Elmer Flick

 Original article written by Angelo Louisa
Elmer Flick – Society for American Baseball Research (sabr.org)
Researched and compiled by Carrie Birdsong

Best known as the player who would not trade for the young Ty Cobb or as the man who won the American League batting title with the lowest average before 1968, Elmer Flick was more than just an answer to a trivia question.  An underrated Hall of Famer whose on-the-field accomplishments are nearly forgotten today, Flick was a hard-hitting, fleet-footed outfielder who had his major league career curtailed by a mysterious gastrointestinal ailment.

Born in Bedford, Ohio, on January 11, 1876. Elmer Harrison Flick was the third of five children – three sons and two daughters – of Zachary Taylor and Mary (Caine) Flick.  Elmer’s father, an American Civil War veteran, was a farmer and skilled mechanic who operated a chair-making shop in Bedford and gained a certain degree of notoriety because of his failed attempt or attempts (the stories vary) to fly without using an airplane.

A natural athlete, Elmer boxed, wrestled, and played football, but his favorite sport was baseball, something that he first excelled at as a slugging catcher on the Bedford High School team (though some locals considered his younger brother, Cyrus, a better player).  Then, sometime in 1891, the Bedford town team was embarking on a trip to play a neighboring team when the manager noticed that he had only eight players.  Unwilling to lose any games by forfeit, he began looking for someone with baseball skills in the crowd that had gathered at the train station to with the team well.  And it just so happened that a barefoot, 15-year-old Elmer Flick was among that crowd and was invited to join the team, an offer that he eagerly accepted – despite not having a uniform or any shoes.  The result was that Bedford lost both games of a doubleheader, but the unshod Elmer made a name for himself with his good timing.

Flick continued to play for the Bedford team until he joined the Youngstown Puddlers of the Inter-State League in 1896, the manager having agreed to hire him sight unseen.  Not wanting to disappoint himself or his manager, Flick prepared for his sojourn into the professional ranks by engaging in a two-part exercise program which consisted of running and catching a ball after bouncing it off the side of a building and by making his own bat on his father’s lathe, something he would do more than once during his baseball career.

At Youngstown, Flick was moved to the outfield because the Puddlers already had a catcher, but learning a new position was not easy for him and his fielding percentage was an atrocious .826 for the 31 games in which he saw action.  His biggest difficulty was judging the distance of fly balls.  However, the change did not affect his hitting, as he pounded the ball for a .438 batting average with five doubles, nine triples, and six home runs among his 57 hits.  As Flick described his Youngstown days to Brian Williams of the Cleveland Record in January of 1963, “The manager told me that as an outfielder, I wasn’t so hot…then he added: ‘But you can sure sting that ball.’”

The following year, Flick took his talents to Dayton, another member of the Inter-State League.  There, he became the team’s regular left fielder, raised his fielding percentage to .921, and continued to hit the ball at a torrid pace, finishing with 183 hits – including 42 doubles, 10 homers, and a league-leading 20 triples – and a .386 batting average.  Added to those figures, he stole 25 bases, scored an incredible 135 runs in only 126 games, and ranked first in the league in total bases with 295.  And because of his offensive exploits, youngsters who came to see him perform would chant, “Elmer Flick, you are slick/Hit a homer pretty quick.”

One of Flick’s performances with Dayton caught the eye of George Stallings, then manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, who signed the gifted slugger to a major league contract for the 1898 season.  Stallings hoped to use Flick as the club’s fourth outfielder, but when starting right fielder Sam Thompson was sidelined with a back injury, Flick was pressed into service and became a fixture in right field for four seasons.

During these seasons, Flick combined power with speed to establish himself as one of the top offensive threats in the National League, even though he was no taller than 5’8” or 5’9”, depending on the source, and weighed between 160 and 168 pounds.  In his rookie year,  he batted .302 and finished fourth in the league in walks with 86 and in on-base percentage with a .430 average.  In 1899, he upped his batting average to .342, scored 98 runs, and drove in another 98.  But it was in 1900 that he put together his best season with the Phillies, leading the league with 110 runs batted in and placing second in home runs (11), extra-base hits (59), total bases (297), batting average (.367), and slugging percentage (.545).

