Player #108A: Allan E. "Rubberarm" Russell. Pitcher with the Washington Senators in 1923-1925. 70 wins and 42 saves in 11 MLB seasons. He also pitched for the New York Yankees (1915-1919) and the Boston Red Sox (1919-1922). For his MLB career, in 345 appearances, he posted a 3.52 earned run average with 603 strikeouts. Russell played on the 1924 World Series champion Senators, making one appearance in the World Series, giving up one run over three innings of work. He was a spitball pitcher who was allowed to throw the pitch after it was banned following the 1920 season. He was one of 17 pitchers exempt from the rule change. His brother Lefty Russell also played Major League Baseball.
Russell's SABR biography puts his career in historical perspective: One of the tenets of the Puritan work ethic was that a man finished what he started. He did not quit when the going got tough. Not all baseball players in the 19th and early 20th centuries were Puritans, by any means, but most of them held the conviction that if a man started a game, he should finish it. Terms such as long relief, middle relief, set-up man, and closer were not in their vocabularies. But times changed. During the first two decades of the 20th century the number of complete games declined drastically, from nearly 90 percent of all starts to less than 60 percent, but the era of the relief specialist had not yet arrived. When the starting pitcher ran into trouble and had to be replaced, the usual response was to bring in a fellow starter to put out the fire.
Clark Griffith, manager of the Washington Nationals, was one of the first to try a new strategy—developing a full-time fireman. Although Griffith had completed more than 90 percent of his starts when he was a moundsman, the Old Fox recognized that the times called for a new approach. He converted his spitballer, Allan Russell, into a relief specialist. The experiment he started with Russell soon came to fruition with Fred Marberry. Baseball was changed forever. . . .
. . . On February 10, 1923, the Sox traded Russell and catcher Muddy Ruel to the Washington Nationals for catcher Val Picinich, outfielder Howard Shanks, and outfield prospect Ed Goebel. Many observers thought Boston got the better of the deal because of Goebel’s potential. The New York Times was particularly enthusiastic: “Harry Frazee swung another nice deal yesterday for his new manager, Frank Chance, and now it begins to look as if the task of rebuilding the Red Sox is on the rise. … This latest deal serves notice on the baseball world that Frazee and Chance mean business. …. It is hard to see where Frazee got the worst of this latest dicker.” The article went on to say that Russell had been of little use to the Red Sox and was nearly at the end of his string. The Times wrote: “Needing pitching badly, Clark Griffith, the Washington president, decided he could develop the right hander into a regular slabster, but Russell has shown little interest in his major league career.”
As it turned out, the highly touted Goebel never played a game for the Red Sox, while Ruel and Russell helped Washington win two American League pennants.
Although Russell had been used in relief occasionally throughout his career, the Nats made him an almost full-time relief specialist, one of the first in the history of baseball. His ability to go to the mound day after day earned him the nickname Rubberarm. During the 1923 season Russell appeared in 52 games, all but five of them in relief. He led the league in saves and relief wins, and had the circuit’s third best earned-run average.
In 1924 Russell ranked second in saves in the league with eight. In addition, he won five games in relief. (We'll return to this point when we next introduce Rubberarm.)
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