Edward Achorn

Q. What drew you to the story of Old Hoss Radbourn and his 1884 season?

A. It’s an amazing and exciting story, and it’s never been told. When I was a kid, I loved looking through the Baseball Encyclopedia, reading the statistics, imagining what the players were like. Of course, I came across this oddly named Old Hoss Radbourn, a man who won 60 major-league games in one season, later adjusted to 59, still more than anybody in history. And after winning 59 games, this man pitched his team to victory in the first World Series. How could anyone be strong or courageous enough to do such a thing? How did his arm not fall off, for one thing? I wanted to find out how. And the more I looked into Radbourn, the more interesting a character he seemed – cantankerous, nasty, brave, loyal, egocentric, moody, easily wounded by perceived slights, an incredible drinker who fell madly in love with a woman he would be with the rest of his life. He suffered something like a nervous breakdown halfway through the season, but fought to get back on track. It’s just a gripping, suspenseful story that deserves to be told, and I think it makes for a really fun read. If you love baseball or American history or tales of courage, I think you’ll love it.

Q. How does baseball of 1884 compare with the game today?

A. In some ways, very different. America was a much less forgiving country – fiercely competitive, and people faced a hard struggle to survive. Imagine, professionals in the 1880s played with a hard baseball barehanded. They had the bent and broken fingers to prove it. It was a very tough game, almost a gang war, played by some brutal men who did not worry about maiming their opponents. Pitchers threw from a box whose edge was only 50 feet from home plate, instead of a mound. They had to pitch the whole game, in most cases – these guys did not hand the ball off to a reliever in the sixth inning. If you hit a man with a pitch it was tough luck for him – the batter could not yet take first base. So pitchers often were able to intimidate batters. But in some ways the game was amazingly similar to today’s. Many of the classic strategies had already been developed: the hit and run, mixing up curveballs and fastballs to confuse the batter, the hook slide, shifting fielders for various hitters. The feel of the game was much the same. And the fans were just as passionate – they chanted players’ name, sang mocking songs at visiting teams, and were obsessed over the pennant race. Sometimes they were more passionate, and came on the field and attacked the umpire. Most of the book focuses on the National League – the same league going strong today. Bottom line: Just as a now, baseball was a remarkable competitive business that employed talented athletes, professionals who cared a lot about the craft. Young men had to be good, fast, shrewd and physically strong to make it.

Q. How would Radbourn do if he were playing today?

A. He pitched at a time when endurance was absolutely crucial. In 1884, he worked more than 678 innings – a pitcher today is considered a workhorse if he throws 200. So it was different. But pitching coaches today talk about the importance of the “three C’s”: confidence, concentration and control. Radbourn had all of those in abundance. In fact, his control was considered the secret to his success. People who had seen Radbourn in his prime compared him with the 20th century stars Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson, in terms of pitching ability and raw speed. So I think Rad would be one of the great starters in baseball today, a Hall of Famer in either era. He did not have access to all the technological advancements that help pitchers today, of course – pitch counts, whirlpools, special conditioning, and the like. In fact, pitchers were told in 1884 that if they had a sore arm to rub it with a dime’s worth each of sweet oil, liquid ammonia and rye whiskey.

Q. What players of today would be successful back in 1884?

A. Well, they’d have to be tough and relentless, able to play through injuries. There were only 12, 13, 14 men on a roster, so players had to deal with pain. There was no union, and pay usually stopped if they did not play. There was little sympathy for a man who came to the ballpark unwilling to give it his all. So they struggled on. Someone like Curt Schilling, who pitched with that bloody sock, is someone I can see doing well then. Also, the game in 1884 used a dead ball – with rubber in its center instead of cork, and just one ball was kept in play, if possible, for the whole game, until it became mushy and frayed. So there wasn’t a lot of pop in the ball. Very few of the best hitters then were sluggers with big swings. Speed, grit and baseball smarts were what counted. The players today with baseball instincts, whoare shrewd and tenacious, would do very well in 1884: Derek Jeter and Dustin Pedroia come to mind. A slashing hitter like Ichiro Suzuki would have done very well. Someone like Manny Ramirez, not so much so.

