Bullet Joe Bush

October 9, 1913. The Polo Grounds, Game 3 of the World Series tied at a game apiece, and Connie Mack hands the ball to a 20-year-old kid from Brainerd, Minnesota. Joe Bush goes the distance, beats John McGraw's Giants 8-2, and walks off the youngest pitcher in World Series history to win a game -- a record that stood for 89 years, until Francisco Rodriguez broke it in 2002. The next morning's headline called him "Mere Boy." He'd spend the next fifteen years proving it wasn't a fluke.

Leslie Ambrose Bush pitched 17 seasons in the majors, won 195 games, and picked up three World Series rings with three different franchises -- a résumé that would get him a statue in most eras. Three of those seasons, 1922 through 1924, came in pinstripes, where he anchored a Yankees staff that finally broke through for the franchise's first championship.

Path to the Bronx

Bush grew up in Brainerd, and Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics bought him off a Missoula, Montana club in August 1912 (about as far from a big-league mound as you could get that year). He debuted that September, then won 32 games over the next two seasons as the A's ran off back-to-back pennants. His 1913 World Series start made him a name. Two years later, when Mack tore the whole roster apart in his famous fire sale, Bush was one of the few players he kept.

He made the most of the reprieve. On August 26, 1916, in the middle of a Philadelphia team that would lose 117 games, Bush no-hit Cleveland 5-0 at Shibe Park -- walked exactly one batter, struck out seven (including Tris Speaker), and outdueled future 20-game winner Stan Coveleski. It was the kind of game that made you wonder what he could do on a team that could actually hit.

He found out in Boston. The Athletics sent him there in December 1917, and Bush turned in a career year for the 1918 Red Sox -- 2.11 ERA, a team-high 125 strikeouts -- then closed out the World Series against the Cubs with a relief save behind Babe Ruth. Three years later, in 1921, he went 16-9 and hit .325 for good measure. That was exactly the kind of production the Red Sox, mid-collapse and selling off anything with value, could no longer afford to keep.

Yankees Career

Boston sent Bush to New York on December 20, 1921, in the same trade that brought Sam Jones and shortstop Everett Scott to the Bronx for Roger Peckinpaugh, Jack Quinn, Rip Collins, Bill Piercy, and $100,000. It was one piece of Ed Barrow's long-running raid on the Red Sox roster, a pipeline that would also deliver Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt to New York in the same stretch.

1922 was the best year of his career. Bush went 26-7, led the American League in winning percentage at .788, and helped the Yankees to the pennant. The World Series that followed was a disaster -- the Giants swept New York in four games (plus an infamous tie, called for darkness, that nobody in New York ever fully got over), and Bush took both losses. In the finale, with two on and two out in the eighth, manager Miller Huggins ordered him to walk Ross Youngs and pitch to George Kelly instead. Bush argued the call loudly enough for the crowd to hear it. He walked Youngs anyway. Kelly singled in two runs.

1923 settled the score. Bush went 19-15 with a 3.43 ERA, and when the Yankees met the Giants again in October, he got the ball twice. Game 1 was the cruel one -- Casey Stengel took him deep for a game-deciding, inside-the-park home run in the top of the ninth, and the Yankees went down in order in the bottom half, 5-4. Four days later, on his ninth wedding anniversary, Bush threw a complete game and beat the Giants 8-1 in Game 5, pushing New York to a 3-2 Series lead. Two days after that, the Yankees closed it out. First championship in franchise history, and Bush had a hand in getting there even with a loss on his ledger.

1924 was steady, if unremarkable -- 17-16, 3.57 ERA, and a league-leading 109 walks that hinted his control was starting to slip. On December 17, 1924, the Yankees sent him to the St. Louis Browns along with Milt Gaston and Joe Giard for pitcher Urban Shocker, who'd go on to win 49 games over his final three full Bronx seasons. It was a clean baseball trade -- New York got younger and better, Bush got squeezed out -- but it still stung. Three straight winning seasons, a championship ring, and he was gone before turning 32.

The Name

"Bullet" was mostly a fastball nickname -- the kind that writes itself when a guy can bring it. The story goes that teammate Eddie Collins actually pinned it on him after spotting a clubhouse letter misaddressed to "Joe Bullet" Bush, and the name outlasted the joke. Either way, it fit a pitcher who spent parts of two decades getting hitters out with velocity, and later, with a forkball he was among the first to throw with any real consistency -- developed, by his own account, after arm trouble made his old curveball too painful to spin. He paired it with an exaggerated corkscrew windup, the "Joe Bush twist-around," that Ruth himself reportedly admired. Not bad for a guy who was mostly known, at least around the Polo Grounds in 1913, as "Mere Boy."

Key Moments

After the Bronx

Bush bounced through four more organizations after leaving New York -- the Browns, Senators, Pirates, and Giants -- before finishing his career in 1928 back where it started, with the Athletics. Sixteen years after Connie Mack first bought him off a Montana sandlot team, Bush made his final big-league appearance for the same Philadelphia club. He retired with 195 wins, a 3.51 ERA, and three championship rings earned with three different teams over an 11-year stretch. He died on November 1, 1974, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 81.

He never got the Hall of Fame call, and 195 wins across seven teams doesn't leave much of a single legacy to hang a plaque on. But for one October afternoon in 1913, he was the best story in baseball -- a 20-year-old kid who wasn't supposed to be able to do what he'd just done. Ten years and two more rings later, nobody was calling him a boy anymore.