Customer Reviews

Fifty-nine in '84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had

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I was pleasantly surprised with this book. As a lover of American history I was drawn to this subject. As an aficionada of good literary prose I was kept drawn to this story. Edward Achorn succeeds in both as a researcher and as a writer, and his dedication to this subject pays off well.

1884 was a time when Irish and Englishmen reigned in baseball. Professional sports was a means to vent their cultural and political differences out on the ball field toward each other. Sabotage, corruption and off-field assaults and attempted murders were commonfold, and the paying American public seems to have wanted more of that. These hard-drinking, tobacco-spitting gloveless players were a cacophony of characters, all which make this read all the more entertaining. 1884 was the time when city teams still had names that related to their town: the Buffalo Bisons, the Boston Beaneaters, the Chicago White Stockings, and they played for the National League, the American Association, or the short-lived Union Association.

Achorn weaves the history of corporate Baseball with the life story of Radbourn. Baseball players of the 1880s were non-union players who were owned by the team. They were luckily to earn a few hundred dollars a month. If they were injured they didn't play, and if they didn't play, they either didn't earn their keep or they made a few dollars taking tickets from the entering crowd. All this affected Radbourn's career decisions. "Traveling hooligans," as many baseball players were referred to by non-fans, were not much admired by the general public, but for the team owners and the paying fans, they were the beginning of corporate sports. They were also a part of the growth of American Industry, and with it its corruption. Yet baseball was perhaps the one way for a lower-class immigrant man to make a decent living. Baseball was clearly still a "white man's sport," and even the admission price of 50 cents (plus another 25 cents for the grand stand) was too much for black men to pay. The prices kept the sport artificially segregated.

Achorn also covers the historical passages of baseball, the American paying public, and the careers of some rival baseball players (Charlie Sweeney, perhaps the first recorded athlete-turned-attempted-murderer), team managers and umpires. The year 1884 reached the first height of team rivalry between cities and team managers. Team owners became more aggressive with their recruiting tactics, when players were traded elsewhere and where some of the earlier great players developed.

For readers more interested in Charles Radbourn's love life can skip to half-way through this book, to Chapter 10, "A Working Girl." Here is where we read about Charles' big love, Carrie Stanhorpe. Working as either a prostitute or a boarding house madam (even Radbourn isn't sure), she was also afflicted with syphilis, a disease she passed down to Radbourn. They didn't marry until 1895, two years before his death. Their love story doesn't dominate the book, though, which continues to focus on the team feuds between New York, Boston, Chicago and St Louis.

Radbourn, known for his strong pitch and mercurial temperament, struggled with constant pain in his shoulders and right arm. He swallowed his pain with whiskey, turning into a downright drunkard when he wasn't playing. Drinking was still the #1 cure for sports-related injuries at a time when sports medicine was still in its infancy.

Although this book covers 11 years of Radbourn's pitching career, the focus remains on 1884 and its many characters. Written like a fast-pitched game, I enjoyed this read. Sure, it skips around with the years from time to time, especially when Achorn described individual players, but his writing style helps the reader follow the story well. Readers simply have to remember that the focus of this book is 1884 and the many changes that came with it for baseball.

I recommend this book for baseball lovers, lovers of history and even for people who enjoy reading biographies. Achorn is a Pulitzer-Prize finalist for commentary writing, and his talent shines through in his first book.

Charles Radbourn, known to all as "Old Hoss," was a freak of nature. Pitching in the National League between 1880 and 1891, he compiled a 309-195 career record. During that time he played with several teams, including the Providence Grays (1880-1885), the Boston Beaneaters (1886-1889), Boston Reds (1890), and Cincinnati Reds (1891). He entered the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.

This enjoyable, delightfully-written, and well-structured book deals with his career, but concentrates on Radbourn's 1884 campaign when he set a MLB record of 59 wins (although some accounts say he won 60), 441 strikeouts, and a 1.38 ERA. I am reasonably certain that his win and strikeout totals will last indefinitely. Edward Achorn, an editor of the "Providence Journal," has written this account as a labor of love for a hometown hero of the nineteenth century.

