Edward Achorn

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

LAWRENCE, Mass. – The Providence Grays play an exhibition game in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a gritty mill city of giant brick factories on the Merrimack River, about seventy-five miles north of Providence as the crow flies. It is another draining trip during the dog days of August, just so manager Frank Bancroft can stuff a few more dollars into his employer’s coffers.

The overworked Radbourn gets the day off, but most of the Grays have no choice but to suit up and play. Pitcher and Holy Cross student Eddie Conley, who has whipped major-league competition, struggles against this unimpressive local team, barely escaping with a 5-4 victory.

Also playing is Charlie Bassett, the substitute for injured shortstop Arthur Irwin. Bassett is a green rookie, a tall, slender, twenty-one-year-old whose only significant baseball experience has been in playing for the Brown University team.

Bassett is gifted enough to have been offered a big-league job by the Worcester club when he was a nineteen-year-old sophomore, but he has declined, explaining he came to college for an education, not to work in professional baseball. Bancroft, for one, is willing to be patient, waiting until Bassett’s graduation to take him on as a much-needed utility player, at $1,000 for the remainder of the season.

In moving up to the pros, Bassett brings along a cherished token of his college life: his favorite bat, into which he had proudly burned the numbers 448, representing his magnificent senior-year batting average. Sometime after that, a Providence teammate introduces him to the ways of major-league baseball when, miffed by an umpire’s call, he grabs the nearest object, which happens to be Bassett’s prized bat, and angrily heaves it over the fence. That is the last anyone sees of it. “His new professional colleagues had little respect or sympathy for such college mementos,” a reporter explains.

Bassett’s most urgent task in joining the Grays, he remembers decades later, is “not to make good on the field, but to grow a mustache to belie his [youth],” helping him fit in with his grizzled teammates. “The mustache, despite great attention and care, turns out to be the skimpy variety,” the Providence Journal quips, though it looks fine in team photos.

RADBOURN’S RECORD: 34-9

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