Jack Quinn

April 15, 1909. Hilltop Park, uptown Manhattan, and Vice President James S. Sherman is in the stands for the New York Highlanders' opener against Washington. The kid on the mound is 25 years old, a spitballer with a funny accent and a name that isn't really his -- John Picus, Anglicized from a Slovak surname his family dropped somewhere between Štefurov and Pennsylvania coal country. He goes the distance. One run allowed, five hits, a win in front of the second-highest office in the land.

Nobody in that ballpark could have guessed they'd watched the opening chapter of a career that would run through three different leagues, eight different teams, two separate stints in pinstripes, and a finish line 24 years later that no pitcher of his generation would even approach. Jack Quinn didn't have the best arm on any Yankees staff he ever pitched for. He just refused to stop pitching.

The Highlanders Years

Quinn's rookie season was a quiet success -- 9-5, sharp enough that nobody worried he was a fluke. In 1910 he became a full-time starter and went 18-12, and when the Highlanders finished second and earned a best-of-seven exhibition set against John McGraw's Giants that October, Quinn got the ball for Game 6. He was terrific -- a spitball that broke like nothing else on the staff, an eight-run second inning behind him, a 10-2 win that cut the Giants' series lead to 3-2. (The Highlanders lost Game 7 to Christy Mathewson two days later, because of course they did. Nobody beat Matty twice in one October.)

Two more seasons followed, unremarkable ones, and then came May 11, 1912, a home game against Detroit that ended his first tour of New York for good. Quinn entered in relief with the bases loaded and two out, faced Donie Bush, and got a call from umpire Silk O'Loughlin that he did not care for. He threw his glove at the ump. O'Loughlin tossed him. Catcher Gabby Street and manager Harry Wolverton argued hard enough to get ejected too, and the Hilltop Park crowd -- not exactly a patient bunch to begin with -- started throwing pop bottles at O'Loughlin. One caught him in the foot. It was the first such incident in the ballpark's history, and AL president Ban Johnson suspended Quinn indefinitely for it.

The suspension only lasted six days. The larger consequence didn't. New York was in last place, on its way to 102 losses, and later that year the Highlanders sold Quinn's contract to Rochester of the International League. He was gone, and there was no reason to think he'd ever wear the pinstripes again.

The Wilderness Years

What came next reads like a résumé for a man who couldn't hold a job, except every stop actually worked out fine. Quinn won 19 games at Rochester in 1913 and got bought by the Boston Braves that August. Then he jumped to the outlaw Federal League, signing with the Baltimore Terrapins for a reported $3,500 -- a contract jump that triggered an actual court fight, because that's what the reserve clause did to a man's career choices in 1914. He was excellent that year, 26-14. He was miserable the next, 9-22. When the Federal League folded after 1915, Quinn needed a job again, and he found one clear across the country with the Vernon Tigers of the Pacific Coast League, where he spent three seasons piling up 53 wins and an ERA under 3.00 every single year.

He was rebuilding a reputation nobody in New York was paying attention to (least of all the Highlanders, who by then had been renamed the Yankees and had bigger problems than an old spitballer three thousand miles away). That was about to change, in the strangest way possible.

A Tug-of-War, and a Grudge That Outlasted the Decade

The Pacific Coast League suspended play in July 1918 because of the war, and the National Commission -- baseball's governing body before there was a commissioner -- ruled that players from suspended leagues could sign anywhere for the duration. Vernon sold Quinn's rights to the Yankees on July 19, 1918. Separately, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey signed Quinn to a White Sox contract of his own. Quinn pitched the rest of 1918 in Chicago, going 5-1, while two franchises argued over who actually owned him.

The Commission met that December and ruled for the Yankees. On February 21, 1919, New York made it official, sending pitcher Happy Finneran, first baseman Zinn Beck, and cash back to Vernon to close the deal. Quinn was a Yankee again at 35 years old, seven years after getting run out of town.

Comiskey never let it go. He blamed AL president Ban Johnson -- who sat on the Commission -- for costing him a pitcher who'd go on to win 15 games for New York that very season, and the grudge festered for years. It's a small footnote to a much bigger story: SABR's account of the Quinn dispute directly ties Comiskey's refusal to work with Johnson to the owner's later silence about his own suspicions surrounding the 1919 Black Sox. A pitching-rights argument over a 35-year-old spitballer, and it still echoes through the sport's ugliest scandal.

Back in the Rotation

Quinn settled into New York's third-starter role behind an ascending staff. In 1919, he backed Bob Shawkey's breakout 20-win season with 15 wins of his own, giving the Yankees a rotation with actual depth for the first time in years. In 1920, he chipped in 18 wins behind Carl Mays's league-leading 26 and Shawkey's 20 -- a staff that didn't need to be dominant with Babe Ruth now providing more run support than the AL had ever seen.

That same March, the American League and National League voted to ban the spitball for good. Quinn was one of 17 pitchers grandfathered in, allowed to keep loading up the baseball for the rest of his career while everyone else had to find something new. It wasn't a loophole he exploited quietly, either -- the spitter had been his signature pitch since Hilltop Park, and now it was legally his alone to throw, a decade after most of the league had given it up.

His only World Series appearance in pinstripes came in the 1921 World Series, and it wasn't kind to him -- he relieved Shawkey in Game 3 at the Polo Grounds and got rocked in a 13-5 loss to the Giants. New York lost that Series in eight games (the format briefly went best-of-nine), and that winter general manager Ed Barrow went right back to stripping talent out of Boston, the way he'd been doing for years. On December 20, 1921, Quinn went to the Red Sox in the trade that brought Sam Jones, Joe Bush, and Everett Scott to New York -- a deal that looked lopsided in the Yankees' favor almost immediately, and Quinn was the most expendable name on the outgoing side of it.

After the Bronx, and Why It Mattered

Here's the part that makes Quinn worth remembering: he was 38 years old when the Yankees traded him away, and he had twelve more seasons left in his arm. He pitched for the Red Sox, then Connie Mack's Athletics from 1925 through 1930, winning two World Series rings there in 1929 and 1930 -- the only championships of his career, both arriving well after most pitchers his age had already retired to the bleachers. On June 27, 1930, at 46 years old, he hit a home run off the Browns and became the oldest player ever to do it, a record that stood until Julio Franco broke it in 2006. He started a World Series game in 1929 at 46 -- still the oldest man ever to do that -- and started on Opening Day for Brooklyn in 1931 at 47, another record nobody's since matched.

He finally ran out of arm on July 7, 1933, pitching for Cincinnati at 50 years old, and got released a week later after twisting his knee mid-game (not a torn rotator cuff, not a dead arm -- a bad knee, the way a much younger man's career ends). His last career win had come the year before, at 49, a mark that stood as the oldest-pitcher-to-win-a-game record for 80 years until Jamie Moyer broke it in 2012. Add it all up -- 247-218, 3.29 ERA, 23 seasons, eight teams, three leagues -- and Quinn never once made an All-Star team, because they didn't exist for most of his career. He just kept getting outs long after everyone assumed he'd stop.

He was 25 the day he threw a complete game in front of a Vice President and nobody thought twice about it. He was 50 the day he finally couldn't finish an inning, and by then half the league had grown up watching him as some kind of fixture, a guy who was just always still out there, still spitting on the ball, still getting people out. The Highlanders sold him off as a washed-up 28-year-old in 1912. He had 21 more years of pitching left to prove them wrong.