This is quite excellent baseball history, comparable to "Crazy `08" by Cait Murphy that was also published by HarperCollins. It does a fine job of setting a time and place, drawing a portrait of an experience in nineteenth century America, and offering a compelling narrative. That is its strength and its reason for reading. One will not find sophisticated scholarly explication or sabermetric statistical analysis.

Even for those not fan of nineteenth century baseball history, including me, "Fifty-nine in `84" is a good starting point to help understand the formation of the professional baseball establishment.

Fifty-nine in '84 tells the story of Charlie "Old Hoss" Radbourn and the 1884 Providence Grays, who were a team in baseball's National League. Radbourn rung up an astounding fifty-nine pitching victories that year and, as an afterthought, won all three games in baseball's first World Series. But this book is about more than just Radbourn, the Grays, and barehanded baseball in general -- reading it will give you a profound sense of what life was like in late-19th century urban America. Author Edward Achorn is an evocative writer who paints pictures with his words, stirring vivid imagery of horse-drawn carriages, pollution-spewing smoke stacks, and the incessant competitiveness of almost every aspect of urban life during this time of great upheaval in the U.S.

Normally I wouldn't worry about "spoilers" in a non-fiction work, but be warned that this summary contains some: As I said in the title of this review, "Fifty-nine in '84" would make a great movie, but the real-life plot is so preposterous, most viewers would be unable to suspend disbelief if they didn't know it was a true story. The action begins at the start of the 1884 baseball season, when the Providence Grays -- who led the pennant race for most of 1883 but faltered at the end -- have brought on hot-shot rookie pitcher Charles Sweeney. This does not make the jealous Radbourn -- who set a record for most pitching wins the previous season -- happy in the least, especially when Sweeney is depicted as the team's ace and given the opening-day starting assignment. In these days, teams normally used only two starting pitchers, and once a game was started, it was expected that the pitcher finish it, so Sweeney and Radbourn took turns pitching for the Grays.

About a quarter of the way through the season, Sweeney throws nineteen strikeouts in one game -- a major-league record that would stand for 102 years, until broken by Roger Clemens. After coming home from the road game where this happened, Providence throws Sweeney a big parade -- inflaming Radbourn's jealousy. Soon after, the overworked Sweeney says he needs rest, so it's up to Radbourn to go it alone. Radbourn demands that he be paid Sweeney's salary in addition to his own ($3,000; among the highest in the league!), but management refuses. Against this backdrop, the rogue Union Association baseball league is trying to steal Radbourn away from the NL's second-place Grays. Under the collusive rules of the two major leagues (the NL and the American Association), players who break their contracts to play for "rogue" leagues like the UA are forever blacklisted, but Radbourn wants out of the "unappreciative" Providence so badly, he strongly contemplates jumping. Ultimately, he has a "crack up" on the field and is suspended without pay, leading him to the precipice of leaving the Grays.

It should be noted here that the Providence press has been hard on Radbourn all year at this point. They suggest his claims of chronic soreness are false, that he's not trying his hardest, and that he's jealous of the younger hurler Sweeney. Radbourn, at this point, is already on pace to beat his all-time best 48 wins from the year before, and the Grays are in second place! So Sweeney has to go it alone for a time while Radbourn sits out, and Sweeney ends up having a "crack up" too -- only much worse: He shows up at a game with two prostitutes (which are ubiquitous throughout the book, by the way), and after taking the lead into the 7th inning, the Grays' manager orders him to move into right field and let another player take over the pitching duties. In these days, being "unable" to finish a game made a player look bad, so Sweeney refuses. Ultimately, he leaves the field entirely -- and in those days, you weren't allowed to make mid-game substitutions except in the case of injury -- so the Grays had to complete the game with only eight players! Now Sweeney is expelled from the team and the National League and black-listed from the majors altogether! After boozing and whoring in Providence for a few days, he signs up with the St. Louis team in the Union Association.

