Edward Achorn

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

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Charlie Radbourn picks up his big bat and walks out to home plate, preparing to face his former teammate Pud Galvin, the squat and dogged ace of Buffalo’s Bisons. This is the team Charlie most enjoys beating, repeatedly punishing it for releasing him in 1880.

It is a Tuesday afternoon, golden and warm, and 1,529 have paid their way in to enjoy baseball before this historic season fades out at the Messer Street Grounds. As Radbourn digs in at the plate, umpire John Gaffney waves his arm, calling a halt.

A sputtering of applause builds to sustained cheering as a pair of men drag out a massive and elaborately detailed gold frame, embracing a life-sized crayon portrait of Radbourn. Someone has snuck the artist a recent picture of Rad to serve as the model.

A few minutes later, his battery mate Barney Gilligan comes to plate, his hands red and tender from the pummeling he has received all season catching Radbourn’s pitches. The umpire calls time again. Somebody who understands how much Radbourn owes to his stalwart battery mate has commissioned a life-sized Gilligan, too. Both men raise their caps in gratitude to the crowd, and then go to work.

If any club is likely to slow the Providence Grays at this point, the Bisons are. Their star hitters have been slamming the ball hard in recent games, propelling the club past New York into third place, and stimulating lively speculation over whether they can do a better job against Radbourn than Boston had a month earlier. The crowd soon gets its answer.

Radbourn “was a monument of skill and strategy,” the Providence Journal reports. For six innings, he toys with the Buffalo batters, mixing heat and slow stuff, varying locations, throwing from different corners of the box, and retiring every man in succession.

He eventually surrenders three scattered hits, but he strikes out ten and secures another shutout, as his teammates gobble up hard grounders and speed to catch drooping fly balls.

“The Grays played without the semblance of an error, and with a spirit and unity of effort which made them superior to defeat,” the Journal enthuses. The brisk, hour-and-forty-minute game is over by 5:15 p.m., leaving the Grays with a 4-0 win, their sixteenth straight.

Radbourn has now won fourteen in a row, something that has never been done at baseball’s highest level.

When it is over, a reporter tracks down Big Dan Brouthers, the Bison’s 6-foot-2, 207-pound behemoth, a man who can hit the ball as far and as hard as anyone in the game, winner of the league’s last two batting titles.

He tells the reporter he will be happy to get out of Providence for the season.

Why?

“Because you have such demon pitchers here.”

RADBOURN’S RECORD: 42-9

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