Edward Achorn

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

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — It is Sunday, and that means no baseball. Old Hoss Radbourn is surely suffering the effects by now of pitching game after game – a weak and aching arm.

At the pitcher’s urgent request, the club has provided him a stove — probably from President Henry T. Root’s kitchen appliance store — for the Grays’ dressing room. It is a new model that uses coal oil, a highly flammable liquid much like kerosene. Such stoves heat up rapidly and throw off a lot of warmth. They are, admittedly, known to explode on rare occasions, even burning their users to death, but that is a risk nineteenth century Americans seemed willing to take in exchange for the convenience.

Even on the most sweltering summer afternoons, Radbourn can now get a hot stove going quickly after games to boil water and steam his aching arm, on the theory that heat will loosen and soothe his muscles.

Modern sports medicine suggests that is exactly the wrong approach — that Radbourn would be better off icing down his arm and shoulder, shrinking the inflammation in his muscles.

But who knew? The treatment available for lame arms and painful joints is primitive at best — no arthroscopic surgery, no whirlpool baths, no sophisticated physical therapy.

For a sore arm, the Sporting Life recommends a “crude petroleum remedy,” or this: “Rub with a mixture of a dime’s worth each of sweet oil, liquid ammonia and rye whiskey.”

When Boston’s Ezra Sutton syffers a sore arm a few years later, the third baseman drops nickels several times a day into the “electric machine” at Baltimore’s Eutaw House, clutching the handles and receiving a sharp shock — a new-fangled therapy believed to cure all sorts of ailments. Sutton concludes that the painful jolts have “done him lots of good, and that his arm feels better.”

But none of these treatments is likely to make a pitcher feel much better toiling day after day.

RADBOURN’S RECORD: 34-9.

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