An “Old-Fashioned Pitchers’ Duel” Didn’t Always Mean What You Think

Baseball’s history is so long and variegated that the term “old-fashioned” can check with absolutely anything. You can use it for the cosplayers within the park who play without gloves but with Civil War beards. You can use it for Babe Ruth’s weight-reduction plan of hot dogs and beer, or the golden-boy idealism of Mickey Mantle, or the segregation that disfigured the game for a long time. You can call old-fashioned the thought of somebody downing greenies before pitching a whole game for the second time in per week, or a man laying down a sac bunt while trailing within the fourth, and even now, overinflated sluggers blasting 65 dingers a 12 months off a complete society of pitchers who could barely touch 93 on the gun, and the moral panic that ensued.

Nearly any aspect of a century and a half of baseball can lay some claim to being old-fashioned. But for an announcer, author, or fan, nothing is as old-fashioned as a pair of strong performances from a game’s starting pitchers. I heard that cliche “We have a very good old-fashioned pitchers’ duel” for the millionth time while watching the Cubs play the Diamondbacks last Friday, as Zac Gallen threw a nine-inning shutout for a 1-0 win, and I wondered, when did a pitchers’ duel develop into invariably, ineluctably old-fashioned? Who was the primary person to deem it to belong more to baseball’s past than its present? Well … it’s complicated.

I searched through a bunch of old newspaper articles to attempt to glean a solution. It probably won’t be surprising that “old-fashioned pitchers’ duel” looked as if it would come into regular use as a phrase within the Nineteen Twenties. For the primary 20 years of the century, baseball for quite a lot of reasons saw a steep drop in offense known now because the dead-ball era. But with the rise of Ruth, who all but invented the trendy home run and smashed a mind-blowing 54 for the Yankees in 1920—greater than every other team within the American League— the balance of power in an at-bat see-sawed back to the hitter. Using “old-fashioned pitchers’ duel,” then, was used explicitly to contrast the light-hitting pre-Ruth days with the brand new age of the long ball.

“Of secondary interest was the remarkable pitching of Bob Shawkey,” wrote the Recent York Herald in a 1920 Yanks–White Sox gamer, “Who had the higher of Urban Faber in considered one of those quaint pitchers’ duels which was the thing before hitting became so prevalent and popular. Babe Ruth’s absence little doubt helped make it a flinger’s frolic.”

In a write-up of a 1927 contest between Rochester and Jersey City, The Bayonne Times‘ lede read, “An old-fashioned pitchers’ duel, the type that went out when the mighty Sultan of Swat set the style at no cost pill socking, was staged by Cliff Jackson and ‘Lefty’ Shoffner at West Side Park yesterday afternoon.”

(As a fast side note, going through these archives was also a neat lesson in how much space newspapers used to provide to baseball teams outside the “major leagues.”)

From that decade on, the context for “quaint pitchers’ duel” was established: There’s numerous slugging in the sport today, but there was once a time when baseball was ruled unilaterally by the lads who threw the ball. Nevertheless, that is not where or how this saying began. The truly interesting history of the phrase begins well before Ruth ever sent one deep.

In a Montana newspaper’s write-up of NL Opening Day 1919—a chunk delightfully headlined “Old Man Baseball Crawls Out Of Dugout”—considered one of the subheadings read, “Brooklyn Takes Two Games From Boston—Rudolph and Cadore Have Old-Fashioned Pitchers’ Duel. Oh-h-h Boy, Come On, She’s Off!” That is a implausible set of words, but after a 1918 season wherein NL teams had averaged just 0.14 dingers and only 3.62 runs per game, calling a pitchers’ duel old-fashioned didn’t make much sense to me.

That line persists, though, as you go further back. It’s in a 1918 edition of The Honolulu Advertiser, and it’s there again in a 1914 recap of an Emporia vs. Great Bend game in Kansas, wherein Otis Lambeth “showed that he remembered enough of the twirling craft to win considered one of those old-fashioned pitchers’ duels from Joe Lillis.” The only oldest version of it I could find is from a 1911 Indianapolis Star article, though even there it seems like a well-traveled phrase: “Before the sport had progressed very far it resolved itself into considered one of those old-fashioned ‘pitchers’ duels.’ And a pitchers’ duel at all times is a high-quality thing when the house team wins.”

How would good pitching be old-fashioned within the depths of the dead-ball era? It might be like basketball writers today calling Warriors games “old-fashioned three-point contests.” It didn’t fit, and even these references I discovered were explicitly contradicted by other newspapers that, when talking about “old-fashioned baseball,” implied (accurately) that the previous renditions of the sport had been marked by sloppy fielding and free hitting. (And, in at the very least one case, on-field smoking.)

This bugged me plenty, so I made it the issue of MLB’s official baseball historian John Thorn. He got back to me in a short time after I emailed him explaining my dilemma, and in doing so he gave me a transient lesson on the history of the term “pitchers’ duel,” without the “old-fashioned” attached to it. That phrase, just by itself, could be traced back to the rowdy and high-scoring 1800s. But in those times, unlike the dead-ball era, a pitchers’ duel was something unique and due to this fact legendary. Thorn specifically directed me to this passage about an 1869 game, from his book Baseball within the Garden of Eden:

The Cincinnati winning streak bumped into a few close matches, most notably a game on June 15 wherein they defeated the powerful Mutuals of Recent York, at Cammeyer’s Union Grounds in Brooklyn, by 4–2, the bottom combined rating ever recorded to that point. At a time when holding an opponent to 10 runs or fewer was thought to be a masterpiece of pitching and defense, this was immediately anointed the best game ever played.

I can not ask the sportswriters of the early twentieth century what they were pondering, but I feel fairly comfortable drawing a conclusion. Throughout the dead-ball era, when someone deployed “old-fashioned pitchers’ duel,” they weren’t making a comment on the present state of the sport but quite hearkening back to a few of the rarest and most indelible games in the game’s history. (Think of it a little bit like a contemporary shortstop’s play being praised as “Jeterian”—it isn’t that Derek Jeter was a very good defensive shortstop, but quite that he made some individually memorable plays over there.) When Ruth and the dong gave baseball a rapid makeover, nevertheless, “old-fashioned pitchers’ duel” evolved to check with the game’s norm before the whole lot was transformed by home runs.

So, the following time an announcer calls a decent ballgame a “good old-fashioned pitchers’ duel,” which version will come to mind for me first? Will I follow my old perception of the dead-ball era as the sport’s extinct standard, or will I honor the term’s original meaning by comparing this 2023 game with a rare yet iconic low-scoring matchup from a long-ago era of blazing offenses? Which fashion is actually the style of old? I’m unsure yet, but I do know that I’m a good greater nerd now than I used to be once I began this search.