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Some pitchers secure a rotational seat by dazzling their coaches with overpowering arsenals stocked full of blazing fastballs, disruptive breakers, and traitorous offspeeds.

Others purchase their permanence with command and craftiness, pinpointing their pitches in precision-engineered performances to amplify otherwise pedestrian weaponry.

A third kind, bereft of any particularly impressive capability, treat their personality as their calling card. Some are egregiously nice to their teammates, who are often unaccustomed to sharing clubhouses with such kind souls.

Others possess the passionate drive that coaches and players alike respect, especially—and perplexingly—when that outsized spirit is unspoiled by concomitantly positive results.

If they are neither of these, perhaps they are natural leaders and counselors around whom clubhouses can rally, especially as they age into elder statesmen of the sport.

In Rogelio Anaya’s case, everything we have, in numerical and qualitative terms alike, suggests that his permanence in the Culebra rotation was because they didn’t feel like finding someone else to pitch.

When it came to dependable pitching, the winter markets of the 19th-century Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña were not especially gemmiferent. Every offseason, teams that intended to win baseball games within the next year invariably found themselves in protracted bidding wars for one of three or four top arms, while others fossicked for months to find the men who would define a putative future full of postseason success.

The predictable result: many, many innings in the nineteenth century went to pitchers like Anaya, for whom every outing seemed unreasonably arduous, regardless of opponent.

Even other teams equally bereft of pitching skill must have marveled at the prodigious slack Anaya enjoyed from Culebra’s directors. For the balance of two decades, they had so entirely forsaken the concept of victory that they were willing to assign substantial playing time to a man who pitched as if he had spent the night at the local fiestas patronales: slow, erratic, and with a real possibility of vomiting.

Within the pure confines of baseball, this was a fair diagnosis, and yet there was undeniable magic in the air when Anaya pitched. Whatever his arm did that day—and it often seemed that his arm was almost completely autonomous, allowing him only the dignity of responding to the catchers’ signals before doing whatever it wanted—would be memorable.

Opposing players, who did so well against him that Anaya finished the nineteenth century with 2,291 bases granted on balls, eighth-most of any Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña pitcher, nonetheless reported finding him incredibly frustrating to face. Somehow, even the most execrable of his curveballs did not have the telltale hang that allowed for hard contact, and when his sinker failed to drop, it also failed to follow the straight path that gave them a chance to knock it back through the box—which, with Anaya on the mound, was no guarantee of a base hit; fielding was the one area where he had the requisite skill to start games.

For any batter possessed of at least a modicum of judiciousness, the best strategy when facing Anaya was to leave the bat on their shoulder—which was no fun for anyone.

As with many other phenomena of the baseball diamond, the explanation for this lay elsewhere.

Rogelio Anaya, whose baseball career began in 1875, was among the first of a new class of ballplayers: men who had been too young to serve in the Army of National Liberation.

Anaya had been thirteen when the towns in the West rose up against Spanish tyranny, and while there were boys at that age, and even younger, who lied and fudged their way into fighting for the freedom of Puerto Rico, they tended to come from the towns already under revolutionary control.

Anaya, born and raised in a big family of textile workers in San Juan, had neither opportunity nor desire to slip past the Spanish checkpoints and enlist for the Insular Government.

His father was another matter. Hilario Anaya, short but long-limbed like his son and already enamored with the promise of free Borinquen, snuck past the Spaniards in the winter of 1868 and joined the Insular Forces by New Year’s Day, when the revolutionaries tasked General Rojas with capturing the port of Aguadilla.

Like many of the others who had escaped from the east and north of the island, Anaya was assigned to the Batallón Descalzo¹, that great pilloried mass of poor and formerly enslaved men who slept in rough tents, foraged for their food and scavenged for their clothing, and awaited the plentiful aid that was imminent in its arrival (so claimed the Insular Government, ensconced in Mayagüez) and would be incomparable in its impact.

Even in those days, when its captaincy was viewed as a mark of dishonor, the Batallón had its share of men who had fought and bled in the desperate combat of nocturnal incursions into Spanish land, or mountain ambushes won with sharp blades rather than bullets.

Those men—the closest the Descalzos, in their obligatory egalitarianism, had to sergeants—would have taught Anaya the basics of survival as a soldier considered eminently expendable: how to use his machete as a proper weapon of war, where to best hide from enemy fire, which pockets he should go through first once the shooting stopped.

Perhaps the elder Anaya would have made use of those skills, had he not died two hours into the Battle of Aguadilla.

General Rojas, aware that victory meant taking a fortified position with the core of his forces, ordered the Descalzos on a wide flank to draw the Spaniards’ fire.

It was a sound tactic, if a bit hastily concocted, and the results were inarguable: the Spaniards were distracted, and Rojas encroached on the barracks with enviable ease.

