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MILWAUKEE WINS THE LMC AGAIN, BUT “DER KAISER” IS FINALLY DETHRONED AS MWBA HURLER OF THE YEAR

On the face of it, 1897 was a typical year in the Midwestern Baseball Association. Milwaukee had the best record in the MWBA, the Eastern League had the most talent and best competition from top to bottom, and the Bavarians won a highly competitive Lincoln Memorial Cup – their third in four years. However, there was one major shock when it came time to give out the awards after the end of the season.

Hans Ehle was the favorite to win the Hurler of the Year award for the eighth year in a row, and it was long assumed that if Ehle were to be finally knocked off his sky-high perch it would be by Detroit ace Martin Kearns, nine times the MWBA strikeout king and five times the Hurler of the Year runner up. Indeed, Ehle had yet another amazing season for the MWBA champions: 27-11 with a 2.56 ERA while leading the MWBA in innings (341.2), complete games (33), K/BB ratio (2.9), and pitching WAR (11.5). Ehle’s pitching WAR title was his thirteenth in a row.

However, Ehle and Kearns were trumped by perhaps the best pro debut season by any pitcher since Ehle’s in 1885.

Going into the last half of the 1890s, Henry Danforth was widely believed to be the best pitcher in semi-professional baseball. To prove that reputation true he was making a pro starting rotation member’s wage – $2,100 per year – to play for the Cantabrigians in the NEBA as the league’s highest paid player by far. To really prove it, this was his semi-pro record as of the end of 1896:





He’d won three Hurler of the Year awards over the previous four seasons, and Danforth seemed content to stay in National Base Ball Organization leagues given that star hurlers in semi-pro ball who signed for ABA teams wound up glued to the bench as often as not. However, with the invent of the four-man rotation offering up increased jobs for pitchers, Danforth took a chance and signed with the Minneapolis Lakers in early December. For their part, the Lakers certainly didn’t think they were taking a big gamble as they signed Danforth to a five-year deal and immediately placed him in the #1 spot in the rotation.

How did Henry Danforth do in his first season at the sport’s highest level?

28-13, 2 SV, 2.07 ERA (175 ERA+), 50 G, 338.1 IP, 32 CG, 8 SHO, 63 BB, 170K, 1.13 WHIP, 2.7 K/BB, 9.2 WAR (6.1/225 IP)

It was easily the best debut season a for a hurler in one of the two American Baseball Association leagues outside of Hans Ehle’s, with Hawk Nielsen’s 1896 for Excelsior (27-13, 2.27 ERA, 8.3 WAR) the only one that came close. In contrast with Danforth’s 28-13 record, the Minneapolis Lakers were 37-50 when the decision wasn’t credited to him. Because Danforth led the MWBA in wins pitching for a team that was otherwise very mediocre and backed that up by leading the league in ERA, the 31-year-old was named MWBA Hurler of the Year. This meant that for the first time in the 1890s Hans Ehle – Der Kaiser – wasn’t given the award for the league’s best pitcher. The previous man to best Ehle for HotY was Detroit's Charlie Higgins in 1889, and it took a 28-5 record for a team that was the league champions by sixteen games for him to earn it that year.

It was going to take a season’s worth of historic-level performance to keep baseball’s most renowned pitcher from giving his annual award acceptance speech, and Henry Danforth did exactly that in 1897.