Page 28 - Delaware Lawyer - Winter 2023

FEATURE | OF COUNSEL: HARRY HOCH
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schools in Camden. (Caesar Rodney High School would not open for another decade.) At the age of 18, he was the youngest head of a Delaware school.
Baseball, like public education, was expanding, in par- ticipation and fandom. By 1906, Hoch was spending his summers in professional baseball. After considering of- fers from teams in five leagues, he pitched for Kane (Pa.), where he won 10 consecutive games, lifting the Moun- taineers to the Interstate League pennant. Upon return- ing home to his teaching duties, he pitched a Bridgeville team to the state club championship.
A year later, he advanced from entry-level Class D ball at Kane to Class B, with the Wilmington Peaches in the Tri-State League. A workhorse at age 20, he started 36 of the team’s 122 games, building a reputation among bird dogs for the big leagues and fandom in his home state. He was “admitted to be the best pitcher in the Tri-State League,” wrote the Wilmington Morning News.
At the recommendation of Dover scout William C. F. Waller, the Phillies purchased Hoch’s contract. Hoch made the club in 1908, and won the Phillies’ second game, in a seven-hitter against the New York Giants.
Four days later, he pitched a 10-inning complete game to defeat the Boston Doves, who became known as the Braves four years later, holding Boston to eight hits and two walks, and saving the game by throwing out the lead runner on a bunt in the 10th.
In his third game, he finally lost, 5-3 to Boston, yield- ing seven walks in seven innings.
Then his Phillies career ended. Hoch was among six players released a month into the season. In an example of 60 years of the team’s penuriousness before Robert Ru- liph Morgan Carpenter rescued the franchise from insol- vency in 1943, management decided to play the last 135 games with a 19-man roster. The team dropped its most popular player, Roy Thomas, who had led the National League in walks in six of the previous seven years, and its two youngest, most promising pitchers, Hoch and Harry Coveleski, who three times would win 20 games for the Detroit Tigers.
Hoch encountered two difficulties with Phillies man- agement: money and religion. “The Wilmington club paid me $300 a month in 1907, then sold me to the Phils. The Phillies wanted to cut my salary,” he told Al Cart- wright, Delaware’s preeminent sportswriter, in 1974. “I told them if I couldn’t get at least what I did in the Tri- State League, then send me back. I finally signed for the same $1,500.”
Then there was Sunday play. For most of his career, Hoch, a Methodist, did not play on Sundays. “The Phil- lies were Irish Catholic-owned, and the only Protestants on the club were me and Roy Thomas,” he told Cart- wright. “Charley Dooin, the catcher, said they let me go to make room for the Catholic pitchers. I went back to Wilmington for the same money and if you go by the way they paid you, I was a star in the minors.”
After resuming his dominance in the Tri-State League, he was dealt in late summer from last-place Wilmington to the contending Harrisburg Senators. Unusually for a pitcher even then, Hoch occasionally batted eighth, stole bases, and was used as a pinch-hitter.
By 1909, a full-time college student at Dickinson, he balked at the league’s salary cap, reporting just before the season. At 21, he was Harrisburg’s ace, with a seven- inning no-hitter.
Moving to the Elmira Colonels in 2010, he became one of the leading pitchers in the New York State League for four seasons. In 2010, pitching both ends of a June doubleheader, he tossed an 11-inning shutout in July to defeat Grover Cleveland Alexander of Syracuse, one of several times he matched or topped the most dominant pitcher in National League history.1
For the next four years, Hoch continued as one of the league’s top pitchers while he studied law at Dickinson, and his brothers Elmer, Ira, Walter, Linwood and Paul were starring for Keystone School, Delaware College and club teams.
After leading Binghamton to the 1913 pennant, Hoch was summoned back to the major leagues with the St. Louis Browns, who, like the Phillies, were an afterthought in their town — the American League’s most abject team until they blossomed as the Baltimore Orioles in 1960.
Hoch was fortunate to encounter a manager as educat- ed as he: Branch Rickey, a graduate of University of Mich- igan Law School, who used Hoch as a reliever and spot starter in 1914, including a complete game 1-0 loss to Walter Johnson, greatest pitcher in American League his- tory.2 In October, he pitched a one-hitter against the Car- dinals to win the post-season city series for the Browns.
Returning to the Browns in 1915, Hoch had a final triumph in defeat. In his last start, he scattered eight hits over seven innings, but lost to Johnson and the Senators when his teammates betrayed him with seven errors. A month later, after several middling relief appearances, he was optioned to Louisville, where he resumed effective- ness in the starting rotation.
Over the 1915-16 winter, three factors converged to
26 DELAWARE LAWYER WINTER 2023