One of the tenets of the Puritan work ethic was that a man finished what he started. He did not quit when the going got tough. Not all baseball players in the 19th and early 20th centuries were Puritans, by any means, but most of them held the conviction that if a man started a game he should finish it. Terms such as long relief, middle relief, set-up man, and closer were not in their vocabularies. But times changed. During the first two decades of the 20th century the number of complete games declined drastically, from nearly 90 percent of all starts to less than 60 percent, but the era of the relief specialist had not yet arrived. When the starting pitcher ran into trouble and had to be replaced, the usual response was to bring in a fellow starter to put out the fire.
Clark Griffith, manager of the Washington Nationals, was one of the first to try a new strategy—developing a full-time fireman. Although Griffith had completed more than 90 percent of his starts when he was a moundsman, the Old Fox recognized that the times called for a new approach. He converted his spitballer, Allan Russell, into a relief specialist. The experiment he started with Russell soon came to fruition with Fred Marberry. Baseball was changed forever.
Allan E. Russell was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 31, 1893, the eighth of the nine children of Mary Carpenter and Charles Carpenter, a carpenter. Of Scottish and English ancestry, Allan was a younger brother of Clarence “Lefty” Russell, who had a brief major league career with the Philadelphia Athletics. Allan attended Waverly Elementary School 51 in Baltimore and completed one year at Baltimore Polytechnic High School.
Allan got his start in professional baseball at the age of 18. In the spring of 1912 he was given a trial with Baltimore of the International League and then sent down to Reading of the Class B Tri-State League to gain experience. He spent four years in the Tri-State and International Leagues. In 1915 he won 21 games for Richmond, leading the International League in strikeouts and earning a late-season promotion to the New York Yankees. The young right-handed hurler was not an imposing figure at 5-feet-11 and 165 pounds, but he clearly possessed potential as a pitcher.
Russell made his major-league debut on September 17, 1915, by defeating the Chicago White Sox, 3-2. The New York Times scribe was impressed:
“A likely young busher named Allan Russell, from Richmond, snuffed all the brilliance out of the Chicago stars. He held the Sox to six hits and struck out eight. In the ninth inning when the Sox had two on, nobody out, and visions of launching a rally, he struck out Happy Felsch, Shano Collins, and Eddie Collins in succession. Young Russell isn’t very big, but he was cool as a fresh gallon of ice cream…. The lad is going to make a big rep for himself next season.”
Fred Lieb of the New York Press wrote:
“The blanket was taken from another of Donovan’s cold pitchers yesterday, a youth named Allan Russell. … He pitched a masterful game for a kid. He held the Rowland maulers to six hits. His control was a little shaky, as he walked eight, but he breezed as many. Twice he struck out Eddie Collins, who is one of the hardest men to fan in baseball. In the ninth Allan struck out the side. With men on second and third he fanned the two Collinses. Eddie did a wooden Injun and stood stock still as Russ curved over three.”
There was no mention of the spitball in accounts of Russell’s first major-league contest. However, it became one of his most effective pitches. Babe Ruth, Allan’s one-time Yankees teammate, was an admirer of Russell’s moist delivery. The Bambino (or his ghost writer) wrote: “Allan Russell, the old-time Yankee pitcher who was later with the Washington Senators, was the most successful side-arm spitball pitcher I ever knew. Allan could break the spitter where he wanted it and since he threw it with the same sweeping side-arm motion with which he delivered his fast ball, it was doubly hard to gauge.”
Despite the promising start, the story of Allan’s stay with the New 