Edward Achorn

(A daily diary of the greatest season a major-league pitcher ever had.)

PHILADELPHIA – The Providence Grays beat the Phillies, 11-4, in a game most notable for igniting a controversy a century later among baseball historians and statistics freaks.

Cyclone Miller, who starts it, is once again found wanting, and when he is through pitching after five innings, the Grays are behind 4-3. In the top of the sixth, the Grays’ bats finally came to life, giving Providence a 7-4 lead. After the Grays have gone ahead, Radbourn takes over pitching in the bottom of that inning, and no-hits the Phillies for the rest of the game.

Who deserves the victory? The MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia, and many others, gives it to Charlie. Others – including the late Frederick Ivor-Campbell, the great Radbourn scholar — say that a reasonably consistent standard of scoring games would give the win to Miller. (I reluctantly side with the latter, though that subtracts one win from Radbourn’s victory column).

In the final analysis, though, all of this is something like the disputations between medieval clerics over the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, since the statistic of pitching wins, counted many different ways over baseball’s long history, is virtually unknown in 1884.

It is doubtful, in fact, that Radbourn himself has any clear idea how many games he is winning; he just knows he is pitching his team to victory.

The win nudges the Grays past the Boston Beaneaters (today’s Braves) by ½ a game. Boston loses 7-0 at New York’s Polo Grounds, for its fourth defeat in five games. What looked like a runaway for the defending champion Beaneaters — especially after the Grays lost their two star pitchers — has now turned into a dogged pennant fight.

RADBOURN’S RECORD: 26-8.

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