America at Large: The pitching padre who still holds a pair of dubious baseball records

Decades later, Red Smith, the celebrated New York Times columnist, rapped on Rev Aloysius Travers's door at St Joseph's College in Philadelphia. He had come to town to write an angry piece about the institution disbanding its gridiron team but happened upon a very different story.

Travers immediately disarmed him by performing a magic card trick and then spinning a yarn. Turned out the rotund cleric owned one rather unique boast that he’d never spoken to a writer about before. Here was the only Catholic priest to play a Major League Baseball game.

As the new season opens on April 1st, Travers retains that and a pair of dubious entries in the record books. No American League pitcher, Jesuit or otherwise, ever gave up more runs in a single match – 24. Or hits too – 26. He was plain old Allan Travers back then.

On a May afternoon in 1912 when, as a 20-year-old student, he wandered from the corner of Columbia Avenue and 23rd Street in north Philly down to Shibe Park and into sporting history. Not even good enough to make his college team, his reputation around campus was for playing the violin and acting in amateur drama. His mother’s dream was that one day he might make the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.

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"Kid you can steal anything you want," said George Mullin, the Detroit Tiger whose uniform he borrowed in the locker-room on his way to the mound, "but don't steal the glove".

The unlikely story of how the pitching padre came to be began at Hilltop Park earlier that week where the Tigers were visiting the New York Highlanders. As was their wont, some of the home fans were hurling abuse at Ty Cobb, the Tigers' legendary centre-fielder.

A notoriously irascible character, he grew tired of the relentless barracking and vaulted into the bleachers where he began pummelling Claude Luecker. When the crowd shouted for him to take pity on a defenceless man, Luecker had lost one hand and three fingers off the other in an industrial accident, Cobb, in mid-beating, roared back: "I don't care if he has no feet!"

After Major League Baseball had banned Cobb indefinitely, the Tigers moved on to Philadelphia to take on the mighty A's and there they decided to strike in solidarity with their disgraced comrade. Team owner, Frank Navin, was in a serious bind. Failing to fulfil a fixture was an automatic $5,000 fine. Not a penalty he could afford to incur. A local sportswriter was enlisted to drum up live bodies and, once the frenzied clarion call for last-minute replacements reached Travers at St Joe's, he couldn't resist taking his shot at the big time.

He enlisted in a motley crew that included some avid sandlot players, one bold volunteer who’d never been on a baseball diamond in his life, and at least two men with decent athletic pedigrees.

Billy Maharg was a retired lightweight pro boxer turned street tough with enough ties to the mob to later be implicated in the throwing of the 1919 World Series.

Bill Leinhauser had once been a promising amateur welterweight and eventually gained renown in the city as a hardboiled narcotics detective. They were all on $25 a piece, Travers got twice that because the pitcher was the one likely to suffer most embarrassment and greatest danger.

“I was throwing slow curves and the A’s were not used to them and couldn’t hit the ball,” said Travers of his promising start that day. “Hughie Jennings [the beleaguered Tigers coach] told me not to throw fast balls as he was afraid I might get killed. I was doing fine until they started bunting. The guy playing third base had never played baseball before. I just didn’t get any support. No one in the grandstands was safe. I threw a beautiful slow ball and the A’s were just hitting easy flies. Trouble was, no one could catch them.”

Some of the regular Tigers squad stayed to watch the debacle unfold, hoping it would be bad enough to prompt the authorities to reinstate Cobb. It was. Once the extent of the mismatch became obvious, a couple of thousand spectators rushed the ticket office at the end of the third inning in a vain attempt to get refunds.

The rest of the 20,000 who stayed to watch the A’s beat the ringers by 24-2 witnessed a game around which a certain mythology grew up. Leinhauser played Cobb’s position and one local legend claimed he wore the center-fielder’s shirt under his uniform when storming a German position on the Western Front in the first World War.

The striking Tigers were all fined $100 but Cobb’s suspension was reduced to 10 days so that normal service could quickly resume. Travers returned to school the next day and upon graduation enrolled in a seminary in upstate New York. A teaching Jesuit, throughout his academic career at second and third level he remained silent about his one fateful day in the majors, probably because, every now and again, some wiseacre student would unearth the story and torment him about it.

His mother wasn’t thrilled with his baseball antics either. The morning after the A’s dispatched his pitches all over Shibe Field, she saw his name in the newspaper and proceeded to smack him over the head at the kitchen table. She hadn’t brought him up to be a strike-breaker.