HISTORY | Tara McClellan McAndrew

It was the summer of 1896 or 1897 and the Baltimore Orioles were playing an exhibition match in Springfield against a local baseball team. “It wasn’t that unusual for a major league team to stop off for an exhibition game,” says Don Doxsie, sports editor for the Quad-City Times. “Teams traveling from Chicago to St. Louis by train might stop off in Springfield for an exhibition game to pick up a few extra bucks. What was unusual about that game is that (Springfield’s pitcher) Joe McGinnity beat the Orioles, a team he ended up playing for as a rookie in the major leagues a few years later.”

McGinnity, who became known as “Iron Man,” was admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946. Sports Illustrated named him one of Illinois’ greatest sports figures.

“You could make a case for McGinnity being the most durable pitcher in the history of major league baseball,” says Doxsie, who wrote Iron Man McGinnity: A Baseball Biography (McFarland, 2009). “Three times in one month – August, 1903 – he pitched and won both games of a double-header. It’s been done a handful of times in baseball history by anyone and he did it three times in one month.”

Hall of Fame baseball manager Connie Mack called McGinnity a “magician.” “It was difficult for a batter to get his measure. Sometimes his fingers would almost scrape the ground as he hurled the ball. He knew all the tricks for putting a batter on the spot,” he said in his book, My 66 Years in the Big Leagues.

That 1890s Springfield exhibition game was McGinnity’s first time playing the majors and, according to the Nov. 15, 1929, Illinois State Journal, he made an impression. Although the Orioles made fun of Joe’s dusty uniform and worn-out shoes (he had pitched a game in Chatham earlier that day), the jokes stopped when he started throwing balls. One batter said, “I’ve been trying to get a hit ever since the game opened and I can’t connect. He’s got something.”

That “something” was “old Sal,” a special pitch McGinnity developed while playing ball in Springfield. “He perfected that pitch to revive his career because he’d been released from a minor league team at a very young age and went back to play semi-pro in Springfield and Decatur,” Doxsie says. While playing here, he developed “old Sal.”