While in Philadelphia, Flick improved his defensive skills and learned to take advantage of the short dimensions of National League Park’s right field by playing shallow and getting several assists, some by fielding would-be singles and then tossing the batters out before they reached first base.  It was also in Philadelphia that Flick showed he had the toughness that it took to be a major leaguer.  For example, twice in a game in 1899, he got angry at Nap Lajoie for going back into shallow right to catch fly balls that should have been his chances.  Then, during a game in 1900, he and Lajoie got into a fistfight over who owned a bat.  Despite giving away at least four inches and about 30 pounds to the larger Lajoie, missing with a punch, stuck a grate, a wall, or a washstand (the sources disagree) and broke his thumb.

With the arrival of the American League, Flick remained with the Phillies in 1901, batting .333 and coming in second in the senior circuit in triples with 17, third in extra-base hits with 57, and tied for first in assists by an outfielder with 23.  However, the following year, he jumped to the Phillies’ intracity rivals, the Athletics, with whom he saw action in only 11 games before joining the Cleveland Blue/Bronchos (the club was known by both names during the 1902 season, though its official name was the Bluebirds).  This latter change of scenery occurred because Flick wanted to avoid the legal ramifications of the Phillies’ court injunctions that prohibited three of his teammates who had jumped to the Athletics the previous year from playing in Pennsylvania for any other team except the Phillies.  Flick was not named in the injunctions, but the results affected him as well.  The move cost Flick a chance to play on a pennant winner with the Athletics, but Cleveland was glad to have a local boy to boost attendance, and Flick was delighted to have his home field in a city not far from where he was born.

Although his final batting average for 1902 dipped below .300, Flick lived up to advance billing for Cleveland fans when he hit three triples in a game against Chicago on July 6, establishing an American League record that has since been tied but may never be broken.  Other highlights for Flick that year included walking five times in a game against Boston on July 18 and finishing sixth in the league in triples with 12.

The next five seasons marked Flick’s heyday with the Cleveland team now called the Naps.  Batting first or third in the majority of the games in which he appeared, Flick led the American League three times in triples (consecutively), twice in stolen bases (as co-champion both times), and once each in runs scored batting average, and slugging percentage.  Arguably Flick’s finest season offensively in a Cleveland uniform was 1905 when he topped the league in triples (18), slugging percentage (.462), and batting average (.308 which remained the lowest mark for a batting champion until Carl Yastrzemski won the 1968 title with a .301 mark) and came in second in on-base percentage (.383).

Another indication of Flick’s value occurred during spring training in 1907.  Hughie Jennings, the manager of the Detroit Tigers, tired of his troublesome outfielder, Ty Cobb, offered to trade the talented Georgian to Cleveland for Flick straight up.  But Charles Somers, Cleveland’s president, refused, maintaining that he was quite satisfied to keep the Ohio farm boy, though he was willing to give the Tigers William “Bunk” Congalton, another outfielder, in exchange for the Georgia Peach – an offer Jennings turned down.

Unfortunately for Flick, all his successes on the diamond could not keep baseball life from beginning to take its toll on his physical well-being.  The Naps held their spring training sites in the South and Flick developed a distaste for southern cooking.  Also, he hated the hot eastern road trips that the Naps would make during the season.

However, it was not just southern cuisine and eastern travel that was affecting the Cleveland star.  In a revealing article published in the July 22, 1907, issue of the Cleveland Press, Flick disclosed that “playing the game day in and day out [out] ruining his health,” that he was “on the verge of physical collapse,” and that “the time of his retirement [was] not far distant.”  Almost prophetically, less than eight months later, Flick came down with a gastrointestinal illness that caused him to miss most of the 1908 season and play in a total of only 90 games during the 1909 and 1910 seasons.  He lost weight, his power and speed declined, and the pain was so severe there were times when he thought he would die.  “My last three years [with the Naps] … were awful,” Flick later admitted. “I shouldn’t have played at all.”  Initially, Flick’s doctors were mystified by what was ailing him, and the exact cause of the illness was never determined, but according to Flick, many of the physicians said that it was acute gastritis, which resulted in Flick taking pills for the rest of his life.

