1913 Washington Senators
The 1913 Washington Senators were coming off a second-place finish in 1912. The season began with the New York Times reporting that Clark Griffith had offered the Detroit owner an astounding $100,000 for Ty Cobb. Shirley Povich wrote that Griffith's plan was to sell 100,000 tickets for $1 each that could be used to attend any game that season. Newspaperman dismissed the rumors, reasoning that no ball player was worth $100,000.
The Senators were the best draw in the league that year -- the Altrock-and-Schaefer comedy team supplemented a competitive team (the Senators would again finish second in the AL at 90-64) and they featured one of the best draws in all of baseball in the lightening-fast Walter Johnson.
1913 was probably Johnson's greatest of all seasons. His 36-7 record and 1.14 ERA were his career best. His season included a scoreless streak of 55.2 innings (56 innings until a recent change in how such streaks are calculated stopped counting outs in the inning the streak is broken). The 55.2 consecutive scoreless innings was the MLB record (it is still the AL record) for 55 years until broken first by Drysdale and then by Hershiser and was the record Walter was most proud of.
Another recent revision in statistics also affects Walter. It began with one of the strangest games in baseball history on the last day of the 1913 season. With nothing at stake, Clark Griffith, then almost 44, decided to pitch an inning. The game was a farce, the players padding their averages and the umpires allowing four outs in one inning. Johnson, who had pitched his 12th shutout five days earlier for victory number 36, played center field, but relieved in the ninth and allowed a double, a triple, and two runs.
Those final two runs account for the difference in Walter's final reported ERA for 1913. For over 70 years his ERA stood at 1.09, until it was discovered that the results of the 1913 travesty had been left out. Once the two runs were included, his ERA rose to 1.14. As a result, when Bob Gibson posted a 1.12 ERA in 1968, he passed Johnson's record, although unbeknownst to anyone at the time, for the best-ever ERA in a single season.
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