The Main Event

  • August 29, 1885 – Charley Ferguson throws the first no-hitter in team history, shutting down Providence. The Phillies won the game 1-0 with their lone run scoring in the ninth on an errant throw.

On August 29, 1885, a 22-year-old right-hander named Charley Ferguson took the mound at Recreation Park in Philadelphia and did something no Phillies pitcher had ever done: he threw a no-hitter. The 1-0 win over the Providence Grays came in just the franchise’s third season of existence, and it remains one of the earliest highlights in a career that would end in tragedy less than three years later. Ferguson’s story is one of the great what-ifs of 19th-century baseball — a pitcher, hitter, and fielder so complete that teammates and rivals alike called him the best all-around player they’d ever seen.

A phenom discovered in Virginia

Charles J. Ferguson was born April 17, 1863, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a working-class neighborhood known as Random Row. He suited up for the University of Virginia’s ballclub in 1882 in an era when college teams freely used non-students. That performance caught the eye of a Richmond leather merchant who ran an independent team, and by 1883 Ferguson was pitching and catching professionally.

Philadelphia’s National League club, the Quakers — the team we now know as the Phillies — had just finished its inaugural 1883 season with a dismal 17-81 record and was getting outdrawn by the crosstown Athletics of the American Association. Owner Al Reach needed a spark. He found it in Ferguson, signing the 20-year-old for $1,500 in the spring of 1884. Ferguson didn’t disappoint: in his major-league debut on May 1, 1884, he pitched a complete game and collected three hits himself in a 13-2 rout of the Detroit Wolverines. He finished his rookie season 21-25 with a 3.54 ERA, having thrown an enormous 417 innings for a team that still lost far more than it won.

By 1885 Ferguson had established himself as the best pitcher on a Quakers team finally turning the corner, posting a 26-20 record with a 2.22 ERA and helping Philadelphia to its first winning season. He was also becoming too good of a hitter to keep off the field: manager Harry Wright started using him in the outfield on days he wasn’t pitching, and Ferguson responded with a .306 batting average — 77 points higher than his own team’s average and 65 points above the league mark.

It was in the middle of that breakout season that Ferguson delivered his signature moment. Pitching at home against the Providence Grays on Saturday, August 29, 1885, he retired the visitors without a hit in a tense 1-0 victory, the first no-hitter in the young franchise’s history. Local papers framed it as the capper to a friendly rivalry among Philadelphia’s own pitchers: teammate Ed Daily had held Providence to just two hits the day before, and the Reading Times noted that while “both are doing remarkably fine work just at present,” Ferguson’s hitless outing “ranks as first.” The two pitchers finished the season with almost identical numbers — Ferguson at 26-20 with a 2.22 ERA, Daily at 26-23 with a 2.21 ERA — but it was Ferguson whose name went into the record book.

More than a pitcher

Ferguson’s rise didn’t stop there. In 1886 he had arguably the best season by any pitcher in the National League, going 30-9 with a 1.98 ERA, finishing second in winning percentage and ERA, and closing the year by winning his last 11 decisions — including both ends of a season-ending doubleheader sweep of Detroit that killed the Wolverines’ pennant hopes.

That season wasn’t without a strange detour. In late August, after the Quakers arrived in Chicago for a series against the league-leading White Stockings, Ferguson abruptly left the team and took a train home to Charlottesville. Rumors swirled about what had happened until Ferguson gave his own account to The Sporting News: he said he’d been feeling seriously ill on the road trip, begged manager Harry Wright to let him go home to recover, was refused, and eventually left anyway, arriving in Virginia so sick he was confined to bed for ten days, a doctor’s note in hand to prove it. Wright apparently accepted the explanation, because Ferguson rejoined the club without further incident.

By 1887 — Ferguson’s last full season — he had become the Quakers’ everyday second baseman on days he wasn’t pitching, going 22-10 on the mound while hitting .337 with a team-leading 85 RBI. Over the season’s final 17 games, with the Quakers charging to a second-place finish, Ferguson hit .361, went 7-0 as a pitcher with a 1.75 ERA, and fielded .963 at second base against a league average of .908. One rival club reportedly offered $10,000 for his services that winter; Reach turned it down rather than part with his star.

A tragic ending, and a lasting legacy

Ferguson never got to build on that 1887 finish. During spring training in 1888 he likely ate or drank something contaminated and within days the telltale rash of typhoid fever appeared. He battled the illness for nearly a month before passing away on April 29, 1888, just shy of his 25th birthday. His death shook the sport — he may have been the most prominent active major leaguer to die during his career up to that point — and the Quakers, along with the Washington Nationals, New York Giants, and Boston Beaneaters, all wore black crepe armbands that season in his memory.

