Edward Achorn

Comparing players across eras is never a perfect science. Conditions change over the years. Pitchers stop throwing complete games, as relief specialists emerge. Pitch counts and advances in medicine help protect arms and shoulders, prone to break down under the unnatural stress of throwing. Players cheat with drugs to enhance their performance.

But my new book, Fifty-nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had (Smithsonian/HarperCollins) is certainly influencing the debate, by bringing into the light an astounding pitcher and his season that will never be matched. (See www.EdwardAchorn.com)

In 1884, a hard-drinking, cantankerous, rubber-armed pitcher named Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn won an incredible 59 games, pitching for the Providence Grays of the National League, baseball’s top league. Then he went on to win all three games of the first World Series, at the Polo Grounds in New York City. He won the pitcher’s “triple crown,” leading the league in wins (59), earned run average (1.38) and strikeouts (441). But he didn’t stop there. He also led the league in games (75), games started (73), complete games (all of them!), ERA-plus (207), and innings (a mind-boggling 678.2).

As former Red Sox pitcher Dave Ferriss said: “How such an unparalleled feat was accomplished is amazing and hard to imagine.”

But was he any better than the greatest pitchers of the modern era: Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux?

While Radbourn is enshrined in the Hall of Fame, and won a weighty 309 games over his career, he did not perform with the sustained greatness of these other pitchers. Johnson (1999-2002) and Maddux (1992-1995) each won four consecutive Cy Young Awards. Radbourn was wrapping up his big-league career when Cy Young (the pitcher) was just getting started, but had the award existed in his day, the Old Hoss surely would have won no more than two in a row. Roger Clemens won a record seven Cy Young awards, but allegations of steroids use have deeply tainted his career, and may well keep him out of the Hall of Fame. Cheating with performance-enhancing drugs puts any players’ records under suspicion.

Radbourn drugged himself with nothing stronger than Brimstone and Treacle in the spring, a mixture of molasses and sulfur, and whiskey during the season (he allegedly drank a quart a day at the height of career). As for training facilities, he essentially had nothing. He demanded that his bosses buy him a stove for the Providence clubhouse so that he could steam his aching arm after games – probably exactly the wrong approach, since medical experts advise pitchers to ice their arms after games to reduce muscle inflammation. Pitchers who had a sore arm in 1884 found no therapists ready to assist them; they were told to rub their arm with a dime’s worth each of sweet oil, liquid ammonia and rye whiskey.

Over his career, Radbourn won fewer career games than Maddux (355) and the tainted Clemens (354), though more than Johnson (303).

Yet it is hard to argue any pitcher ever had a better two seasons than Radbourn did in 1883 and 1884. The numbers are incredible. Over those two years, he won 107 games against 37 losses, threw a mind-blowing 1,311 innings and pitched 139 complete games.

His contemporaries understood that he was as good, or better, than anyone. When a reporter in 1916 polled 10 major-league managers, asking them to pick the greatest achievement in baseball history, six of the managers – including such keen minds as John McGraw, Connie Mack, Pat Moran, Clark Griffith, Jimmy Callahan and Hugh Jennings — named Old Hoss Radbourn’s sustained pitching in 1884.

“I see,” a correspondent wrote to syndicated columnist Grantland Rice in 1924, “that some fan picks [Christy] Mathewson, [Ed] Walsh and [Rube] Waddell as the three greatest [pitchers]. Matty was a marvel. But when you come to the greatest, it is a matter of choice between Radbourne and [Walter] Johnson. Radbourne, I think, was the greatest pitcher I ever saw.”

Frank Bancroft, Radbourn’s manager in 1884, agreed. “To this day,” he said in 1910, “I don’t think I have seen better pitchers than were Radbourne and [Charlie] Sweeney of the old Providence team, with, perhaps one exception. That was Christy Mathewson. He, I think, would have compared with either of the first two. But they were wonders, and [neither] Mathewson nor any other pitcher who has come since was better than they.”

It’s fair to guess that, under the daunting conditions of the 1880s, Maddux and Johnson would have had the toughness and skill to perform brilliantly. But Radbourn, aided by superb training and conditioning, might well have won 400 games had he thrown today, given his savvy ability to coax mileage from his arm by mixing his fastballs with off-speed pitches and curveballs.

One thing seems clear: No pitcher ever had a better all-around season than Radbourn in 1884. No major-league hurler ever won more than 59 games in a single year – and none ever will.

As Larry Tye, author of the best-selling Satchel, put it: “Make room, Satchel and Cy, Walter, Grover and Roger. In a game where winning is everything, Old Hoss Radbourn did more of it than any of you in that magical season of 1884. But don’t believe me. Travel back there with Edward Achorn, who makes Old Hoss’s case for greatness in a book that passionately evokes a forgotten era and convincingly rewrites our list of the most accomplished pitchers ever.”