Peeking Through the Cornfield: Ghosts from Baseball’s Past

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John Clarkson

By Jordan Miesse

Hall of Fame pitcher John Clarkson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 1, 1861, right as the Civil War was beginning. Although it was a vile time in our nation’s history, the war did serve to aid in the proliferation of the burgeoning game of baseball.  Soldiers who had grown up playing the game in one part of the country would teach it to the men who were unfamiliar with it in their regiments, and by the 1880s, when Clarkson began his baseball career, the National League had already been formed. 

Clarkson played semipro baseball while attending business school and signed with the Worcester Ruby Legs in the National League in 1882 when he was twenty years old. He pitched in three mostly unremarkable games with the Ruby Legs, finishing 1 -2 with the team, and by year’s end the team had gone out of business. 

After pitching for two years in the minors, the great Cap Anson signed Clarkson to his Chicago White Stockings. Clarkson went 10 – 3 in that first year with Chicago, but better things were looming on the horizon. 

The next season, in 1885, Clarkson started an unfathomable 70 games and finished with a record of 53 -16. Those 53 wins are the second most for any pitcher in a single season ever, coming in second to only Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn’s 60-win season from the year before. To go along with those 53 wins, Clarkson racked up a league-leading 308 strikeouts and finished with a miniscule 1.85 ERA. 

He would go on to pitch in three games that year in the World Series, finishing with a 1-1 record and only allowing two earned runs. The Series would ultimately wind up a much disputed 3-3-1 tie.

Clarkson would continue his dominance of the NL for the next eight years. That stretch includes an impressive 1886 World Series showing in which Clarkson went 2 -2 with 28 strikeouts in a losing effort against the Browns and another 620+ inning season in 1889 when Clarkson, now with the Boston Beaneaters, won the NL pitching Triple Crown. He led the league in wins (49), ERA (2.73), complete games (68), innings pitched, and strikeouts (284) that year.

During that 1889 season Clarkson did something that no other pitcher had done before. On June 4 of that year, in the third inning, John Clarkson struck out all three Philadelphia Quaker batters on a total of nine pitches. This feat is now known as an immaculate inning and it has only been accomplished 103 times in the 153-year history of Major League Baseball, most recently by Max Scherzer last year against the Padres.

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Meanwhile, John’s two brothers, Dad Clarkson and Walter Clarkson, were also busy pitching in the National League. The three brothers’ 386-win total ranks fourth in wins by brothers, behind Phil and Joe Niekro (539 wins) and Gaylord and Jim Perry (529 wins), and Greg and Mike Maddux (394 wins).

There is a persistent and apocryphal story that seems to originate from the renowned John McGraw that at some point while Clarkson was pitching for the Beaneaters during a game, as the innings wore on, Clarkson urged home plate umpire Jack Kerins to call the game due to darkness. Kerins refused to stop play, however, so Clarkson was forced to get creative. As dusk was setting in, he procured a lemon from some undisclosed place and took it to the mound with him. Clarkson hurled the lemon to his batterymate and once Kerins called the pitch a strike, the catcher showed him that the pitcher had thrown a fruit rather than a baseball, forcing his hand to call the game. The story has remained a staple of baseball lore for a century now.

In June of 1892 the Beaneaters released Clarkson at the behest of new manager Frank Selee, even though he had a 2.35 ERA over 145 innings. He signed as a free agent with the Cleveland Spiders and won seventeen games with the club to finish the season. As good as he was in 1892, it would prove to be Clarkson’s final winning season and he would find himself in something of a new role as he was no longer the ace of his club. That job belonged to a 25-year-old Cy Young, who was pitching in his third season and won the ERA crown that year (1.93).

After finishing the 1893 campaign with a record of 16 – 17 and a 4.45 ERA, Clarkson and his close friend Charlie Bennett (also a professional ballplayer) boarded a Santa Fe Railroad passenger car en route to Williamsburg, Kansas for an annual hunting trip. Due to rainy conditions, Bennett slipped and fell off the platform and his legs were crushed under the wheels of the train. This incident is said to have had a profound impact on Clarkson’s already noticeably unstable frame of mind. 

Clarkson pitched one final season with the Spiders in 1894. His career ended unspectacularly as he posted his second losing record ever at 8-10. 

After his baseball career was over, he moved to Bay City, Michigan and ran a cigar store until 1906. The details are not very clear, but around this time Clarkson was declared legally insane and he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions. 

John Clarkson died of pneumonia on February 4, 1909, at the age of 47. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veteran’s Committee in 1963. His career accolades include an NL ERA title, the NL Triple Crown, 3 x NL wins leader, 3x NL strikeout leader, 3 x NL complete games leader, and a career WAR of 83.2, placing him squarely in the top 70 baseball players of all-time by that stat.

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