"Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball and the GreatestSeason a Pitcher Ever Had"
Astro pitcher Roy Oswalt
If you enjoy dovetailing your recreational reading to the events of the day like I do, you need to go out and commemorate the start of the baseball season by picking up Edward Achorn’sFifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had.
Now you'll have some time to read it, as the Major League Baseball season is a long season. This drawn-out schedule has the potential to not only wear down even the most ardent fan, but it will predictably take a physical toll on the players as well.
Last year, Astros pitcher Roy Oswalt pitched 181.1 innings, but spent the last part of the season on the disabled list due to a back injury. Over his nine-year career, he's pitched 1803.1 innings, and there have been questions circulating as to how many more years Oswalt will be able to don a baseball uniform with so much accrued time on the mound.
Yet no matter how many innings Oswalt or any other major league starter pitches this year, they will all pale in comparison to Old Hoss Radbourn. You see, Radbourn threw a staggering 1,311 regular-season innings over the course of the 1883-1884 season.
My arm hurts just thinking about that.
Old Hoss
Fifty-Nine in '84 is centered on Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, a pitcher for the Providence Grays, who won 59 games in the 1884 baseball season. As NPR’s Only A Game summarized, not only did he win these games, Radbourn started 73 games and completed them all.” Oh yeah, he also had “an earned run average of 1.38” and “at one point he won eighteen games in a row, the last five of them on consecutive days.”
Impressed yet? Did I tell you that he was also a “whiskey slugging son of a butcher” who reputably drank “a quart of whiskey every day at the height of his career?” How about now?
Old School
In addition to the rugged life and amazing accomplishment of Radbourn, the book also describes the game of baseball in the 1880s. According to Achorn, while the game shared similarities to what you’ll see at Minute Maid Park this year, there were big time differences. For starters, the game itself was brutal, and mostly because of a lack of equipment. Achorn documents there were “no batting helmets, not batting gloves, no fielding gloves.”
There weren’t any team doctors either. The first chapter of the book begins with Radbourn getting a massage from hotel workers he hired. Most players also chewed “fruit cake,” or tobacco plugs, “which helped to relieve the pain” from catching line drives with their bare hands.
Games were played with only one ball, and that ball could end up resembling “a leather bag filled with jelly” if the game was played in rain.
Pitchers pitched from a “rectangular box,” 50 feet from home plate, and without the aid of a mound. Some used a running start, at times combined with a hop in their delivery.
And each team usually possessed only two pitchers; compared to the dozen most MLB teams carry on their rosters today. Achorn writes that “a top man might well start more than half of the games his team played, and once he started, he was expected to pitch all the way through the ninth, or even on into extra innings.”
The players weren’t high rolling millionaires either. Instead, Achorn describes them as “mostly poorly educated members of the working class, fond of drinking, cursing, and carousing.” Many were also “adorned with bristling mustaches that they grew to advertise their toughness.” All in all, Achorn depicts the players as “hard characters who played to win, resorting to cheating and violence if necessary.”
You can see why this game captivated Americans. And despite the evolution of and improvements to the game over a hundred and thirty years, it still captivates us to this day.
I guess having such a long season is not such a bad thing after all.
