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

From that decade on, the context for “old fashioned pitchers’ duel” was established: There’s a lot of slugging in the game today, but there was once a time when baseball was ruled unilaterally by the men who threw the ball. However, that’s 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 piece delightfully headlined “Old Man Baseball Crawls Out Of Dugout”—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’s a fantastic set of words, but after a 1918 season in which 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, in which Otis Lambeth “showed that he remembered enough of the twirling craft to win one of those old-fashioned pitchers’ duels from Joe Lillis.” The single oldest version of it I could find is from a 1911 Indianapolis Star article, though even there it sounds like a well-traveled phrase: “Before the game had progressed very far it resolved itself into one of those old-fashioned ‘pitchers’ duels.’ And a pitchers’ duel always is a fine thing when the home team wins.”

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