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Intro to Today’s Essay:
Many of you may have heard of the early Deadball Era ball player, Noodles Hahn. As Mike Janacek tells us today, besides having one of the greatest baseball nicknames of all time, Noodles Hahn was quite a pitcher for the Reds over his injury-shortened career. I’d say that leading the National League in strikeouts for three straight years and completing 91.8% of his starts should earn him more recognition than he has previously received. We thank Mike for shining our baseball spotlight today on Noodles Hahn, a player who should be remembered for much more than his great nickname. -GL
Another Edition of Baseball’s Forgotten Stars:
Frank ‘Noodles’ Hahn
“Hahn…lacked the blazing speed of a Grove or a Rube Waddell, but he could tie up batters into more knots than 10 sailors could untie in a week.” -Grantland Rice, sportswriter 2
In a conversation with a good friend from the great state of Tennessee, Noodles Hahn came up as we talked about ballplayers who came out of Tennessee. After reading and doing some research, I was intrigued by his career. Indeed, it is not a household name or one that many baseball fans would recognize, but Noodles Hahn had an incredible run as a left-handed pitcher with the Cincinnati Reds. Hahn had a short eight-year career, of which the last two were filled with injuries and arm troubles. If we focused on his first six campaigns before he was injured, Noodles averaged 20 wins a season with an average of 318 innings per year. What I find incredible is that in his 231 starts, he completed 212 games for a completion rate of 91.7%. In comparison, in 2024, three pitchers managed to post two complete games.
His winning percentage of .580 ranks him slightly higher on the all-time list than Hal Newhouser and John Smoltz. His WAR of 46 places him 130th all-time for pitchers, which is slightly ahead of Jim Kaat, who pitched for 25 seasons. Unfortunately for Hahn, baseball then did not know what baseball knows today about keeping pitchers healthy. If only, what a career this guy might have had.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Hahn was a starting pitcher with the Cincinnati Reds and the New York Highlanders from 1899 to 1906. While he didn’t have a long career, he did have a very productive one. No one, including Hahn, knows the origin of his nickname, but it is believed to have come from a childhood event involving the movement of Noodle soup.1 He signed a $ 35-a-month contract with a team in Clarksville, Tennessee, before he was 15 years old, and then joined a team in Chattanooga in 1895. He pitched well enough to attract interest from teams in St. Paul’s and Detroit of the Western League. He won 29 games and lost 35 with the Wolverines over two years, but impressed Charles Cominsky, who recommended him to John Brush of the Cincinnati Reds.
He finished his rookie season at 23-8, leading the League in strikeouts with 145. He threw a one-hitter against the Louisville Colonels.
On July 12, 1900, he pitched his second no-hitter and ended the season with a 16-20 record. He once again led the League in strikeouts. The Reds finished last in 1901, winning only 52 games, of which Hahn won 22 games or 42% of the team’s victories. This was the highest mark until Steve Carlton won 46% for the 1972 Phillies. Leading the League in strikeouts for the third straight year with a career-high 239. He also finished first with 41 complete games and innings pitched at 375. He struck out 16 batters in a game on May 22, a mark not surpassed until 1933 by Dizzy Dean.
Wise beyond his years, Hahn was one of those rare breeds who realized that baseball careers do not last forever. He began looking at options to prepare for the end of his playing days. He once considered going into the electrical field but settled on studying veterinary medicine, enrolling in Cincinnati Veterinary College. As Noodles later observed:
“When ballplayers are finished as major leaguers, many drift back to the minors, then into the saloon business, and then into oblivion; and not two-dozen NL players were in a position to give up baseball at the end of their career. There were enough doctors, lawyers, and dentists, but ‘hoss doctors, why, they’re lined up along the boulevards waiting to give those boys money.” 3
Over the next two seasons, the Reds began to improve, and Noodles went 23-12 and 22-12. His ERA in 1902 was the second lowest in the League. In July 1903, and not yet 24, Hahn became the youngest pitcher to win 100 games since Major League Baseball moved the mound 60′ 6 “. Since then, only Bob Feller has accomplished that feat at a younger age. He also threw over 300 innings in each of his first four seasons. A workload that would eventually wear him down.
At 25 and entering his sixth season, Noodles was beginning to falter. He finished the season 16-18, but his ERA was the second lowest of his career. Playing with a sore arm that never really recovered, Hahn had an unremarkable year in 1905, pitching only 77 innings before the Reds released him. The following spring, Noodles tried out for the New York Highlanders and made the team, but his arm gave him issues. After appearing in 6 games and throwing 42 innings, he decided it was time to move on.
Having graduated from Veterinary College, Noodles went to work as an inspector for the United States Government in Cincinnati. He continued pitching on semi-pro teams and often visited Crosley Field, putting on a uniform and throwing batting practice. He did this until 1946 at the age of 68. In an injury-shortened career of only eight seasons, Frank George ‘Noodles’ Hahn won 130 games, lost 94, and had a career ERA of 2.55 over 2,029 innings, striking out 917. Of his 231 starts, Noodles completed 212 games for an incredible 91.8% completion rate. He had 25 shutouts and won twenty games or more four times in his six full-time seasons. Noodles Hahn passed away in Candler, North Carolina, on February 6, 1960, at the age of 80.
Mike Janacek
1 Levitt, Dan. Sabr.org. Noodles Hahn. SABR Baseball Biography Project. Retrieved April 15, 2025.
2 Rice, Grantland. The Sport Light. The Milwaukee Journal. August 21, 1941. Retrieved April 15, 2025.
3 Levitt, Dan. Sabr.org. Noodles Hahn. SABR Baseball Biography Project. Retrieved April 15, 2025.
Baseball-reference.com. Noodles Hahn. Retrieved April 15, 2025.
Baseball Almanac. Noodles Hahn Retrieved April 15, 2025.
Photos: All from Google search
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