Whatever the cause of Flick’s misery, the ailment brought an end to his major league career.  From 1908 until mid-1910, Flick batted just .254 in 338 at-bats.  Finally, in July 1910, the Naps released him to Kansas City of the American Association – a move Flick negated by refusing to report.  Instead, he played part of each of the next two seasons with another American Association team, Toledo, before retiring from professional baseball and returning to Bedford.  There, he farmed, hunted (Flick was an outstanding shot with a rifle), raised trotting horses, built houses and office buildings, and, in Flick’s own words, “dickered in real estate.”  In addition, he scouted for the Cleveland franchise and spent more time with his wife, Rose Ella (Gates), and their five daughters.

Despite his short but highly productive career in the majors, Flick remained largely forgotten by the baseball community in general and the Hall of Fame voters in particular until Ty Cobb died in 1961.  Some articles written about the Georgia Peach mentioned the aborted 1907 trade and thus revived interest in who Flick was and what made him worthy of being suggested in a trade for Cobb.  The renewed attention, in turn, led to Flick being voted into the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1963, an honor he treasured until he died from congestive heart failure at 8:25 A.M. on January 9, 1971, only two days before his 95^th birthday.  Flick also suffered from mycosis fungoides, a malignant lymphoma, which contributed to his death.

Buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Twinsburg, Ohio, Flick was posthumously inducted into the Greater Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame in 1977 and into the Ohio Baseball Hall of Fame 10 years later.  Today, one of the baseball parks in Bedford bears his name.

Note:

A different version of this article appeared in David Jones, ed., Deadball Stars of the American League (Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006).

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Full Name: Elmer Harrison Flick.
Born: January 11, 1876, Bedford, OH (USA)
Died: January 9, 1971 at Bedford, OH (USA)

Eddie Plank

Original article written by Jan Finkel
https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Eddie-Plank/
researched and compiled by Carrie Birdsong

Eddie Plank fidgeted.  On every pitch, Plank went through a seemingly endless ritual: Get the sign from his catcher, fix his cap just so, readjust his shirt and sleeve, hitch up his pants, ask for a new ball, rub it up, start at a base runner if there was one, ask for a new sign and start the process all over again.  As if that wasn’t enough, he would begin to talk to himself and the ball out loud from the seventh inning on: “Nine to go, eight to go…” and so on until he had retired the last batter.  Frustrated hitters would swing at anything just to have something to do.  His fielders would grow antsy.  Fans, not wanting to be late for supper, would stay away when he was pitching.  Writers, fearful of missing deadlines, roasted him.

Plank rarely threw to a base to hold a runner close.  Sad Sam Jones, good enough to win 299 games over a long career, told Lawrence Ritter, “I once hear Eddie Plank say, ‘There are only so many pitches in this old arm, and I don’t believe in wasting them throwing to first base.’  And he rarely did.  Made sense to me.  I was just a young punk, and I figured if it was good enough for plank it should be good enough for me.”

Somebody that annoying can hang around only for one reason – if he’s a winner.  Plank was exactly that, winning 326 games, the most be any lefthander until Warren Spahn and Steve Carlton came along.  His 69 shoutouts remain the standard for southpaws.  Despite all his accomplishments, however, it was Eddie Plank’s fate to be the second banana.  He had some great seasons and many good ones, but there always seemed to be someone having a better one.  Usually, it was Walter Johnson, but there would occasionally be someone like  Jack Chesbro, Ed Walsh, or Joe Wood, whose overall career wasn’t the equal of Plank’s.  accordingly, in no season was he considered the top pitcher in the American League; he had to be satisfied with being one of the top four or five, but he was in that position year after year, and while other pitchers came and went, Plank persevered, helping the Philadelphia Athletics to five American League pennants and three world championships.  "Plank was not the fastest,” teammate Eddie Collins once observed.”  He was not the trickiest and not the possessor of the most stuff.  He was just the greatest.”

Edward Stewart Plank was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on August 31, 1875, the fourth of seven children of David L. Plank and the former Martha E. McCreary.  Growing up on the family farm, Eddie never played baseball until a neighbor organized a team when Eddie was 17.  From the start, the young lefthander threw with a natural cross-fire motion he called a “slant ball.” Landing his right leg on the first base side of the pitcher's mound and throwing across his body.  This off-balance method of throwing usually resulted in wildness, nut in time Plank became perhaps the greatest cross-fire control pitcher in history.   Eddie pitched for town teams and, at the age of 22, enrolled in Gettysburg Academy, a prep school under the auspices of Gettysburg College.

