LITMIR.BIZ

      CHARLIE CASE

      SEPTEMBER 7, 1879–APRIL 16, 1964

      Major League Career

      1901; 1904–1906

      Time as a Red

      1901

      Position

      PITCHER

      AROUND THE TURN OF THE 20^TH CENTURY, the Greater Cincinnati area produced some fine Major League pitchers. Unfortunately, they produced them for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who won four pennants in the century’s first decade. Jesse Tannehill, Howie Camnitz, and Sam Leever were big pitching stars, but Charlie Case put in a couple of good seasons there as well.

      It wasn’t that the Reds didn’t recognize talent. In those years, teams had no minor league affiliates where they could stash promising prospects until they were ready for the big leagues. If a hot prospect needed seasoning, teams risked losing them. And such was the case with Charlie Case, who grew up in Smith’s Landing, a tiny town on the Ohio River in the southeastern corner of Clermont County, where his father worked as a ferryman. In his late teens, he moved to Milford and lived with relatives while working as a railroad conductor and playing amateur baseball. A strapping six-foot, 170-pound lad, Case was known as one of the best amateur pitchers around, the ace of the Muldoons, one of Cincinnati’s top teams. The Clermont Sun noted in July 1901, “The secret of his success is … his splendid control of the sphere and his terrific speed.”

      That year the last-place Reds had only one good pitcher, Noodles Hahn, and were grasping for help on the mound. They signed Case in late June, and he debuted against the Boston Beaneaters on July 5. Though he lost 4–3, The Sporting Life praised his performance, blaming the loss on errors by his teammates: “Case is a good pitcher but he does not possess the superhuman power to distribute brains to the men behind him.” The game summary continued with, “The young twirler was liberally applauded throughout the game and bore his honors modestly. If every game that the Reds have played this year had been as well pitched, there would be more victories on the right side of the percentage table.”

      He started against the Giants a few days later, the Enquirer predicting that his “many friends and admirers” would attend the game. Those who did saw him beat the Giants 5–4, scattering seven hits. In the colorful sports-page patois of the day, The Sporting Life gushed, “Case is all the money” and also is “some pumpkins of a slab artist,” adding, “Case has height, speed and good curves and there is no reason why he should not make a star twirler in time.” The only knock on his first two performances was his fielding, which in those days was highly valued in a pitcher.

      Still, he was the man of the hour for the moribund Reds. That feeling, however, didn’t last long. His next start was called after one inning due to rain, and in the one that followed he probably was praying for rain. He surrendered 13 runs on 18 hits to Philadelphia in a 13–1 loss. After just one bad outing, the team released his contract to the Indianapolis Hoosiers of the Western Association, even though they’d already begun promoting an exhibition game in Batavia on August 1, promising that Clermont County’s own Charlie Case would take the mound for the Reds.

      He spent two years in the minors before he was signed by Pittsburgh, where in 1904 he went 10–5 with a 2.94 ERA in 141 innings. The next year, he threw 217 innings, posting a 2.57 ERA, but the workload may have been too much because the following year he started poorly and was sent to the minors, where he spent the next nine years, all of them at Class A, the highest level, winning 122 games.

      After his career ended, he and his wife, Frances, settled in Chilo, a little town on the Ohio not far from where he grew up. They had no children, and he worked as a mail carrier for many years, passing away at the age of 84, another local boy who’d helped fill the pipeline to Pittsburgh.