At this point, the Grays are still in second place. But over the course of eight days, they went from looking great, with two of the best pitchers of all time, to having neither of them, and the team's board of directors come perilously close to folding the team mid-season! Instead, they swallow their pride and bring back Radbourn, agreeing to pay him Sweeney's paltry salary in addition to his own and, more importantly, to grant him an unconditional release from his contract if he can pitch Providence's way to the pennant. As you know, he does.

Radbourn was quite a character: He was the first man in history to be photographed giving his middle finger to the camera, and is likely the source of the term "Charlie horse." He set the record for most pitching wins in a season and won the first world series -- but today he is virtually unknown. He took his used-up arm back to his home in Illinois and made some wise investments, but lost most of his wealth in an economic panic later in his life. Ultimately, he gets shot in the face while hunting, and although it isn't fatal, it dashes his hopes of returning to the big leagues. He dies at 42, anyway, of syphilis, which he most likely contracted from his prostitute-turned-wife. These were hard and interesting times, and Edward Achorn's book captures them beautifully. A "history" book without focus can be dull and tedious, but given a proper prism through which to examine the "on-the-ground" history of people who really lived it, a book like Achorn's can educate as well as entertain. I loved every second of reading "Fifty-nine in '84," and give it my most fervent recommendation.

FIFTY-NINE in EIGHTY-FOUR is not your typical baseball book in that it describes what conditions were like in nineteenth century America and in Providence, Rhode Island, where Radbourn pitched his great season.

For instance shopgirls, like Radbourn's paramour Carrie Standhope, made only five or six hours a week, while being required to wear expensive stylish clothes. Some of them were forced into prostitution.

Author Edward Achorn also goes into elaborate detail about how the game was different. Not only did the athletes play the game barehanded, but there was only one umpire, which resulted in cheating: taking a shortcut from first the third on a base hit, tripping the runner on his way by second base etc.
The pitcher also threw from a box instead of the mound. He could run up toward the batter before throwing and he was only fifty feet away from home plate.

Radbourn was able to win fifty-nine games (some say sixty) because he was virtually the only pitcher the Providence had during the last half of the season. At the beginning of the season, Charles Sweeney was considered the ace, but Radbourn was terribly jealous and when Sweeney went down with a sore arm, he demanded more money and was suspended for a week. When Sweeney was kicked off the team for public drunkenness, Rad had to go it alone. The directors of the club briefly considered disbanding the team as they eventually did after the next season. According to Achorn, Radbourn was a "junk ball" pitcher, mixing speeds, throwing from different places in the box, and sometimes throwing overhand, which had recently been legalized.

Achorn also gives us a look at some of the greatest players of the 19th century, Mike Kelly of the Chicago White Sox, Harry Wright, the original manager of the Cincinnati Redlegs, the first professional team and Radbourn's first manager on the Grays, Dan Brouthers, one of the greatest hitters of the 19th century, and "Pud" Galvin, one of the winningest pitchers in major league history.

Achorn covers all fifty-nine wins and the three games Radbourn won in the first world series against the New York Metropolitans of the American Association. Achorn also shows us the sad conclusion to Radbourn's life. Like many professional athletes, he had a hard time adjusting to civilian life back in Bloomington, Illinois, his home town.

Usually I read three or four books at a time because I find that most don't hold my interest that well. But I devoured this book in two days. Well written is too easy an appellation to put on this book, look up the word accomplishment in the Thesaurus and copy down the first hundred and you'll get the idea. 'Old Hoss' Radbourn (or Radbourne or Radburn or..it differs on his Hall of Fame plaque and gravestone) was an enigma even in the days of barehanded play. He was quiet to the point of reticence and seldom spoke to the 'press' much less anyone else. He just wanted to go out and do his job and then at the end be left alone.