Frank Foreman, a fair to middling pitcher in the 1880s and 1890s, was the coach of the Gettysburg College team.  When Foreman saw Plank’s unorthodox delivery, he promised Plank, “If you follow my instructions closely, I’ll make you one of the greatest southpaws in the country.”

Plank never attended the college but played on the team, a common practice in an era of lax eligibility requirements.  Nonetheless, Plank learned his lessons well, coming out of the academy with but one weakness: a poor move toward first, at least in the view of Ty Cobb.  Foreman had turned Plank into that rarest of creatures, a cross-firing southpaw with outstanding control of his curve and fastball.

Plank signed with a minor league team in Richmond in 1900, but the Virginia League folded a few days later, so he never pitched in the minor leagues.  In the spring of 1901, Foreman told his friend Connie Mack he ought to sign Plank.  Mack telegraphed Plank, inviting him to join the Athletics in Baltimore.

Plank debuted on May 13, 1901, finishing up a 14-5 loss at Baltimore, then returned to Gettysburg to pitch one last game.  He went on to a fine rookie year: 17-13 with 28 complete games in 32 starts, a 3.31 ERA, and the first of his 69 shutouts.  The 1902 season, in which the Athletics won the American League pennant, marked a first and a last for the southpaw; he won 20 games for the first time and his 3.30 ERA was his last trip north of 3.00.  He also led the league in hit batters with 18 despite giving up only 1.83 walks per 9 innings.  Appeared shorter and slighter than his listed 5’11” and 175 pounds not surprising in that his mentor, Foreman, had a reputation as a headhunter.

Plank would work in relative anonymity from 1902 through 1907, living in the shadow of Rube Waddell.  Playing the tortoise to Waddell’s hare, Plank won 23 games and led the league in games started in 1903, while Waddell, the prototypical screwball lefthander, struck out batters at an unprecedented rate when he wasn’t chasing fire engines or drinking himself blind.  Rube finished the season with a 2.44 ERA; Plank at a 2.38.  Seven years later Rube would be out of the majors and Plank would be posting even better ERAs.

Eddie reached his career high with 26 wins (against 17 losses) in 1904, coming in a distant second to Jack Chesbro’s post-1900 record of 41 wins.  The highlight of the year came on September 10 as Plank beat Boston’s Cy Young, 1-0, in 13 innings,  the shutout was one of Plank’s four wins in ten decisions against the old master.

The Athletics captured the pennant in 1905, thanks in large part to Plank’s 24 wins and 346 ½ innings pitched, both second in the league, and 2.26 ERA, which didn’t crack the top ten in a strong pitcher’s year.  In his two starts against the Giants in that year’s World Series, Eddie pitched 17 innings and allowed only three earned runs, but lost both games to Christy Mathewson and Joe McGinnity, respectively.  Plank’s 1905 performance, in which his teammates scored zero runs for him, foreshadowed his fate in World Series play, as he would often pitch just brilliantly enough to lose heartbreakingly.

In 1906 Mack worked Plank hard over the first two-thirds of the season, but the pitcher developed a sore arm and could start only once in the season’s final 50 games.  He was productive, however, going 19-6 with a 2.25 ERA; his .760 winning percentage led the American League, although his 211 2/3 innings pitched were 135 fewer than the earlier season.

Appearing in a league-leading 43 games in 1907, the southpaw went back to his usual chores, pitching 343 2/3 innings and returning to the 20-win club, going 24-16 with a 2.20 ERA and a league-high eight shutouts.  in addition, he was third in the league with 183 strikeouts.  The year would be his last venture into 300 or more innings, as he would never pitch more than 268 1/3  innings in any season, and that would be in the Federal League in 1915.

The Athletics weren’t a factor in the wild pennant race of 1908, dropping to sixth place with a 68-85 slate, just a half-game ahead of Washington.  Plank’s won-lost record slid with the teams although not as far; he endured his first losing season with a 14-16 mark despite a fine ERA of 2.17.  The game of September 20 shows the kind of year it was.  Frank Smith of the White Sox threw the second no-hitter of his career, beating Plank 1-0.  The run scored in the bottom of the ninth when Plank was trying to walk Freddy Parent intentionally; Parent crossed things up by reaching and swatting a sacrifice fly to short right field.  As a testimony of his consistency, Plank would finish with a losing record only one more time in his long career.