Unfortunately for the three dozen Descalzos who were chosen to march first into the fire, Hilario Anaya among them, Rojas purchased that success with their blood, and in so doing captured an important port; a future terminus for the first military railway of the Revolution; a fortified barracks; a significant supply of rifles, ammunition, and other necessary materiel; and a few dozen nonplussed soldiers, some local and some Spanish.

The twenty-nine Descalzos who won Aguadilla with their lives, at the time, would represent a third of the “Batallón’s” strength. Among them lay the second lieutenant, who volunteered to lead the men on the charge.

Of the others, ten had been formerly enslaved. Two had not yet celebrated their seventeenth birthdays.

Rojas, whose principal forces had been able to take the barracks with much fewer casualties, ordered his aides-de-camp to find the names, ages and hometowns of the twenty-nine men, and write them on thick paper.

Later, once he had driven the Spaniards back to their ships and become—for a time, at least—one of the most honored figures in the new Insular Republic of Puerto Rico, he would visit the families of each of those twenty-nine men, to honor their service and provide whatever support he could.

Among them, now that San Juan was in liberty, were Hilario Anaya’s widow Teresa and his son Rogelio, now sixteen—as old as two of the boys who had died with his father.

Like his father, Rogelio had a prodigious stride and wingspan for his height, and like his father, he was entirely unsuited for the delicate and attentive work of weaving in which his family specialized.

In the first years of the Insular Republic, he worked odd jobs here and there—on fishing boats, a little as a stevedore, even for a time working as a runner for the Capitoline Guard—but from the first time he stumbled upon a Metropolitano game, his true passion was baseball.

He was struck by the beauty with which a few pitchers, true aces like Canóvanas‘ Periandro Ramírez or Orocovis‘ Palamedes Coronel, could deliver balls to the plate. It was certainly a rare sight in that first decade.

Rogelio Anaya, without playing a single game of professional baseball, decided his destiny was to be a pitcher. He practiced for years, imitating his favorites when his cousins came over to play and practicing curveballs against the wall of the family’s small hut until the yelling started.

By the time he was eighteen, like his father, he headed west in search of the destiny he knew awaited him.

For Rogelio Anaya, however, Aguadilla would not be a resting place, an altar to someone else’s victory, but the beginning of a new and fruitful life.

Anaya’s heroics, rendered exponentially more impressive by the depth of his preceding two-year slump, lived only twice as long as Frederic Leighton‘s peerage.

On October 1st, Juana Díaz beat Culebra 6-3 to break the tie, eliminate them from the playoffs, and restore order to the world of baseball.

Culebra would not return to the postseason until 1896, by which point Rogelio Anaya had been retired for three years.

This—his sole postseason win, by virtue of being his sole postseason start—demonstrated the brilliance Culebra’s scouts had validated when they signed him at the invernales, after seeing him throw one of his unpredictably loopy curveballs that catchers hated to receive.

It was not, however, the most famous proof of the magician he could be on the mound.

That would take almost another decade: ten more years filled with excruciating spectacles of inconstant pitching, and more than one of the worst seasons any nineteenth-century pitcher completed.

In the decades after, it would invest the name of Rogelio Anaya with the sort of confounding renown unique to eternal answers at bar trivia.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that Rogelio Anaya, despite giving up three walks and hitting a batter, nonetheless kept the whole San Sebastián lineup from reaching base through their own efforts.

Culebra’s defenders, considered competent for a change, held up their end of the bargain, and Anaya was certainly glad to once again be out of the game before the eighth, when his longstanding tendency to implode usually manifested.

This time, however, he’d achieved something quite special.

That last aspect of Anaya’s no-hitter would have been enough to secure him immortality in the multitudinous rararia that erupt around baseball like Spartoi in Theban soil: well-kept plaques and board game cards, coffee-table books full of digestible facts, short films on shoestring budgets.

It would have been the single blinding flare on a career otherwise sunken in silent shadow: a prayer said in the darkness for the magic to come.

There would, in fact, be more magic to come. Rogelio Anaya was not finished impressing the audiences of the nineteenth century with his baseball wizardries.

First, however, some much-needed context. There were 93 no-hitters in the first 27 seasons of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, which can be divided into various subtypes.

There is one piece of powder that it is pointless to keep dry: Anaya’s 1887 no-hitter is, by the facile metric of game score, the worst no-hitter on record, largely because it ended in the second third of the seventh inning, in addition to the three walks and plunk he issued before the umpires had mercy on the audience.

Fortunately for Anaya, Culebra’s directors remained completely uninterested in finding a pitcher who could replace him—which, to be clear, meant finding a pitcher who threw flat fastballs, could not finish games, and sometimes appeared to think the strike zone was located in the next town over.

There were many, many arms capable of that on every year’s winter market, or littering the reserves of teams across the league, who at least had the potential to be better one day.

By turning to Rogelio Anaya to start games, year after painfully incompetent year, Culebra’s staff sent a very clear message: they did not care.

They did not have to, because after that game in 1887, every Anaya start had the potential to be magic, and magic sold tickets.

