Edward Achorn

Steve Buckley, baseball guru of the Boston Herald, warmly praises “Fifty-nine in ’84” in a piece about the best baseball books under the sun.

“Baseball fan or not, you will lose yourself in this wonderfully-written book. You will smell the manure on the streets of Providence. Your throat will burn from the booze and the tobacco. And your shoulder will ache.”

Buckley writes: “While we sometimes think of baseball played in those days as clean and tidy, the reality was something quite different. Baseball in those days was mean and it was dirty, and it was played by borderline desperados who were heaved to the unemployment line at the very moment their bodies had fallen victim to alcohol, philandering and brawls, not to mention horrific travel schedules, laughably faulty equipment and rickety, deathtrap hotels.”

“Achorn, an editorial editor with the Providence Journal, devotes most of this book to Radbourn’s 1884 season with the Providence Grays. And what a season it was: Old Hoss pitched 75 games for the Grays that year, 73 of them starts, and he fashioned a 59-12 record and 1.38 ERA. True, the art of pitching was nowhere close to what it is now, and rules were either enforced or ignored depending on the competency of the umpire working the game that day, but understand this: Radbourn grunted and groaned his way through much of that season, using everything from pure guile to such questionable pick-me-ups as ‘copious amounts of a thick brown syrup made of sulfur and molasses’ to get himself in game shape.”

Buckley notes that the book is also a love story, an exploration of “the pitcher’s relationship with Providence boarding house proprietress (and likely prostitute) Carrie Stanhope. The Radbourn-Stanhope relationship (they eventually got married) isn’t as fleshed out as Radbourn’s baseball career. Then again, the box scores and sports columns of the day weren’t very good at chronicling affairs of the heart.”

To read the full review, click here