Edward Achorn

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — On the night of August 30, 1876, the eve of an important game between semi-pro Bloomington and its arch-rival Springfield, 21-year-old Charles Radbourn is not to be found resting up at home. He is in a downtown saloon named Schausten’s, getting seriously sloshed.

The episode ends up in the paper as part of a scandalous story, years before Radbourn becomes a famous major-leaguer.

Two gamblers named Ed Stahl and Jim Conners are in the hot, crowded bar that night, working to guarantee a big payoff the next day for their bets on Springfield. When locals point out to them the players on the Bloomington team, the pair approach a tipsy Radbourn and offer him $25 to throw the game.

“He does not deny that he may have said that he would take the money, but, being drunk, was not responsible for his words,” the Bloomington Pantagraph assures its readers – a statement which, however much it exonerates Radbourn as a cheater, hardly seems a high recommendation for his character.

At some point during the next several hours, Charlie and his cousin Henry sober up enough to make it clear to the gamblers that they want nothing to do with selling out their teammates and their town.

Still, when Springfield wins the next day 4-1, rumors sweep through the crowd that the gamblers have successfully “sugared” two other Bloomington players, a charge that causes “great excitement” near the backstop where gamblers congregate at the end of the game — and on the town’s streets that night, where many more men were angrily counting their losses.

The scandal, one of many signs that gamblers have infested baseball and are rapidly hollowing out its integrity, is not enough to destroy Radbourn’s professional career. By 1877, the Pantagraph asserts, “Charley was decidedly the best pitcher in the state.”

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