[chucksabr]

Frederick Britton Retires

One of the greatest pitchers in Burnley baseball club history, Frederick Britton, he of “Three Freds” fame, has announced his retirement as of the end of the 1902 season.

Mr Britton, aged forty-six years, joined the Baseball League along with the Clarets in 1888, but he’d been pitching in competitive baseball from shortly after the Spalding tour of 1879, at which point he abandoned a promising cricket career for work on the diamond.

Mr Britton immediately became one of the most accomplished and durable pitchers during the early League days. He led the League in games started three of the League's first four years, and in wins twice. His best season was 1890, during which as the acclaimed best pitcher in the Game he paced the League with a record of seventeen wins versus four defeats, sporting an earned runs average of 2.64 whilst Burnley was winning its third straight league Cup.

Unlike many good players with long careers, who are released from their clubs and languish in the purgatory of unwantedness for several seasons before quietly retiring, the Clarets found starting work for the durable Mr Britton all the way to the end. Mr Britton started twenty five games in 1902, although he finished with his worst record of seventeen defeats versus only nine wins, a 5.53 ERA, issuing a League leading 134 bases on balls, and was in fact instrumental in the Clarets dropping to the Second Division for the first time in their history. That was proof positive to Mr Britton that it was time to quit.

Nevertheless, Mr Britton retires with some of the greatest individual marks in British baseball history. He stands second in career wins with 195, third in games pitched (396), fourth in games started (374), second in complete games (278), second in clean sheets (27), and second in innings pitched (3,210).

Mr Britton will be most remembered for his durability and reliability, having missed significant time to injury only once, in 1895, and even then only for three weeks. Although struggling to keep up with the youngsters of the Game in recent seasons, he showed one more flash of the old stuff in 1902, on the eleventh of July, when he recorded his final clean sheet against Middlesbrough with a five hit effort for a two-nil victory.