In 1883 he won an astounding 48 games in a 98 game season. But like an "Old Hoss" the next year he won 59 in a 112 game season. Because the National League had added fourteen games to the schedule in 1884, it was thought that every team would need two starters. So the Providence Grays added Charlie Sweeney was brought on to the team to alternated with Radbourn. Both of them were having amazing seasons (Sweeney would have 41 wins himself) but after Sweeney had 19 strikeouts (a record that stood for over 100 years) against the hated Boston Red Stockings, Radbourn became even more sullen than his usual self. At a point in the season, Sweeney complained that he couldn't pitch and 'Old Hoss' had to go out there almost everyday for two weeks.

One day Sweeney came to the ball park drunk and though he pitched seven innings and was winning, he got into a shouting match with the Coach when he tried to take Sweeney out. The Team then fined Sweeney and put him on suspension. Sweeney had gotten to big for his britches. After being offered a $1000 bonus to jump to the new "Union Association" the Grays were left with only one starter. Hoss was livid, not only did he have to pitch while Sweeney was 'dogging' it, now he had left the team 'high and dry'. Hoss told the Gray's owners, that he would start the rest of the season (forty-three games) if they paid agreed to pay him the rest of Sweeney's salary and release him from the 'reserve clause' in his contract at the end of the season. This would have allowed him to sign with any team he wanted, making him a free agent before the word was coined.

During this remarkable run, Radbourn won eighteen games in a row while the team won twenty. At the end of the season he had an astounding record of 59 wins and 12 losses with an ERA of 1.38. He started 40 of the 43 games, winning 36 and hit for over .300. After the season, the Grays played the New York franchise of the American Association and the Grays won all three games of the "Championship Series", with Radbourn pitching three complete games. The next year he surprised everyone by re-signing with the Grays but he never won thirty games again retiring in 1891 at the age of 36 with 309 wins. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1938 by the Veterans Committee.

Zeb Kantrowitz

I have read most of the books on 19th century Baseball. Achorn has done a wonderful job re-creating what it was like to play in an era where baseball games were arduous and perilous pursuits. These athletes played with no protection other than rudimentary thin gloves. Pitchers were closer than they are to home plate and frequently threw at players with the intent of hitting them. Since players wore no helmets, I can imagine the fear of facing the hard throwers.

The view of 1884 Providence should make the green movement re-think the good old days of a clean America. Despite our increasing carbon footprint, I'll take today's air pollution anytime. Achorn describes cities with a powerful smell of unbathed men, feces from horses, smoke from mills, and open sewage and garbage from residents. The ballpark was one form of reasonably priced entertainment and an escape from the grind of daily life.

Now the main subject Hoss Radbourne deserves admiration from today's six inning pitchers throwing about 32 times a year. Radbourne was a workhorse starting over 70 games, pitching over 650 innings and winning 59 times. Most pitchers had very short careers due to the obvious strain on the arm. Radbourne actually lasted a normal length career and that is amazing. He was Nolan Ryan like in having a rubber arm.

The players of the 1880's were generally of Irish or English lineage. They were sons of working men as few upper class families wanted their sons to become ball players. The players of the 1880s, although well known and revered, were seen as working class lads and not a profession for the well-educated.

Achorn has done a masteful job mixing descriptions of games with colorful historical anectodes about life in the rough times of the 1880's. Most players were drinkers, frequent users of prostitutes and not above throwing games for a bit of the gamblers share. The good old days were certainly rough ones. One of the most interesting things was that players were frequenltly ill from tainted water, malaria, TB and other common ailments before sanitation was the norm and anti-biotics were invented. Given a roster of only 13 players, there were few rest days allowed.

