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Antram Quits League Baseball.

After a long and fruitful career of playing League baseball, one of the greatest pitchers of any era is quitting the professional game.

Percy Antram was the first of the great line of pitchers who have graced the mound at Portland Park for the Burton United club. He first took to the pitch in 1909 as a callow youngster of twenty, and he worked his way into the rotation the following season for good, albeit as the loser of nineteen matches, yet still demonstrating himself to be an above average hurler. He came into his own in 1912 as he won twenty to lead United into the First Division, where they have resided ever since.

Antram also won 21 games in 1914 before the League suspended for the war, during which he worked in the Home Office as a close aide of the Under Secretary of State Sir Edward Troup, responsible for routing German spies from the homeland. Upon the return of League baseball, Antram also returned to his winning ways, fashioning a consistent string of seven seasons in which he won between sixteen and nineteen matches during each. Antram finished his tenure with 211 victories, which places him 27th on the League’s list.

But the two main things Antram was known for were the strike out and run prevention. He was one of the first great strike out artists, leading his division in four different seasons, finishing second in four more and finishing third twice. He retires with the second highest strike out total among all pitchers in the annals of the League with 2,208, behind only the great Jesse Morgan. In this era of higher strike out rates, several pitchers stand at the ready to pass by Antram, but that will hardly dim his accomplishment in this particular area of endeavour.

As for preventing runs, no other pitcher with a similarly long career comes close. Antram finished with a 2.19 earned runs average during his seventeen seasons. The closest competitor to this mark is Ernie Watson who has delivered a 2.29 ERA during his eighteen seasons, but who has also worked strictly as a reliever for the past ten seasons and thus has pitched more than 1,000 fewer innings. Antram had the second best ever season for earned runs average in 1912 with 1.26 and delivered the fourth best ever season two years later, 1.29. In both seasons, he won his division’s Pitcher of the Year honours. He also had three additional seasons with earned runs averages of less than two, the most of any starting pitcher ever.

While Antram spent his final five seasons in various states of injury, which cost him his 1929 season before coming back for a mere seven innings in this, his last season, he will always be remembered as the most dominant of pitchers in the years both preceding and following the war, and the four seasons lost to the conflict serve as a bitter reminder of being deprived of what surely would have been the best seasons of his career.