Did Pete Dowling pitch a no-hitter in 1901? It’s complicated
Cleveland Blues pitcher Pete Dowling was great one June afternoon in 1901. Just how great, we might never know.
The only memories that remain of a game played on a Sunday afternoon in June 1901 between the hometown Milwaukee Brewers and the visiting Cleveland Blues are tiny blurbs in the next-day newspapers. There are no videos, no photographs, certainly no one alive today who was there at the Lloyd Street Grounds. But the slim record shows that the 4,500 fans in attendance witnessed Cleveland pitcher Pete Dowling have the game of his life.
Dowling was a 24-year-old, 5-foot-11 southpaw who had an otherwise forgettable career. He won only 39 games in his brief Major League tenure while losing 64. He played his last game in the big leagues at the age of 25 and was dead just four years later. On that June day, though, he made history.
Or did he? We might never know for sure, and that’s what makes his story so fascinating.
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To understand how Dowling came to be on the mound in Milwaukee that day, pitching against players he was teammates with just a month earlier, you have to go back to July 15, 1876. Henry James Peter Dowling was the first of seven children born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Irish immigrants, Michael and Ellen. His father worked as a laborer; his mother was a clothes washer. The family was working-class, and young “Pete” grew up playing on the sandlots of St. Louis.
Dowling signed his first professional contract in 1897 with a team from Paducah, Kentucky in the Class C Independent Central League. Records from the Central League are hard to come by; the league folded in July, and Dowling wound up on the Louisville Colonels of the National League, the top professional league in the country.
He made his big league debut on July 17, two days after his 21st birthday, pitching Louisville to a 12–6 win over a New York Giants lineup that included future Hall of Fame shortstop George Davis and Kid Gleason, best remembered as the manager of the ‘Black Sox’ in 1919. Louisville finished the season in 11th place, but Dowling got to play with some future legends. Honus Wagner made his debut just two days after Dowling. Rube Waddell joined the club in September. Dowling made four starts in the 1897 season, winning one with a 5.88 ERA.
The Colonels finished near the bottom of the National League in ninth place each of the next two seasons. Dowling’s record matched the club’s. He won only 27 of his 65 starts while losing 39. He led the club with a 3.05 ERA in 1899 but went 13–17.
Following the 1899 season, the National League decided to reduce in size from 12 teams to eight, eliminating Washington, Cleveland, Baltimore…and Louisville. Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the Colonels, purchased part of the Pittsburgh Pirates and took some of his Louisville players with him, including Wagner and future Hall of Famer Fred Clarke.
Dowling was expected to join them in Pittsburgh, but he never played for the Pirates because of a problem that would plague him for the rest of his tragically short life: he was an alcoholic. After going back to Kentucky, where his family owned a farm, he was arrested in Paducah for drunkenness and burned down the jailhouse after kicking over a hot stove. Dreyfuss did not want Dowling anywhere near his club in Pittsburgh and sold his rights to the Milwaukee Brewers of the new American League.
Dowling enjoyed a productive 1900 season in Milwaukee, playing for legendary manager Connie Mack. He finished second on the club with 16 wins in 39 starts and led the team in innings pitched and strikeouts. Before the 1901 season began, American League president Ban Johnson declared it a Major League, inaugurating the Modern Era of baseball history. Dowling was back in the big leagues after one year, but Mack was no longer his manager. The “Tall Tactician” took over the Philadelphia club, beginning a 50-year career as manager of the Athletics.
The American League coaxed several of the National League’s top players to join, and the better competition led to Dowling suffering a decline in performance. He appeared in 10 games with Milwaukee, including four starts, giving up 31 earned runs in 49.2 innings pitched (a 5.62 ERA). Believing he was no longer the pitcher he was just the year before, the Brewers sold him to the Cleveland Blues on June 1.
So there was Dowling, a few weeks later, taking the mound for the Blues against his former Brewers teammates on June 30. The game took place at Lloyd Street Grounds, at the corner of West Lloyd St and North 18th Street. The site is now occupied by Johnsons Park, best known for its 16-foot-tall sculpture of a tyrannosaurus rex.
Cleveland won the game 7–0, with Dowling pitching a complete game. That is an established fact. But here is where the historical record becomes cloudy: did Dowling hold the Brewers hitless, or did he finish with a one-hitter?