Decades later, those who saw Ferguson play still spoke of him in rarefied terms. Sportswriter W.B. Hanna named him to a 1924 list of the 25 greatest players in baseball history, citing his rare combination of pitching, fielding, and hitting. And in 1931, Hall of Fame catcher-manager Wilbert Robinson — asked to name the five greatest players ever — put Ferguson alongside Ty Cobb, Willie Keeler, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner.

How the Phillies’ wait stacks up

Getting a franchise’s first no-hitter in year three, as the Phillies did with Ferguson, is fast by historical standards — though not the fastest. The very first no-hitter in National League history came in the league’s inaugural 1876 season, when George Bradley threw one for the St. Louis Brown Stockings, the ancestor of today’s Cardinals. Boston’s American League entry, later the Red Sox, got its first in year four, when Cy Young threw a perfect game in 1904. The Philadelphia Athletics, the Phillies’ old American League rivals, waited until their fifth season, when Weldon Henley no-hit the St. Louis Browns in 1905. Even the expansion-era Arizona Diamondbacks, whom many think of as building a no-hitter tradition quickly, needed seven seasons before Randy Johnson‘s perfect game in 2004.

Plenty of storied franchises waited far longer. The Yankees didn’t get their first no-hitter until their 15th season, when George Mogridge beat Boston in 1917. And two teams hold the two longest droughts in major-league history: the Mets went 51 seasons before Johan Santana finally broke through in 2012, and the Padres waited an astonishing 52 years — more than 8,200 games — before Joe Musgrove no-hit the Rangers in 2021. Measured against that history, Ferguson’s 1885 gem wasn’t just a franchise landmark. It was one of the quicker arrivals in baseball’s long, uneven relationship with the no-hitter.

Philadelphia Baseball Events for August 29

  • August 29, 1934 – The Athletics split a doubleheader with Detroit, winning the nightcap 13-5 to end Tigers ace Schoolboy Rowe‘s 16-game winning streak.
  • August 29, 1969 – Signed minor-league free agent Jim Essian.
  • August 29, 1977 – Greg Luzinski has his only Sports Illustrated cover appearance.
  • August 29, 1981 – Jeff Stone, playing for the Phillies’ farm club in Spartanburg, steals his 121st base of the season, breaking the professional baseball record. He’ll finish the year with 123, a mark that stands for only two years before Vince Coleman stole 145 for the Macon Peaches.
  • August 29, 1993 – The Phillies draw more than 58,000 fans for a Sunday afternoon game at the Vet, capping a team-record streak of 20 straight games with attendance topping 40,000.
  • August 29, 1996 – Traded Pete Incaviglia and Todd Zeile to Baltimore for two players to be named (Calvin Maduro and Garrett Stephenson).
  • August 29, 2015 – Aaron Altherr triples in a run against San Diego, his seventh straight extra-base hit since reaching the majors — no Phillie had started a career with that many extra-base hits, per records dating to 1900.
  • August 29, 2023 – The Phillies rout the Angels 12-7 at Citizens Bank Park, with Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber, Alec Bohm, Bryson Stott, and Trea Turner each homering in the win.

ICYMI

Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for August 29

  • Jimmie Savage (born 1883) – An outfielder who made his big-league debut with the Phillies on September 3, 1912, appearing in two games before later playing regularly for the Pittsburgh Rebels of the Federal League.
  • Frank Nicholson (born 1889) – A pitcher whose entire MLB career consisted of two games for the Phillies in September 1912.
  • Hap Collard (born 1898) – A right-handed pitcher who broke in with Cleveland in 1927 and closed out his big-league career with the Phillies in 1930.
  • Jack Warner (born 1903) – An infielder who spent parts of eight big-league seasons with Detroit, Brooklyn, and the Phillies, playing his final MLB season with Philadelphia in 1932.
  • Dave Cole (born 1930) – A right-handed pitcher who wrapped up his six-year big-league career with the Phillies in 1955 after stints with the Braves and Cubs.
  • Aaron Rowand (born 1977) – A center fielder who played for the Phillies in 2006-2007 and is best remembered for a highlight-reel, wall-crashing catch at Citizens Bank Park on May 11, 2006, that broke his nose and cheekbone.
  • Roy Oswalt (born 1977) – A right-handed starter acquired by the Phillies from Houston at the 2010 trade deadline, joining Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels to form one of baseball’s most formidable rotations.
  • Noah Syndergaard (born 1992) – A pitcher acquired by the Phillies at the 2022 trade deadline who worked as a hybrid starter/reliever during the club’s run to that fall’s World Series.

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