In 1909, Philadelphia rebounded to second place, 3.5 games behind Detroit, and Plank came back with them.  He finished the year 19-10 with his career-best ERA, a tine 1.76.  He had the honor of pitching the game dedicated to Shibe Park on Monday, April 12, and responded by beating Boston 8-1, giving up just six hits.  The game had a tragic ending, however.  A’s catcher Doc Powers caught all nine innings in agonizing pain due to suspected food poisoning and was taken to a local hospital afterward.  Two weeks later he was dead, with “strangulation of the intestines” listed as the official cause.  Powers, who was also a physician, starved to death because he could not eat.  His intestines were mangled due to a hernia, which some believed he had suffered when he collided with the new park’s concrete wall while chasing a foul popup in the seventh inning.

The Athletics team of 1910-14 was the first of Mack’s two masterpieces, a powerful unit that would win four pennants and three World Series over those five years.  Plank was basically the third or fourth pitcher in the rotation behind Jack Coombs (who would go 31-9 with a 1.30 ERA and 13 shutouts, an AL record that still stands).  Chief Bender (23-5 with a 1.58 ERA, easily his best season), and Cy Morgan )18-12 with an ERA of 1.55).  Next to that assemblage, Plank almost looked like an underachiever with his 16-10 mark and 2.01 ERA.  Suffering from a sore arm by the end of the season, he didn’t even pitch in the Athletics’ five-game World Series win over the Cubs, as Mack used only Coombs and Bender.

Plank bounced back in 1911, going 23-8 with a 2.10 ERA and a co-league-leading six shutouts.  His luck in the World Series improved as he hosted his first win, a complete-came 3-1 victory over the Giants’ Rube Marquard in Game Two.  With Game Five tied 3-3 after nine innings, Mack brought in Plank to relieve Coombs.  Plank could have closed out the series with a win but lasted only two-thirds of the tenth inning before surrendering the winning run.

Plank enjoyed another terrific year in 1912, posting a 26-6 record with a fine 2.22 ERA.  However, the Athletics fell to 90-62, one game behind second-place Washington and 15 behind the powerful Red Sox.  Indeed, the 1912 season is emblematic of a tendency to underestimate Plank’s greatness.  His 26-6 record jumps out as of today, but it was only the fourth-highest win total in the American League, behind Joe Wood’s 34-5, Walter Johnson’s 33-12 (and league-best 1.39 ERA), and Ed Walsh’s 27-17.  In addition, Wood and Johnson each strung together league-record winning streaks of sixteen games, and Marquard won a major-league record nineteen straight games in the National League.  So, Plank’s solid performance was lost in the shuffle of one of baseball’s great pitching seasons.

Still, the season had its moments.  He dropped a 4-3 beating on Joe Wood to celebrate the Fourth of July.  (Wood’s next start four days later would be the first of his sixteen-game winning streak.)  On September 27 Plank went the distance in a 19-inning loss to Washington’s Bob Groom and Johnson.  Collins’ wild throw let in the winning run as Johnson got the win with 10 innings of scoreless relief.

Plank slipped to 18-10 with an unusually high 2.60 ERA in 1913, but the Athletics roared back to the American League throne room.  The Giants were back in the Series for the third straight year, having lost to the Athletics in 1911 and the Red Sox in 1912.  Plank faced Mathewson in Game Two.  The two aces threw shutout balls for nine innings.  In a much-criticized move, Mack allowed Eddie to bat for himself with the bases loaded and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth.  Plank hit into a fielder's choice, the A’s failed to score, and it all came apart for Plank in the tenth as he gave up three runs, including the go-ahead single to Mathewson.  Everything changed in Game Five, with Mathewson and Plank once again squaring off.  This time around, the southpaw threw a two-hitter and beat his nemesis, 3-1, to take the Series and send John McGraw to his third consecutive Series defeat.  The game was Plank’s greatest career win; the only Giant run was unearned, scoring due to Plank’s own error.

The Athletics remained apparently unstoppable in 1914, winning 99 games and heading back to the Series, this time against Boston’s Miracle Braves.  Plank contributed a 15-7 mark, the wins being good for fourth best on the team, as Chief Bender won 17 while Bob Shawkey and Joe Bush each chipped in with 16.  Plank’s mark was accompanied by a 2.87 ERA, higher than the league and by far his highest since 1902.  He could still pitch brilliantly, then as his Game Two effort showed, a 1-0 loss (the run scored in the ninth inning) to Bill James as the mighty Athletics were swept in a major Series upset.  It was the final game of Plank’s World Series career and left him with a career 2-5 record in the Fall Classic despite a 1.32 ERA.