Newspaper accounts of the game are unanimous that Dowling surrendered an infield single to Wid Conroy in the seventh inning. Here is how the St. Paul Globe described it the following day: “Dowling pitched a wonderful game against his old teammates today, letting them down with but one scratch, this being a hot drive by Conroy to Bradley, who could not handle it in time to put the runner out.”
The Washington Times adds that the Milwaukee crowd gave a nice reception to their former pitcher throughout the game: “Three weeks ago Milwaukee let ‘Pete’ Dowling go because the Brewers thought he was no good. Today he pitched against the home team, held his former teammates down to one hit, and wound up by shutting out the local talent. Dowling’s good work was appreciated by the crowd, and sympathy was with him throughout the game.”
So, you might think, the matter was settled. Dowling pitched a one-hitter against the Brewers. But the story becomes more complicated when examining the record. For, at some point in the proceeding 119 years, Conroy’s hit was eventually changed to an error on Cleveland third baseman Bill Bradley.
Conroy’s career statistics do not give him credit for a hit on June 30. All the major databases of baseball history — Baseball-Reference, Retrosheet, Baseball Almanac, Fangraphs, and MLB.com — are in agreement that Conroy finished the 1901 season with 129 hits and a .256 batting average. Using the Wayback Machine, it’s clear that his record has not changed since at least 2003. Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet go further, including a complete game log of Conroy’s season. Adding up his hits from the other 130 games he played in that season, he finishes with exactly 129, the same number he’s given credit for. According to the “official” baseball record, Conroy went 0–3 against Dowling on June 30.
The same is true of Bradley. His error totals for 1901 are the same across every database, 37. That includes one error on June 30 against Milwaukee, Conroy’s supposed ‘hit.’ The box scores maintained by both Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet give Dowling’s line as nine innings pitched, zero hits, four walks, and no strikeouts.
But if Bradley was charged with an error on the play, and Conroy wasn’t given credit for the hit, then why hasn’t Dowling been included on the list of all-time no-hitters? The list maintained by MLB.com does not include him. Neither does Baseball Almanac. Retrosheet only added his name on Aug. 9, more than 119 years after the game. The performance would have lasting implications. Dowling would have the first no-hitter ever thrown in the American League. He would be the first in the Modern Era to throw one. And he would have the first no-hitter in now-Indians franchise history. For more than a century, though, Dowling has been denied membership in the no-hitter club.
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His subsequent career landed him out of the big leagues at the end of the season. He lost 22 games for Cleveland in 1901, still an Indians franchise record. Only one other pitcher, Luis Tiant in 1969, has lost 20 games for Cleveland since. Given how pitchers are used in the modern era, it’s a record not likely to ever be broken.
The following year, Cleveland included a stipulation in Dowling’s contract that required him to stay sober. He balked at the offer and decided to instead head west, pitching for Sacramento of the California League. While playing for Sacramento, Dowling made national headlines when he saved three policemen from drowning in the Sacramento River.
He joined Butte of the Pacific Northwest League in 1902, helping the Miners win the league pennant. In 1903, after Butte moved to the Pacific National League, Dowling led the league with 30 wins as the Miners again won the league championship.
Dowling attempted to rejoin the Major Leagues in 1904, heading to camp with the St. Louis Cardinals. But his heavy drinking had left him out of shape, and the Cardinals returned him to Butte. He played the first part of 1905 for a team in Ogden, Utah before signing with a semipro club in La Grande, Oregon, a town of 4,000 people.
He was scheduled to pitch for La Grande in early July but missed his train on June 30. It was four years to the day since his most memorable accomplishment on the baseball diamond. Choosing to walk along the tracks to La Grande, he never heard the train’s whistle approaching. He died immediately upon impact at the age of 28.
Dowling was a beloved figure around the sport in spite of his battles with the bottle. The Seattle Times described his Butte manager Jimmy McCloskey as being in “tears” when talking about his former southpaw.
“When he was sober there was not a more decent chap in the business than this same erratic southpaw,” the paper reported. “It was a sad ending to a brilliant career. He was as tender-hearted as a woman and generous to a fault but he could not let liquor along and his end was a tragic one.”
Dowling quickly disappeared from the national baseball consciousness. It was only with the discovery of the box score from that June day in Milwaukee, 119 years later, that he finally received his due. He was far from perfect off the field, but on it, at least for one game, he came pretty close.
