Edward Achorn

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

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The work is relentless. After beating Boston four straight times, Old Hoss Radbourn is back out at the Messer Street Grounds the very next afternoon, straining his arm against Cleveland’s Blue Stockings.

Admittedly, Cleveland is not nearly as good a team as the Beaneaters, even at full strength, and in the past week it has been weakened considerably. The club has fallen victim to the prowling Union Association, which has stolen three of its biggest stars, all supposedly under contract with Cleveland through the rest of the 1884 season — ace pitcher Jim McCormick, catcher “Fatty” Briody, and “Pebbly Jack” Glasscock, perhaps baseball’s best shortstop. They have jumped to the Union Association’s Cincinnati “Outlaw Reds.”

Fearing that few Clevelanders will pay to see a floundering team bereft of their favorite players, the Cleveland owners contemplate folding the team. Abraham G. Mills, president of the National League, fires off a telegram from his vacation resort in the White Mountains: “Disbandment now would seriously injure League and gratify nobody but Wreckers” — or, as he calls them in another letter, “the unscrupulous gang of thieves, known as the ‘Union Association.’” Their backbones stiffened, the directors resolved to keep going, even though it meant bringing in far less talented players to “supply the places of the traitors.”

About 1,500 people turn out on an unseasonably cool, gloomy Ladies Day for what is, in a way, a pity party for denuded Cleveland. When the notoriously pro-Providence crowd begins applauding the visitors for every good play, it is “evident that the spectators accorded the Clevelands much sympathy in their present weakened condition, which had been brought about by players who had no respect for contracts and waited only the opportunity of securing more money to break their bonds, as well as their words,” the Providence Journal sermonizes.

But for all the crowd’s pity, stripped-down Cleveland proves a worthy foe, making a dogged fight of it and forcing Radbourn to throw hard. Providence finally breaks a 2-2 tie in the fifth inning in less than heroic fashion, when catcher Barney Gilligan hits a long fly to center field that one of Cleveland’s new men, a raw minor leaguer named Gurdon Whiteley, promptly misplays into a double. Gilligan scores on two wild pitches by Cleveland hurler John Harkins, the former Rutgers chemistry student. In the fifth, sixth and ninth, Cleveland has men on the bases, but Radbourn clings on for a 3-2 victory.

The day is not entirely happy for the Grays, though. Early in the game, Arthur Irwin is “seized with a hemorrhage of the bladder,” according to the Boston Globe, and has to leave the field. Irwin has been doing “the grandest short stopping in the League,” the Sporting Life contends, grabbing hot grounders other men cannot reach because his strong arm permits him to play unusually deep. Now Providence will have to get by without him, at least for a few games.

RADBOURN’S RECORD: 34-9.

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