Through good times and bad, winning or losing, pitching well or not, Plank did everything the same way – quietly.  He didn’t talk much, generally speaking only when he had something to say.  And when he did talk, his only grandson (Edward Stewart Plank III, born much too late to know him except by reputation and memory in the family) points out, people listened.  Moreover, he and his more outgoing teammate Chief Bender seem to have been patient and kind with rookies who wanted to learn.  Rube Bressler made the point clearly to Lawrence Ritter: “I used to try to get near [Bender and Plank] and listen to what they were talking about, and every question I’d ask they’d pay attention and tell me what they thought.  I used to put sticks behind my ears, so they’d stand out further.  Boy, I wanted to hear what those guys had to say.”

At 39 years of age following the 1914 season, Plank had been talking about quitting baseball for several years.  His workload had diminished and Mack nursed him along for the last two years, using him primarily against clubs he was most likely to dominate.  Mack knew that Bender and Plank were talking to Federal League agents.  He asked for waivers on them and Coombs and released all three pitchers.  Coombs signed with Brooklyn of the National League.  Bender went to the Baltimore Terrapins of the Federal League, and Plank to the new league’s St. Louis Terriers.

Plank had a good year with the Terriers, who wound up in a virtual tie for first place with the Chicago Whales, contributing a 21-11 record and 2.08 ERA.  He reached a major milestone on September 11 with a 12-5 win over Newark, making him the first southpaw to reach three hundred victories.

When the Federal League folded after the 1915 season, Terriers Phil Ball bought control of the St. Louis Browns and kept Plank.  He went 16-15 with a 2.33 ERA in 1916 for a fifth-place team (albeit with a winning record of 79-75).  He could only go 5-6 – just his second losing record – in 1917 despite his second-best ERA, a glittering 1.79.  On August 6, at age 41, he hooked up with Walter Johnson, going down 1-0 in 11 innings, his seventh loss against three wins in match-ups with the Washington ace.  It was Plank’s last game; noting some stomach problems, he announced his retirement the next week.

Despite his announcement, Plank was still in demand.  On January 22, 1918, the Yankees traded pitchers Urban Shocker and Nick Cullop, infielder Fritz Maisel, second baseman Joe Gedeon, catcher Les Nunamaker, and cash to St. Louis for second baseman Del Pratt and Plank.  Now 42, Plank would have been the oldest active player in the game.  Having announced his retirement, he had no intention of changing his plans.  “I will not go to New York next season,” he said from his Gettysburg farm.  “I am through with baseball forever.  I have my farm and my home and enough to take care of me, so why should I work and worry and longer?”  according to The Historical Register, in 1918 he pitched a bit for an industrial league team in Steelton, Pennsylvania, posting a 4-2 record in 52 innings.  The Bethlehem Steel Company owned all six teams in the league and offered current and former major leaguers including Plank, Dutch Leonard, and Joe Jackson an opportunity while avoiding the draft.

Plank had taken pretty good care of himself throughout his career, watching his money and investing it reasonably well.  He spent his retirement farming, running a Buick Shop, and leading tours of the Gettysburg battlefield.  Since he was a taciturn man, it’s not likely that most visitors to the battlefield knew they were in the presence of one of the game’s great pitchers.

Plank had married Anna Myers in 1915; the couple had one son, Edward Stewart Plank Jr.  Having left baseball, Plank spent his time handling his various interests, even contemplating a run for public office before suffering a stroke on February 22, 1926.  Plank died two days later at the age of 50.  He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg.

Note:

This biography originally appeared in David Jones, ed., Dead Ball Stars of the American League (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006).

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4.      Thorn, John, Phil Birnbaum, Bill Deane,
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5.     Westcott, Rich. Winningest Pitchers: Baseball’s
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         University Press, 2002.
6.     Wilbert, Warren N. What Makes an Elite
        Pitcher? Young, Mathewson, Johnson,
        Alexander, Grove, Spahn, Seaver, Clemens,
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Full Name: Edward Stewart Plank
Born: August 31, 1875, at Gettysburg, PA (USA)
Died: February 24, 1926, at Gettysburg, PA (USA)