In time, even players on other teams, often the same ones who would openly comment on how annoying it was to face Anaya, came to see the allure.

Perhaps it helped that their share of the gate receipts tended to get bigger when Anaya was on the mound.

At this point, with three no-hitters, Anaya tied Sebastián Reyes, whose sterling career, with four Campeón appearances and a bronze finish for Excelentísimo, could scarcely have been more diametrically opposite to his.

Most pitchers retired without a single gift from the baseball gods, and Anaya, whose other games surely did not deserve their favor, had been given three.

Their magnificence, it turned out, was not yet strained.

After this game, Culebra was 32-28.

It was the first time Anaya had pitched a no-hitter while his team had a winning record.

Rogelio Anaya had managed two feats which no baseball fan, in their most profound reverie, could have imagined lay in the path of his career.

Throwing five no-hitters, and four in just three years, was an absurd triumph on its own, enough that the Gaceta bestowed upon him the immensely rare honor of a retroactive Campeón selection despite a season that was, in almost every other sense, utterly humdrum.

Even more remarkably, he’d thrown two of them in successive starts, separated only by the normal rotation of a pitching staff and an additional day agreed upon by the road secretaries for both teams.

Culebra ended the 1892 season at 70-68, exactly one game above .500. It was their first winning record since 1877, when Anaya had made himself known with an entirely different class of heroics.

Within a few years, they would once again cross the threshold of the postseason, but it would be without the most famous figure to have ever worn their uniform.

Anaya retired in 1893 and promptly returned to San Juan, where he rejoined his family and took up a second career in theater, which was rather appropriate for a man who had spent eight years fooling tens of thousands of people into thinking he was a professional pitcher.

He became particularly famous for his ability to memorize and recite long monologues, often featuring the same clownishness that had defined his first career. Some of these he wrote himself, and at least one, Cinco días que viví, was about his own baseball career, which was only to be expected.

He was, at that point, a living legend, because the nineteenth century properly saw each of those five displays of anomalous expertise as causes for celebration in a near-completely undistinguished career.

Now, in a wider context, Rogelio Anaya’s no-hitters mostly vanish into the statistical noise of a large corpus, as if the baseball gods had intended to confuse us into thinking they were thrown by a normal pitcher, whose career had taken normal turns, and not one of the oddities whose exploits brim the ledgers of nineteenth-century pitching.

As Culebra became a fully-populated member of the Republic of Puerto Rico, and its baseball team finally became interested in making deep runs into the playoffs, the duality of Anaya’s legend—the five no-hitters, none of which he had even had the decency to lose, or even let one run in on walks or errors; the dominant postseason win that made him one of the few pitchers to ever come through for Culebra in the clutch—bedeviled fans, journalists and historians alike.

From the perspective of the team, the advantage was clear: signing a true ace would have brought hope, and unrealized hopes breed resentments. They might have gotten one or two years of good attendance from the promise of the future, but maintaining it would require building a competitive team.

Rogelio Anaya presented a much easier way to solve the dilemma. For each trick arrow in his quiver, for each game in which he behaved like the pitcher he was supposed to have been when he spent an hour throwing for Culebra’s scouts near Rompebote, he threw ten games that made sure Culebra fans expected nothing more from their club than passable food and a nice afternoon in the sunlight.

The academics who studied the nineteenth century of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña would have found all this easier to stomach if Anaya had been, like so many other pitchers of his time, a dolt blessed with a Jupiterian arm.

Unfortunately for them, Anaya was the kind of man who took advantage of his days off to learn to read and write, and even picked up some French during the offseasons.

By his retirement, he had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of Golden Age Spanish theater, which certainly settled his choice of second career.

They asked themselves: how could a man so clear-eyed and intelligent have put up with a career of such immense mediocrity, even one studded with a few flashes of true greatness?

As it turns out, the answer is quite simple: for Anaya, too, the arrangement with his team was quite profitable.

Culebra fed, clothed, and housed their players, and Anaya had few needs beyond good pens, thick paper, and the occasional new book. That meant that most of the salary he earned playing went directly to his family in San Juan, where it fed, clothed, and housed the rest of the Anayas.

When he moved back to the capital, his performances paid well enough that the Anayas expanded their weaving business into its own company, which became a relatively prosperous clothing firm by the middle of the twentieth century.

Rogelio Anaya was not a good weaver, and it drove him from his family in search of a way to contribute to their difficult situation.

Rogelio Anaya was not a good pitcher, either, but in Culebra, however, he found a team that paid him a fair wage and let him be good enough, and in return, he provided the needed spectacle to be profitable as they developed a fanbase and an identity that would carry them forward into the twentieth century.

And so, a pitcher whose entire goal in becoming a professional baseball player was to provide for his family was not only the one to throw five no-hitters, but the first pitcher to win a no-hitter in under nine innings, and the first to throw two no-hitters in a row.

Whether these are simple irregularities of the kind that dot baseball history, or proofs of the rare and fickle generosity of the baseball gods, is a question best left to private reflection.