In 1884, only real men dared play the game
In the archives of the Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology, in Washington, is a remarkable set of 1889 images labeled, “Hands of an ex-professional baseball player.” The photographs of this man’s broken, mangled, disjointed and deformed fingers are powerful testimony to the brutality of major-league baseball as it was once played: barehanded.
They are my favorite pictures in my new book, “Fifty-nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had” (Smithsonian/HarperCollins), because they speak eloquently of a time and place, post-Civil War America, where winning was a serious matter, and people had to be tough and resourceful to survive. That included major-league ballplayers.
None was tougher than Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, who in 1884 pitched for the Providence Grays of the National League, then baseball’s premier circuit.
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