Ray Caldwell

August 24, 1919. League Park, Cleveland. Two outs, ninth inning, the Indians up 2-1 on the Philadelphia Athletics under a sky that had been threatening rain all afternoon. Ray Caldwell reared back for what should've been the final pitch of his Cleveland debut. Instead the sky opened up and hit him first.

The bolt knocked him flat on the mound, unconscious for a few seconds in front of a stadium that went dead silent. He got up. He waved off the trainers. He threw the pitch. Game over, Indians win, and Caldwell had a complete game to his name that no lightning strike was going to take off the books. "It felt just like somebody came up with a board and hit me on top of the head and knocked me down," he told the Cleveland Press afterward -- which is, all things considered, a fairly calm way to describe getting struck by lightning during a baseball game.

By then he'd already spent nine years wearing pinstripes, and the Yankees had already run out of patience with him twice.

McKeesport to the Hilltop

Caldwell was born April 26, 1888, in Corydon, Pennsylvania, a right-hander with a 6-foot-2 frame who broke into pro ball with the McKeesport Tubers of the Ohio-Pennsylvania League (a mill town outside Pittsburgh -- nobody remembers the Tubers, but they remember what came next). He pitched well enough there in 1910 that the New York Highlanders signed him that September. Within a few years he was the best arm on a team that didn't have many.

Three Shutouts and a Vanishing Act

The 1914 season should have made him a star. Caldwell opened with three straight shutouts, blanked the White Sox on July 27, and beat Cleveland four days later for his 17th win -- with two full months of the season still in front of him. A 25-win year looked like the floor, not the ceiling.

Then he disappeared. Caldwell vanished during an August road trip, and the alcohol that had already cost him a season's worth of fines finally cost him the rest of it. He never won again that year. Final line: 17-9, a 1.94 ERA that ranked fourth in the league, and a small mountain of "what if" that nobody in the organization could do anything about.

Fifty-Two Innings of Nothing

If 1914 was about Caldwell failing himself, 1915 was about the Yankees failing him. At one stretch, his teammates went 52 consecutive innings without scoring a single run behind him -- nearly six complete games of shutout-caliber pitching rewarded with silence. He still finished 19-16 with a 2.89 ERA over 305 innings, workhorse numbers wasted on a lineup that couldn't hit.

He tried to fix it himself. Caldwell hit four home runs and drove in 20 runs that year, finishing ninth in the American League in homers -- not among pitchers, among everybody. A man who couldn't get run support decided to become his own run support. It didn't work often enough, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

Walter Johnson, Then the Fall

The 1916 Opening Day start against Walter Johnson and the Washington Senators was the Yankees' way of saying he was their man. Through July his ERA sat at a sharp 2.99. His record said 5-12, which tells you everything about that offense and nothing about him.

Then it happened again. Manager Bill Donovan fined him, suspended him two weeks for drinking, and when the two weeks ended Caldwell didn't show up. New York suspended him for the rest of the season. Final line: 8-16, 4.47 ERA. The talent had never been the question. Staying sober long enough to use it was the problem, and 1916 baseball had no answer for that beyond punishment.

Caldwell hung around one more full season, tying Bob Shawkey for the team lead with 13 wins in 1917, before a new manager decided he'd seen enough.

The Trade

Miller Huggins tore the roster apart that winter, and Caldwell went with the wreckage. New York sent him, Frank Gilhooley, Slim Love, Roxy Walters, and $15,000 to the Boston Red Sox for Duffy Lewis, Dutch Leonard, and Ernie Shore. Huggins wanted players who'd show up. Caldwell, gifted as he was, had proven for four straight years that he couldn't promise that.

He finished with 96 wins and 99 losses in pinstripes -- a losing record for a pitcher who, on his best days, was as good as anyone in the league (his best days just never lined up with his sober ones often enough to prove it over a full season).

The Lightning, Twice

Boston didn't fix him either. He struggled there through most of 1919 before Cleveland claimed him off the scrap heap, and in his very first start for his new team, the sky did what a decade of fines and suspensions never managed: it knocked him flat and made him famous.

He shook it off and won the game. That alone would've made a good story. What happened next made it a great one.

Seventeen days later, on September 10, 1919, Caldwell no-hit the New York Yankees. Final score: 3-0, against the team that had just spent nine years trying to get him sober and given up. He finished 1919 at 5-1 with a 1.71 ERA in his six Cleveland starts -- the best short stretch of his career, arriving the moment nobody expected it.

The next year he went 20-10 for a Cleveland club that won the World Series, the only ring of his career. He was also grandfathered as one of 17 pitchers in baseball allowed to keep throwing the spitball after the league banned it following that season -- a technicality that helped keep him employed into his thirties. He started Game 3 of the '20 Series and didn't get out of the first inning. Cleveland won anyway. That was Caldwell's career in miniature: brilliance and disaster, often in the same week, occasionally in the same afternoon.

Nine years in New York got him a losing record and a reputation as the most talented, least reliable arm in the organization. One night in Cleveland got him a place in baseball trivia forever. Somewhere, that seems about right for a career built entirely out of brilliance nobody could count on.