I have always been a baseball "nut" but I have never been exposed to the early history of the game with its raw beginning when there were few, if any, rules used. The beginnings of rules were in place but seldom used in the correct way. Today's baseball players from the street game through to the professional ranks probably would not have fared well in the early days. Edward Achorn takes us to the days when no one wore a glove with which to catch the baseball; no pitcher threw from what we know today as the rubber but rather had a box approximately 6 X 4 foot that they could roam and pitch from any area within that box; there was one umpire-if one could be found-and that umpire was very often biased against one of the teams or some players on a team and used that bias to sway the outcome of a game; there was no decent way to travel from city to city other than slow trains with no decent accommodations; no base was awarded because of a hit batsman and most pitchers did aim at batters and were not punished even if a batter was badly hurt; over night sleeping accommodations were not in very good hotels; food was take-what-you-could-get; brothels were in every city and in between and were used very frequently by most players; Syphilis and other sexual diseases were rampant since there were so many women available of every class and character; unless a player was unable to walk, he had to play because there were no substitutes, even with split open fingers, hands, or other extremities; crowds were small and very brutal towards players, even their own cities team; pitchers on many teams pitched every day regardless of their tired arms and were generally given a day off only when they could not move their arms but they still usually had to play another position in case they would have to pitch--like it or not. I think I have given you a good background of the game in the 1800's.

Charlie Radbourn is not well known but he should be to any baseball fan. Charlie played mostly for the Providence Grays of the National League in an era when that league was the only "major" league. There were several other leagues that came and mostly went after a short season not being able to last financially or able to obtain and keep good players. The era was mostly the 1880's when Charlie Radbourn did his phenomenal work for Providence. It seems impossible that he made it through 1883 with an arm that became very sore but Charlie suffered through getting paid meager wages for almost every day hard work. But he loved it and management knew they had a real gem of a pitcher in Charlie. He actually quit the team in 1884 when the other good pitcher had left the team because he wanted more money. Charlie wanted his salary plus the salary of the man that quit but the team owners refused that request. Eventually they gave in and paid Charlie both salaries. This rejuvenated him to go on to set a record of fifty-nine wins in 1884, the most wins ever by a pitcher in professional baseball.

This excellent book not only tells so much about baseball but also a lot of history of the time. I would recommend this book to any age baseball fan as well as any amateur or professional player. To think of the conditions and salaries these men played for opens ones eyes so wide and makes the reader happy to be living in today's baseball era. We have modern stadiums with the best playing fields possible instead of a rock and uneven dirt field; equipment that players from the 1800's could not dream of using; unlimited supply of baseballs instead of one ball per game; medical assistance was a bandage or a wrap and forget anything like massages of aching muscles and joints; and umpires with whose calls we might not always agree with but they cover every base much better than the one umpire did in those days. A review of this book can't say enough in words what the reader will get from it.

Anyone who has ever stumbled across this record in major league baseball's list of superlatives has no doubt sat back in wonder: SIXTY wins in a single season? (Since then, modern scorers including the author have reclassified one of the wins as a save, but still!...) When in modern times a pitcher who wins HALF as many is someone you brag to your grandchildren about having once seen in action? What was the story behind this amazing record? I couldn't find out much more than the basics at the time, but it stuck in my memory so that I leaped at the chance to try this book, and I'm so glad that I did!

Edward Achorn has finally revealed the true story behind this record, and what a story it is! Rival pitching aces, an epic pennant drive, greed, jealousy, hatred, and maybe even true love in a time and place long gone and hard for us moderns to imagine much less understand. I agree with the other reviewers who talk about what a great movie it would make,...

if they could only make it believable!

Mr. Achorn's task was made all the more difficult by the character of his hero, Old Hoss Radbourn, a man who flat out refused to talk about himself, even in retirement, forcing Mr. Achorn to write around the all but silent Charlie Radbourn what Caleb Carr called a speculative biography when he chronicled the exploits of a similarly taciturn New Englander, the man who gave me my pseudonym, in his magnificent The Devil Soldier: The American Soldier of Fortune Who Became a God in China. I also see similarities with Jim Dent's marvelous chronicle of the somewhat better known though no less legendary exploits of THE Monster of the Midway: Bronko Nagurski, the 1943 Chicago Bears, and the Greatest Comeback Ever.

