George Mogridge

April 24, 1917. Fenway Park, a cold Tuesday afternoon, 3,219 fans scattered around a ballpark built for triple that many. George Mogridge, a lanky left-hander from Rochester nobody outside New York had much reason to know, walked out to face the Red Sox and did something no Yankee had ever done -- not once, not in 14 years of trying, not through nine separate one-hitters that got achingly close. He no-hit Boston, 2-1, and gave the franchise its first no-hitter. It wasn't a masterpiece by strikeout standards -- three walks, three strikeouts, three Yankees errors he had to pitch around -- but a no-hitter with warts is still a no-hitter. Mogridge earned his place in the record book the hard way.

Path to the Bronx

Mogridge was born February 18, 1889, in Rochester, New York, and baseball found him almost by accident. In 1911, a catcher friend talked him into joining the Galesburg Pavers, and Mogridge won his first start and never looked back (some pitchers spend a decade hunting for their arm; his showed up on day one). He impressed enough people that Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey sent manager Hugh Duffy out to see for himself -- Duffy liked what he saw and brought the kid back to Chicago.

The White Sox stint didn't take. Mogridge spent 1911-12 on the fringes of that roster, then bounced through the high minors for two-plus seasons -- the Minneapolis Millers, then the Des Moines Boosters of the Western League. He was good enough there that the Yankees, hunting for left-handed pitching in the summer of 1915, agreed to buy his contract outright. Boosters manager Frank Isbell wasn't in a hurry to let him go, though -- he held onto his ace until Des Moines had the Western League pennant locked up, then finally released him to New York in late August.

Yankees Career

Mogridge worked his way into the rotation over the next two seasons, and by 1917 he was a fixture. That April afternoon at Fenway made him a permanent line in the record book, but it also fit a pattern -- Mogridge was durable in a way that modern arms simply aren't. A year earlier, in 1916, he'd thrown back-to-back 14-inning complete games against Detroit, both ending in 3-2 losses (one on a Ty Cobb RBI single), 26.2 innings combined for a 1.01 ERA in the stretch. He lost both. That was Mogridge's Yankees career in miniature -- excellent work, indifferent results, because the team around him wasn't very good yet.

His best Yankees season came in 1918, under new manager Miller Huggins. Used as both a starter and a fireman out of the bullpen (a job that wouldn't get its own name for another sixty years), Mogridge went 16-13 with a 2.18 ERA and led the American League in saves with seven -- the first Yankees left-hander to lead the league in that category. He was the definition of a swingman that year, once throwing 11 shutout innings in relief against Cleveland on May 24 in a game the Yankees eventually lost in the 19th. Nobody asks a pitcher to do that anymore, and for good reason.

The Yankees traded him away on December 31, 1920, sending Mogridge and outfielder Duffy Lewis to the Washington Senators for outfielder Braggo Roth. It read as a minor housekeeping move at the time. It aged into one of the uglier small-print footnotes of the early Ed Barrow era -- Roth was out of the majors within two years, while Mogridge went on to anchor a pennant-winning rotation three seasons later.

Life After New York

Washington got the better end of that trade and then some. Mogridge became a steady starter for the Senators, and in 1924 he was part of the only World Series championship team Washington baseball ever produced. He won Game 4 outright on October 7, evening the Series behind his own pitching and a Goose Goslin three-run homer. Two days later, in the winner-take-all Game 7, he came out of the bullpen after starter Curly Ogden was pulled after facing two batters -- an early, primitive version of the "opener" strategy -- and held the Giants scoreless for several innings while Washington worked its way to the title.

He finished out his career in 1925 split between Washington and the St. Louis Browns, then signed with the Boston Braves in 1926 after invoking his right, as a ten-year veteran, to refuse a minor-league assignment. He pitched effectively enough out of the Braves bullpen in 1927 that it's a little surprising how the story ends: in July of that year, at 38, he asked for and got his release -- not to retire outright, but to go manage the Rochester Tribe of the International League. His hometown team. He'd been born in Rochester in 1889, and when he died there in 1962, he'd long since made his peace with a quieter kind of baseball life than the one that made him famous.

The First, Not the Second

It's worth being precise about what Mogridge actually did, because the record gets muddled with time. He threw the first no-hitter in Yankees franchise history -- not the second, not "one of the early ones." Nine times in the club's first 14 seasons, a Yankees pitcher had carried a no-hit bid deep into a game and let it slip. Mogridge was the one who finally closed the door. Six years later, Sad Sam Jones threw the franchise's second no-hitter, a scoreless gem against the Athletics with zero strikeouts -- and by then Mogridge was three years removed from a championship ring of his own, wearing a different uniform.

The location matters too, in a smaller way. Mogridge's no-hitter came on the road, at Fenway Park, which makes for a strange footnote -- but it wasn't even the first no-hitter that ballpark had ever hosted. Boston's own George Davis had thrown one there in 1914, pitching for the Braves. Mogridge's claim is specific and still remarkable: first no-hitter in Yankees history, full stop. That's plenty.

The no-hitter is the line everyone remembers, and it should be -- it's still the answer to a real trivia question more than a century later. But the fuller picture of George Mogridge is a left-hander who outworked his own team for six years, got traded away right before he hit his stride, and won the ring the Yankees couldn't quite give him with somebody else's franchise instead. Baseball's ledger doesn't always balance in favor of the team that let a good arm go. It didn't this time either.