Q. Why did you find this an important story to tell?

A. Baseball in every era has a remarkable knack for opening a window on American culture. I think Radbourn’s amazing grit says a lot about America 20 years after the Civil War – about its bitterly competitive culture, and what a struggle it was for a man to raise himself above the herd. He was the son of a butcher, who worked 14 hours a day clubbing steers with a 25-pound sledgehammer. It was not an easy thing for him to make it in baseball, but he was driven to get beyond that brutal, bloody business, and distinguish himself as a great man. Many men simply lived out lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau put it. Most Americans, in fact, had grinding lives and died young. Yet this was an incredibly vibrant America that was creating the modern world, led by brilliant individuals who introduced corporations and business efficiencies, electricity, steam, innovations in transportation and communication. And this was the era that shaped baseball into the highly competitive game we know and love. The book is very much set in that culture. Anyone who loves baseball and wants to know where it comes from should have an interest in this story.

Q. Why did you devote so much attention to Carrie Stanhope?

A. She’s a big part of Radbourn’s life story, and her connection with him has never been explored. She was a married woman living apart from her husband. She ran a boardinghouse in a rather shady part of downtown Providence known as the Bowery, near several notorious brothels. She was described as attractive and fashionably dressed, and was said to personally know every man in the National League. Radbourn fell in love with her in the early 1880s, when he was pitching for the Providence Grays. It’s quite possible her boardinghouse was a brothel, too. In this repressed Victorian era, commercialized sex was becoming big business, to the dismay of reformers. Men found it quite easy and cheap to sneak off with prostitutes. The papers were full of advertisements about treatment for sexual dysfunction and dreaded sexually transmitted diseases, especially syphilis. I thought it was interesting to tell that side of the American story, to explain about the sex and the brothels and the nightlife. Radbourn eventually brought Carrie and her son Charles back home to Bloomington and told everyone she was a widow and his wife, neither of which was true. She wasn’t divorced yet. When he was dying of syphilis – a disease that also claimed the life of her first husband – he snuck off and married Carrie in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so that when he died she could be left with everything he had earned. He obvious loved her and wanted to protect her.

Q. What did you learn about Radbourn’s personality?

A. He was an amazing man, incredibly loyal to his family and loved ones, very driven to prove he was the best in the world at what he did, which was pitch. He was a perfectionist at his craft. But, at the same time, he was a hard drinker with a somewhat twisted sense of humor, and strangely scornful of the trappings of glory. He was apparently the first human being ever caught on film flashing the middle finger – he made the obscene gesture while posing with two teams in a very formal photo on opening day. He mocked pitchers who flamboyantly warmed up in front of the grandstand, considering them poseurs who could not deliver when the going got rough, as he did. He was prickly and jealous. A good part of the book looks at his hatred and resentment of a brilliant young pitcher named Charlie Sweeney, a teammate who was stealing his glory. Their nasty feud almost destroyed the whole team. Yet this was a man who could somehow summon the courage to pitch in pain, day after day, starting almost every game for the last three months of the season, including winning 18 games in a row. He had an ability to rise above adversity that was astonishing. It took a personality like that to do what he did, win 59 games in one year. No one else could, or ever did, or ever will, do it.

Q. Many readers have noted the depth of your research. Bob Creamer, Babe Ruth’s biographer, called the detail “extraordinary” and baseball historian Cait Murphy called Fifty-nine in ’84 “impeccably researched” and “ the best book out there on 19th-century baseball.” How did you do your research?

A. A lot of misinformation about 19th century baseball has been passed down over the years, particularly before the rise of the Society for American Baseball Research. To find out what really happened you can’t rely on books. You have to go back to the primary sources – mainly newspapers, but also guidebooks, memoirs, and contemporary census and other records. But it takes real work to “translate” baseball of the time for the modern reader, because newspaper accounts did not often quote players or go behind the scenes. It almost takes a lifetime of research to get at what was going on. I spent many hours at the Library of Congress going over virtually every daily newspaper from every city that had a major-league team, and many more hours at my place of employment, The Providence Journal, and the Rhode Island Historical Society, delving into daily newspapers in Providence. I learned more about running a team in that era, and the personality of the players, by reading through the records of the Chicago White Stockings (now Cubs), housed at the Chicago Historical Society. I repeatedly watched and talked to members of the vintage Providence Grays, a modern team that plays under 1884 rules, to learn from the “inside” about how baseball was different, and the same, in Radbourn’s day. I got a lot of help, too, from historians and doctors who helped me better understand 19th century Providence and the nature of the medical problems Radbourn faced. There are 35 pages of footnotes and sources in the back in small type, so readers can follow where I dug up this stuff. It was an incredible amount of work, but I ended up thinking it was worth it to be able to tell this wild, fun and tragic but ultimately triumphant story about Old Hoss.