Paul Burke
by Al Borie
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The familiar adage “records are made to be broken” may seem prescient every time an existing standard is surpassed, but there may be instances when the old saw just won’t cut. In his spectacular 1946 season, the San Francisco Seagulls’ Paul Burke set one mark that can technically only be tied and another that seems as safe as George Stonge’s 47 victories in 1877 or Irwin Edson’s 68 triples in 1894. Some records are protected as much by the time and place in which they were set as by the excellence required to set them.
Which is not to say that Paul Burke lacked anything in the excellence department. If his career had not been truncated by institutional racism on one end and by a seemingly endless series of injuries on the other, his name may well have appeared liberally among the ranks of career record holders. But like scores of other players, what he might have done can only be a matter of speculation; what he did do is certainly impressive enough.
Paul Burke was born in Barnwell, South Carolina on October 26, 1914. Like most African-Americans reared in the rural South in the first half of the 20th Century, he was born in poverty, and the outlook for a better life than the ones his sharecropper parents were living didn’t appear promising.
But the boy was a natural athlete, and he loved to play baseball. There was, of course, little point in dreaming of playing in the majors, but even the comparatively meager pay offered by Negro League teams beat the heck out of sharecropping. Almost anything did. Burke began pitching for bottom-level Negro teams at the tender age of 16. His ability was obvious, and it took him less than two years to reach the highest level of the Negro Leagues.
Negro League records are notoriously incomplete and unreliable, but it is clear from surviving newspaper accounts that Paul Burke was all but universally acknowledged to be one of the two or three best pitchers in Negro baseball from about 1933 until 1942, the year he was drafted. He was fortunate not to see combat, and like many professional players, spent much of the war playing baseball for Army teams. By the time the war was over he was 30 years old, still in his prime.
He would undoubtedly have gone back to the Negro Leagues to finish his career but for an enterprising group of individuals who sought to start a second major league. The economy was booming, and there were thriving metropolitan areas that still lacked major league teams. With literally hundreds of major league players returning from military service, there were plenty of baseball players around to stock new teams, but the upstarts also had another plan. They would do what NBL owners had refused to do for 70 years; they would sign African-American players. In late 1945 all eight teams in the newly-minted All-America Baseball Conference began offering contracts to the cream of the crop of Negro League players. Burke was one of the first to sign, inking a contract with the San Francisco entry, along with his friend Robert Bolen, the best hitter in the Negro Leagues. The new team had pennant aspirations in its first season.
The AABC proved a hit, and the Seagulls were the jewel in its crown. Bolen hit .399, and the ’Gulls soared to a 100-win season, winning the Western Division by 10 games over second-place Seattle. Bolen’s great season won him the league’s Most Valuable Player Award, but his contributions were secondary to those of the teams’ biggest star, 31-year-old right-hander Paul “The Tarantula” Burke.
Oh yes; the nickname. Burke doesn’t remember when he got it or who gave it to him, but it was bestowed upon him sometime during the early part of his Negro League career. Burke was known for employing several different arm angles to confound hitters. It was said he threw his fastball, slider, splitter, and circle change so many different ways it was “like he had about eight arms”. Hence, The Tarantula.
Burke faced Los Angeles’ Percell Russell on April 16, 1946; it was Opening Day. Russell was another friend from the Negro League days, and the two aces would match up many times over the next few seasons. Burke got the better of his friendly rival that day, allowing just two hits and no walks while striking out 10 and throwing the first of 10 shutouts he would deliver in that historic season. Burke and the Seagulls started the season 1-0; San Francisco would win an impressive 62.5% of their decisions that year, but their best pitcher would do much better than that. He would be perfect.
Major League Baseball requires that a pitcher earn at least 15 decisions to qualify as the season’s league leader in winning percentage. Aside from Burke, no pitcher has ever earned that many decisions in a season without at least one of them being a loss; no one else has ever come close. The most wins without a loss in a single season any pitcher other than Burke has earned is 8. Burke beat that by 19 wins.
