CHIEF BENDER

Charles Albert Bender came out of Crow Wing County, Minnesota, a Chippewa who learned the game at Carlisle and then carried it back East, where Connie Mack handed him the ball for eleven summers in Philadelphia. They called him Chief, and for a stretch of years there was no more reliable arm in the American League.

He was a tall man, six-two, and he threw with a loose, easy motion that made the ball do things late. In 1910 he won twenty-three against five losses, an E.R.A. of 1.58 across 250 innings, twenty-five complete games, three shutouts. That is not pitching; that is a man closing a door. The year before he had gone 18-8 with a 1.66 E.R.A., and in 1913 he won twenty-one and saved thirteen more out of the bullpen, which was a job nobody much wanted in those days.

He finished with 212 wins and 127 losses, an E.R.A. of 2.46 over 3,017 innings, 1,711 strikeouts. The numbers are stingy and mean, the way good pitching always is.

He did not stay in Philadelphia forever. There were later stops, Baltimore in the Federal League, a turn with the Phillies, but the main body of the work belongs to Mack and the Athletics and those dead-ball afternoons when a run was a fortune and Bender was in the habit of making sure the other fellow did not get one. He died in 1954, having pitched his way into the conversation of the great ones, quietly, the way he did most everything.