Our Arklahoma Heritage: Ben Tincup carried a ranch, a language, and a perfect came from Oklahoma to the Big Leagues

Austin Ben Tincup

North of Pryor, Oklahoma there was once a ranch where a boy learned to ride almost before he could walk and to speak Cherokee before he spoke much English at all.

That boy was Austin Ben Tincup, born in 1894 in Indian Territory, a full-blooded Cherokee who would one day stand on a major-league mound wearing the uniform of the Philadelphia Phillies

.His father, George Washington Tincup, was a cattleman and deputy sheriff who rode for the Cherokee Nation’s Lighthorse police. His mother, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Crittenden, came from solid Cherokee stock; her family had walked the Trail of Tears two generations earlier.

The Tincups raised eight children on that Mayes County spread, and Ben, the second youngest, grew up roping calves, breaking horses, and listening to his elders tell stories in the Cherokee language around the evening fire.

Baseball, when it finally arrived, was just another thing to master.

By 1912 the tall, raw-boned teenager with the whip-quick right arm was pitching for local town teams and catching the eye of scouts. The Louisville Colonels signed him first, then shipped him to Little Rock.

On the afternoon of June 18, 1917, in front of a few thousand fans at Kavanaugh Field, Ben Tincup did something that has been done only twenty-three times in Major League history and far fewer times below it: he retired all twenty-seven Birmingham Barons in order, no hits, no walks, no errors, not a single man reaching base.

Final score: Little Rock 1, Birmingham 0.

The Travelers carried him off the field on their shoulders while the band played “Over There.”

The perfect game made newspapers across the country, and for one shining moment the Cherokee ranch kid was the most famous pitcher alive The majors called the next year.

The Phillies bought his contract, and in 1918 Ben found himself staring down Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and the best hitters of the dead-ball era. He never stuck long (three brief cups of coffee in Philadelphia across 1914, 1915, and 1918), but he earned his big-league card all the same: 2–4, 3.32 ERA, and memories that would last a lifetime.

When the playing days wound down, Ben came home to Oklahoma. He married Ruby Lee Hair, a Cherokee girl from Adair, and together they raised three children: daughters Juanita and Betty Jo, and son Ben Jr.

The family settled in Claremore, where Ruby kept the books for the local Chevrolet dealership and Ben turned his eagle eye for talent into one of the longest scouting careers in baseball history.

.For more than forty years he roamed the backroads of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas in a series of battered Chevys, signing kids who reminded him of himself: country boys with live arms and quiet pride.

He sent Allie Reynolds (another Oklahoma Indian) to the Yankees, signed Hall of Famer Bill Mazeroski for the Pirates, and coached generations of minor leaguers who still swear “Chief” Tincup taught them how to think on the mound instead of just throwing.

He never bragged about the perfect game. Folks say if you asked him about it, he’d grin, spit tobacco juice, and change the subject to the new shortstop he’d just seen in Muskogee.

Austin “Ben” Tincup died on July 5, 1980, at age 87 in Claremore of natural causes from complications of diabtes. He is buried at Rose Hill Memorial Park in Tulsa --his headstone is inscribed simply “Austin B. Tincup – 1893-1980.” The headstone ios embellished with a bas -relief slugger and crossed bats encompassing a baseball.

But every June 18, old-timers in Little Rock still raise a glass to the day a Cherokee cowboy from north of Pryor stood sixty feet, six inches away and made twenty-seven professional hitters look mortal

Somewhere up above, the Travelers are still carrying him off the field, and somewhere on an Oklahoma backroad you can almost hear a lanky kid speaking Cherokee to the horses, winding up, and letting one rip straight and true into history.