The 1912 Detroit Tigers strike sent Allan Travers into an endless pit of pitching despair. He threw the single worst complete game in MLB history.

A Catholic priest, a violinist, and a college student walk into a bar. They come out as pitchers for the Detroit Tigers. No, this isn’t a joke about how bad the Tigers are in 2020 (although it could be). This is a real story from the 1912 Detroit Tigers, and it’s only about one guy. The Catholic priest, violinist, and college student are the same person. His name was Allan Travers.

This story is a little wild. It begins with one of the greatest baseball players to ever live, Ty Cobb, doing some unspeakable things to a man with no hands. In May of 1912, the Tigers were suffering a less-than-stellar start to the season, and fans of the other teams were making sure they knew it.

On May 15, Cobb and the Tigers were in New York facing the Yankees (formerly the Highlanders in 1912). A man was reported to be heckling Cobb ferociously, and according to Cobb it was not the first time this man had done it. According to most reports, the handicapped heckler named Claude Lueker was taunting Cobb the entire game with profanity and racial slurs.

Ty Cobb did not take this too kindly. He ended up jumping into the stands and started punching Lueker repeatedly in the face and stomped on him with his spiked cleats. When the fans screamed for Cobb to stop claiming that the man had no hands to defend himself, Cobb was so overcome with rage that he exclaimed “I don’t care if he has no feet!”

The American League president at the time, Ban Johnson, was present for the game and witnessed the entire incident. He decided to suspend Cobb indefinitely. In a show of solidarity for their teammate, 16 other Tigers players announced they would refuse to play in protest of the harsh suspension by Johnson.

Ban Johnson was a smart man, so he found ways to counter this protest. He threatened Tigers owner Frank Navin that the team would be fined a sizeable amount of money for every game he forfeited. Navin became terrified of a potential loss of revenues, so he turned to a ragtag group of sandlot players from Philadelphia. In total, eight new “players” were recruited by the Tigers on one day contracts for $25 each.

There were never any intentions to actually play this game. Navin’s idea was to find a loophole around Johnson’s fines and just put enough men on the field to be able to play a game, but then forfeit before it actually started. The problem was that over 20,000 people showed up to watch this train wreck. With the threat of lost revenues and refunded tickets looming, the Detroit Tigers went ahead and played against the reigning World Series Champions Oakland Athletics.

The 16 Tigers players who went on strike with Cobb left the team with virtually no pitchers. Enter Allan Travers, the aspiring violinist and priest who had never pitched a game in his life. He wasn’t even a player for the sandlot team the Tigers scrounged from, he was their assistant manager. But enticed by the $50 bonus to pitch, Travers became the most unlikely rookie pitcher in league history.

The Athletics did not hold back with their roster construction on this fateful day, playing all of their regulars including three Hall of Famers: third baseman Frank Baker, second baseman Eddie Collins, and pitcher Herb Pennock. Poor Allan Travers probably didn’t know what he was getting into. It was almost certain that the Athletics would give their regulars a day off while playing quite literally the worst group of players in MLB history. But they didn’t, and Allan Travers paid the ultimate price for it.

The only formidable thing Allan Travers did on May 18, 1912 was throw a complete game. Although very impressive by today’s standards, a complete game by a debuting pitcher has happened 290 other times since then and 15 other times just in 1912. Nothing about this feat was very historical, just very unlikely.

The darker historical significance of this game for Allan is that nobody making their debut has even come close to giving up as many runs. Allan Travers gave up 26 hits, 7 walks, and 24 total runs in eight innings, a Major League record that still stands today. In fact, only 15 other players in history had given up double digit runs in their debut. Travers’ record is 7 runs more than the next worst debut. Travers also holds the record for most amount of batters faced (52) in the shortest amount of innings pitched (8). That’s a long day at the ballpark. The final score on May 18 was 24-2. At least he struck out a guy?

Needless to say, Allan Travers was no longer a baseball player after this game. His one and only start in his career led him to be directly responsible for -0.5 WAR. All’s well that ends well though, for Allan Travers went on to become an ordained Catholic priest, still the only one to ever play in the MLB today. I’m sure it didn’t feel good at the time, but I hope Travers was able to laugh at this later on in life. It’s not every day that a random bystander gets to pitch in a Major League game and scratch a way into the record books. In fact, it’s never happened since, and will never happen again. Shortly after this travesty, Ty Cobb was reinstated and begged for his players to discontinue the strike. They obliged, and business as usual began once again for the Detroit Tigers. They missed the playoffs and finished the season with a record of 69-84. If I was Allan Travers, I would have felt better knowing that the Tigers weren’t going to the playoffs anyway. I would have enjoyed that my name is forever in the record books and sitting side-by-side the 19 other pitchers the Tigers used in 1912. That is why Allan Travers is one of my favorite bad baseball players.