Defects? Only a few. Mr. Achorn arguably overdoes it in his drive to convince us just how bad were the times in which Radbourn performed his astounding achievements, not just in baseball, where the owners arguably had the players over a barrel except on those rare occasions when a new major league was starting up and trying to attract good players with wads of cash, but also in America as a whole. I get it; the 19th century STANK to high heaven! I really don't need to have my nose rubbed in the fact that a city propelled by genuine horse power and steam would have smelled so much worse than a city propelled by gasoline and diesel, not to mention the problem of raw sewage and air pollution! A certain amount of this would be justified in countering the siren song of Nostalgia, but Mr. Achorn overdoes it to the point of unintentional hilarity.

Nevertheless, these are minor complaints indeed about a baseball masterpiece!

The second half of the 19th Century in America was a bizzare and most fascinating era; the survivors of the battlefields of the Civil War were a battered lot, many disabled with permanent emotional scars, to go along with the obvious physical ailments. Trying to go back to "normal" lives was virtually impossible for most; widespread use of mind-numbing drugs such as morphine and cocaine became the norm for an alarming percentage of the population. Even those desperate housewives in post Civil War America were taking large doses of "medication" just to get through their mundane daily existence.

With that sordid environment as a backdrop, Edward Achorn has compiled a fascinating look at baseball's wild and wooly distant past; specifically, how one colorful pitcher named Old Hoss Radbourn had the greatest season ever: 59 wins in 1884. Nowadays, if a pitcher can bag 59 wins in THREE seasons, he's considered a superstar, worthy of a long-term multi-million dollar contract. In the rough and tumble world of 19th Century baseball, nobody made much dough and practically every player had to scratch and claw his way through each season. The game was brutal and only the toughest of the tough survived; Old Hoss Radbourn not only survived; he thrived.

For anyone with an interest in baseball history or simply American history, for that matter; Achorn's book is a must read. I loved it.

Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn won 59 games against 12 losses for the Providence Grays in 1884. Radbourn accomplished the feat in a 112-game schedule (compared to today's 162-game schedule). He started 73 games and completed all 73, threw 678 2/3 innings, struck out 441 batters and compiled a microscopic 1.38 earned run average. Author Edward Achorn terms it "the greatest season a pitcher ever had."

Achorn chronicles Radbourn's amazing season while educating the reader about what baseball in the 19th century was like. Baseball in the 1880s was described as "nasty, brutish and fast-paced played by profanity swearing men who didn't hesitate to use violence to get their way."

1884 marked the first year pitchers could legally throw overhanded. At the time, there was no pitcher's mound, but a pitcher's box. Pitchers could throw from anywhere in the box and could take a running start before releasing the ball. The box was only 50 feet from home plate compared to today's 60-feet and 6-inches.

Baseball was played with no gloves, no batting helmets, no trainers and physical therapy was virtually non-existent. Pain was accepted as part of being a pitcher or catcher. Clubs generally used two starters and they frequently pitched several games in a row.

Radbourn, a Hall of Famer, was extremely talented. He mixed up his pitches, had an explosive fastball, pinpoint control and incredible stamina. He used different motions and pitched to different spots.

His manager Sam Crane described him as "strong, sturdy as an oak and the most willing worker of any pitcher who ever lived." A former teammate said Radbourn was "the brainest pitcher that ever delivered a ball over the plate."

In late July, Radbourn declared he would pitch every game for the Grays until they clinched the pennant, which they did on Sept. 26. From July 23 through Sept. 26, he pitched in 36 of 39 games, including 14 of 17 days and five days in a row. At one point, he won 18 straight games.

Achorn's story of Radbourn's 1884 season is enhanced by recounting his battle with Charlie Sweeney to be the ace of the Grays' staff (they bitterly resented each other), his clashes with management and romance with Carrie Stanhorpe.