Player #76A: John "Needles" Bentley. Pitcher with the Washington Senators in 1913-1916. 46 wins and 8 saves in 9 MLB seasons. His most productive season was 1924 with the New York Giants as he posted a 16-5 record with a 3.78 ERA in 188 innings pitched. Was a good hitter with a career OBP of .316 in 616 plate appearances. Gave up World Series winning-ground ball single to McNeely in the 1924 "pebble" game.
Bentley's SABR biography sums up his role in one of Washington's greatest moments and the apex of his career as the "Babe Ruth of the Minors": The “Pebble” game. After 85 years it remains one of the most memorable games in the history of the World Series. On October 10, 1924, at Washington’s Griffith Stadium, in the seventh game of the World Series between the New York Giants and Washington Senators, the Senators’ Earl McNeely came to bat in the bottom of the 12th inning with the score tied, 3-3, runners on first and second, and one out. Moments later, his routine grounder fortuitously struck a pebble and bounced high over the head of Giants’ third baseman Freddie Lindstrom, and the Senators scored the winning run for their only World Series victory. Fittingly, the winning pitcher that day, in what would also be his only World Series victory that year, was the universally beloved Big Train, Walter Johnson. For New York, the losing pitcher was a 29-year-old left-hander named John Needles Bentley. Everybody called him Jack.
Jack Bentley remembered that game for the rest of his life; yet surprisingly, he recalled it with fondness, not regret. In October 1955, when he was 60 years old, Bentley told a reporter, “There I was, pitted against Walter Johnson, my boyhood idol. The whole country wanted him to win a Series. When we lost, I felt lower than a snake’s belly in a rut. But as I walked off the field and heard all those people hollering, I was a little bit pleased that I had brought so much happiness to so many people … by losing! My own family was rooting for Washington.” . . .
. . . On January 27, 1917, Jack Dunn, owner and manager of the International League’s Baltimore Orioles, had not yet finished assembling the core group of players who would soon make his team legendary. Two and a half years earlier, in July 1914, with the Orioles in first place by 5½ games but in desperate financial straits because of competition from the Federal League’s Baltimore Terrapins, Dunn had sold pitchers Babe Ruth and Ernie Shore and catcher Ben Egan to the Boston Red Sox for $20,000. After the subtractions from the roster, the Orioles had collapsed, finishing 21 games behind. Now Dunn was rebuilding, and on January 27 he announced that he had traded shortstop Sam Crane, in Dunn’s estimation “easily the best shortstop in the minor leagues last season,” to the Senators for catcher Alva Williams, outfielder Turner Barber, and Bentley. As it turned out, Dunn didn’t want Bentley to pitch; instead, having witnessed Bentley’s batting prowess in Minneapolis, Dunn installed him as the Baltimore Orioles’ starting first baseman.
It proved a very prescient move. Beginning in 1919, the Orioles won seven consecutive International League pennants, and for three of those years Bentley, who by then considered himself a hitter who occasionally pitched, put on one of the most dazzling offensive demonstrations the league had ever seen. In his first two seasons, 1917 and 1919 (he was in the US Army in 1918), with the exception of a lone pitching appearance in his first year, Bentley played exclusively at first base and in the outfield: In 185 games, he posted averages of .333 batting and .510 slugging. Then he really caught fire. From 1920 to 1922, Bentley’s numbers were staggering, as he batted .378 in 439 games, scored 340 runs, drove in 399, and had a slugging average of an astounding .590. In both 1920 (161) and 1921 (120), Bentley led the league in RBIs; in 1921, he won the league Triple Crown, batting .412 (the league’s highest season average in the 20th century), with 24 home runs and 120 RBIs. His 246 hits that season remain the league’s single-season record.
Yet Bentley continued to pitch when needed, and those results, too, were staggering. From 1920 through 1922, Bentley pitched in 56 games and produced a 41-6 record, a winning percentage of .872: in both 1921 (.923) and 1922 (.867), he led the league in that category. In 1920 (2.10) and 1922 (1.73), Bentley also led the league in ERA, and over three seasons his ERA was an astounding 2.07. During those years, by virtue of his performance both at the plate and on the mound, the press bestowed on Bentley the moniker Babe Ruth of the Minors.
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