“Fifty-nine in ‘84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had” by Edward Achorn, $25.99
He was the greatest pitcher no one’s ever heard of: Old Hoss Radbourn, star of the Providence Grays. Back in organized baseball’s infancy, he won 309 games in just 11 major league seasons and led his team to the 1884 National League pennant.
But more significant than the Grays’ success that year was what Radbourn achieved as an individual. As Edward Achorn recounts in “Fifty-nine in ‘84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had,” Radbourn won 59 games in 1884, a mark that has never come close to being broken.
“In 1916,” Achorn writes, “a baseball writer named Brown Holmes polled ten famous major-league managers, asking them to choose the greatest feat in the game’s history. … When it came time to cast their votes … six of the ten managers, including some of the keenest minds in the game — John McGraw, Connie Mack, Pat Moran, Clark Griffith, Jimmy Callahan, and Hugh Jennings — picked … Radbourn’s astonishing performance in 1884.”
It’s tempting to dismiss the feats of early baseball; in the 19th century, the game existed in protean form. In 1887, an outfielder named Tip O’Neill batted .492 for the season, but this was at a time when walks counted as hits.
Yet, Achorn makes clear, Radbourn’s pitching record was legitimate and hard-earned. “(A) team’s top pitcher,” he explains, “needed unyielding stamina — mental as well as physical — to survive, throwing day after day.”
In one evocative passage, he describes what Radbourn faced during the 1884 stretch run: “The punishing repetition — pitch after pitch after pitch, day after day, without significant rest — had surely started to wear down his rotator cuff. … Even after the pain had set in, searing his shoulder, jarring him awake several times a night, he had continued to pitch.”
In the 1880s, most teams carried only two starting pitchers; for the Grays, this led to a crisis when, in late July, 21-year-old phenom Charlie Sweeney, who had outpitched Radbourn over the first part of the season, was expelled from the team — and the National League — for insubordination.
From that point on, the burden was on Radbourn, who started 41 of the team’s final 51 games. The pace was unyielding, even by the standards of 19th century baseball, but Radbourn faced it with stolid grace. For Achorn, he is an American archetype: the son of a butcher for whom pitching offered a better life:
“During the 1884 season,” he writes, “a man approached the great pitcher in a hotel lobby. ‘Gee, Old Hoss, ain’t you ever going to tire out?’ he asked. ‘Tire out?’ Radbourn snapped at him. ‘Tire out tossing a little five-ounce ball for two hours a day? Man, I used to be a butcher. From 4 in the morning until 8 at night I knocked down steers with a 25-pound sledge. Tired of playing 2 hours a day for 10 times the money I got for 16 hours a day?’”
Achorn writes with relish about this history of dissolution; the deputy editorial page editor of the Providence Journal, he loves the toughness of the place. This translates to his account of Radbourn’s legendary season, and the rigors of the early game.
Even the names we recognize — Cap Anson, John M. Ward, Tim Keefe — are, for us, less men than monuments, as stiff and unmoving as the rigidly posed photos of their tobacco trading cards. Achorn’s book reproduces many of those photos, including one of Radbourn subtly positioning his hand to give the finger to the world.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
