goodness knows that one was enough for the 1,500 spectators. A second dose of the same kind of play would probably have driven the entire crowd to drink.5

Clay Fauver was an unlikely candidate to pitch his teammates to victory. At Oberlin College in Ohio (before law school), Fauver found popularity on campus as a fine baseball and football player and even more notoriety as an outstanding student, both academically and outside the classroom. He was the manager of the yearbook, assistant editor of the student newspaper, and a member of the debate team. To become a lawyer after graduating in 1897 was his only goal.

Joining a major-league team was never in Fauver’s plans, especially when he enrolled at Western Reserve University’s law school. The fact is that before the Louisville-Pittsburgh game, Fauver did not wear a professional baseball jersey.6

Because of his success against the Pirates, Fauver apparently felt emboldened to give the game another shot in 1900, in this instance, as a member of the American League’s Cleveland Lake Shores, a minor-league franchise. (In 1901 the AL was declared a major league by President Ban Johnson.) As was the case with his abbreviated stay with the Louisville Colonels, Fauver had to work around his Western Reserve demands. He appeared in only 10 home games for the Lake Shores, winning four games and losing six (no ERA statistic exists) while accumulating seven hits for a .206 batting average in 34 plate appearances.

Fauver put aside professional baseball for good after the 1900 season, the same year he earned his law degree. But he did find time to coach the Western Reserve baseball team to a 5-6 record in 1902 while teaching law at the university and practicing law with two Cleveland firms.

Fauver’s brief tenure in the majors took place during one of the period’s most controversial front-office machinations. A month before his sole major-league appearance, August 12, 1899, the grandstand at the home of the Colonels, Eclipse Park, burned down.

Barney Dreyfuss, owner of both the Pirates and the Colonels, with the help of Harry Pulliam, manufactured a trade that ended with the Pirates getting 12 players from Louisville. In exchange, the Colonels received $25,000. Three of the players who went to Pittsburgh in the trade were future Hall of Famers – Rube Waddell, Fred Clarke, and Honus Wagner. The lopsided deal helped Pittsburgh win four pennants and a World Series (1909) in the next 16 years.

On the other hand, Louisville’s major-league legacy abruptly ended. The Colonels were one of four NL clubs contracted from 12 to 8 teams after the 1899 season.7

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Russ Walsh and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

Career statistics and player information from Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.

Thanks to Mike Risley and Wendell Jones from the Pee Wee Reese SABR Chapter in Louisville for locating the Courier-Journal recap and box score on the September 7, 1899, game between the Louisville Colonels and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and to Allie Petonic from the Forbes Field SABR Chapter in Pittsburgh for the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette.

Notes

1 “New Pitcher Was on Deck,” Louisville Courier-Journal, September 8, 1899: 8.

2 “Lively Colonels Beat the Tired Pirates,” Pittsburg Post, September 8, 1899: 8.

3 “Too Tired to Play,” Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, September 8, 1899: 6.

4 “Too Tired to Play.”

5 “Too Tired to Play.”

6 “C.K. Fauver Stricken in Georgia,” Oberlin News-Tribune, March 5, 1942, https//dcollections.oberlin.edu/digital/collection/newstribune/id/872, accessed March 13, 2021.

7 The Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Spiders, and Washington Senators were also folded during the 1899-1900 offseason, reducing the National League to eight clubs. Jamie Talbot, “The National League Winter Meetings of 1899-1900,” in Base Ball’s 19th Century Winter Meetings, 1857-1900 (Phoenix: SABR, 2018), 486-492.