En route to his unbelievable 27-0 record, Burke also logged an incredible 0.79 ERA. This may prove to be the more unassailable achievement. While it’s doubtful anyone will ever win 27 games without a loss in a season again, a pitcher going 15-0 would technically tie Burke’s record for winning percentage. That’s not likely to happen either, but is it less likely than another pitcher posting an ERA lower than 0.80? The only other qualifying sub-1.00 ERA in history was Matthew Sullivan’s 0.98 in 1909, during one of the deader years of the deadball era. Burke beat that by a good bit as well, in a less pitcher-friendly time.
It should be pointed out that there were mitigating circumstances that worked to Burke’s advantage in his record-setting season. The variance in the quality of play in the AABC in 1946 was all over the map. All of the good major league players from the pre-war years were back in the NBL. The AABC was comprised of NBL castoffs, young players who were still developing, old players well past their prime, and a handful of former Negro League stars. The Negro League stars, led by Burke, Bolen, and several others, completely dominated the league. They were All-Star-caliber players in a league that was otherwise almost entirely minor league-caliber. In each subsequent season, the younger players gained experience, the older players retired, and the new league slowly evolved into a real major league. But in 1946, there were only a handful of quality players in attendance.
There was a bittersweet coda to the 1946 campaign for both Burke and the Seagulls. The pitcher who had been impossible to beat during the regular season naturally got the ball in the first game of the league championship series, but despite pitching well, he took a loss, as New York’s Tom Green out-dueled him 2-1. Burke bounced back to shut out Green and the Empires 1-0 in Game Four and 3-0 in the deciding Game Seven, which landed San Francisco in the first-ever NBL-AABC World Series, but the Seagulls’ magical season was not destined to end on a high note. Burke did all that could have been asked of him, winning both of his starts against Philadelphia to cap off a 4-1, 0.84 postseason, but his teammates were badly out-gunned by the Quakers and lost all four of the games in which Burke did not appear.
Burke could not be expected to top his unbelievable 1946 season, so no one was disappointed by his outstanding 26-6, 1.72 campaign in 1947, especially since he once again led San Francisco to the postseason. This time the ’Gulls would go no further than the league championship series. Burke, facing Tom Green again, threw another 1-0 shutout in Game One, but Green beat him 3-2 in Game Four. Burke would have gotten the ball again if the series had gone the maximum, but the underdog Empires closed it out in six.
Astonishingly, a month and a half into the 1948 season, Burke was on pace to not only break his two-year-old ERA record, but to demolish it. He had thrown shutouts in four of his eight starts and his ERA was 0.38. He was 6-1 and looked absolutely unhittable. When he took the mound on May 17, 1948, he was coming off consecutive two-hit shutouts. On that day, he felt a searing pain in his shoulder after throwing a pitch. He had severely torn some cartilage in the shoulder socket. He was finished for the season.
Burke had never been an iron man. He had managed to stay healthy for all of 1947 but had missed a few starts in 1946, and had suffered various injuries during his Negro League days. But he had always rebounded from injury strongly in the past; when he returned in 1949, it was clear that something was different.
His speed was gone. Always considered a smart pitcher, the reputation was put to the test as he had to learn to get hitters out without an overpowering fastball. It is a testament to his intelligence and perseverance that he turned in a solid 15-11, 3.47 campaign amid various setbacks which landed him on the disabled list twice; the second trip ended his season. For the second year in a row he was a spectator during the Seagulls’ postseason run, which, for the third consecutive season, ended with a loss in the league championship series.
The next three frustrating seasons were marked by constant trips to the disabled list, and Burke was able to start as many as 18 games only once, in 1951. When he was healthy, he could still pitch: his won-lost record for those three seasons was a middling 18-15, but his ERA was a more than respectable 3.18. With Burke unable to maintain a steady presence in the rotation, San Francisco was no longer a playoff team, even with the emergence of Ray Hayes, a young pitcher that Burke mentored.
In 1953 the Seagulls asked the 38-year-old Burke to anchor their bullpen, reasoning that the lighter workload would allow him to spend more time on the active roster. It was not to be; he got hurt again almost immediately, and when he was able to pitch the results were gruesome: 0-3, 8.83 ERA. Burke announced his retirement before the season was over.
Burke was on an active major league roster for parts of only eight seasons, so under current rules he is ineligible for the Hall of Fame. He did manage to accrue over 1000 major league innings, so he qualifies to take his place among the career leaders for rate statistics; his 2.24 career ERA ranked 14th best as of Opening Day, 1954.