Marathon shutout by Sacramento-born pitcher is one for the record books

Marathon shutout by Sacramento-born pitcher is one for the record books

By Carlos Alcalá


The record has not been broken – and perhaps cannot be.

One hundred years ago today, a young Sacramentan threw the longest shutout by a single pitcher in professional baseball history: 24 innings.

Clarence Henley's 1-0 victory for the San Francisco Seals was, one San Francisco paper said, "the most spectacular game of baseball ever played on the Pacific Coast."

The modern professional is considered strong if he pitches a complete game.

A Texas college pitcher went 13 innings last month, but critics heaped scorn on his coach for allowing it.

Henley pitched nearly twice as many innings, maintaining enough control to strike out six while giving up nine hits and walking only one of the dozens of Oakland Oaks batters he faced.

Clarence "Cack" Henley was born in Sacramento in 1885 and grew up in a brick house that still stands on 13th Street.

His father, Oscar Henley, was a brick mason and built the Henley home about 1880. It is the oldest brick home in Sacramento.

Clarence Henley entered the Pacific Coast League in 1905. He was so tall and thin that he was immediately nicknamed "Slivers."

He threw so hard that it was said the Seals' catcher kept a piece of beefsteak in his glove to cushion the impact of the ball.

Henley had two 30-win seasons, though the feat was easier then because teams played more than 200 games per season, thanks to balmy West Coast weather. (Today's major league teams play 162 games in a season.)

His control was storied, and over the course of his career, he struck out twice as many men as he walked.

His long shutout, though, was a product of the times.

Back then, "pitchers generally started and finished their games," said Marshall Wright, a Massachusetts historian of the minor leagues. "They were expected to do it, and they did."

For today's hurler, said Alan O'Connor, a Sacramento baseball historian, "a good outing's five innings, six innings. It's different."

The players then didn't have year-round training, nor did they have designer steroids.

"Drinking was the only substance abuse," said Wright, "and it wasn't minor."

Once, a group of gamblers got the idea to fix a Seals game by getting Henley drunk, San Francisco Examiner sportswriter Abe Kemp recalled in a 1953 column.

The plan was to bet big that Henley would lose and ensure it by buying him as much nickel beer as he would drink.

He drank a lot.

The gamblers and Henley boozed all night, downing $10 in beer. He was still standing.

They ferried him to the ballpark, Kemp wrote, and "smiled knowingly as he zig-zagged toward the clubhouse in centerfield." Then they made their bets.

Henley wobbled at the start of the game but grew stronger as the game wore on.

He pitched 12 innings of shutout ball that day, and won when he himself homered.

Sheryl Pinto, Henley's granddaughter, still lives in the brick house in Sacramento's Colonial Heights neighborhood where Clarence and his wife, Emily, lived. Clarence Henley built it, Pinto said.

She has held onto photos and clippings her grandmother saved, including this one about the fabled 24-inning game:

"And Henley," the story reads. "Well, he pitched as he never did before. He twirled as clean and great a game as was ever witnessed anywhere.

"You might think that's romancing a bit. Not on your life. If you think a pitcher, no matter how famous, pitched a better game where bat and ball held sway, then you had better tell it to Sweeney," the writer concluded, emphasizing with that old phrase that he would never believe it.

Oaks pitcher Jim Wiggs also shone. He pitched 23 shutout innings before losing.

"Henley's control was far better," William Slattery wrote in the San Francisco Call newspaper, "the tall San Francisco slabster walking only one man, while Wiggs passed six.

"That was with a hard-to-please umpire, according to the Chronicle. "The ball had to cut the plate in the middle to be called a strike."

The two pitchers scattered 20 hits, with several scoring threats eliminated only by dramatic double plays.