1884: Old Hoss Radbourne and the Providence Grays

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).

 

Frank Bancroft, the new manager of the Providence Grays, was having second thoughts. Had he done well to leave Cleveland, where he had been treated kindly and where, the previous season, he had led his club to a respectable fourth-place finish in the National League? In late January 1884, in a letter to Harry Wright, his friend and predecessor as manager of the Grays, Bancroft hinted his distaste for the Rhode Island city, and wondered if he might find himself under too many bosses with the Grays.

Perhaps Bancroft’s grumbling was simply new-job jitters. As manager, he would be expected to produce a profitable team—a manager in the 1880s managed his club’s scheduling and business matters as well as its players. But Bancroft, although he was not yet thirty-eight years old, was known for his financial genius. In four years of managing National League clubs in Worcester, Detroit, and Cleveland, none had finished a season higher than fourth, but all had turned profits for their owners.

Now, with a good team-one that in its six years in the league had never finished lower than third, one that in the two previous seasons had contended strongly for the championship—surely with a team like this he could earn not only money but maybe even a pennant for his new bosses.

Whatever his private fears, Bancroft in public looked toward the 1884 season with optimism. His team was essentially the one that the previous year had finished a strong third, only five games behind the champion Boston Red Stockings. The club had lost its right fielder, John Cassidy, to the Brooklyn club in the rival American Association, but in his place it had signed Paul Revere Radford, a promising young Bostonian who had broken into the majors the previous season with his hometown team, and who could pitch as well as play the outfield.

All the other Grays regulars were club veterans. One, in fact—center fielder Paul Hines—had been with the team since it entered the National League in 1878. In his first three seasons with Providence he led the club in batting (leading the league in 1878), and had been every year among the Grays’ two or three best hitters. As a fielder he was known for his fine eye and spectacular catches, especially of low line drives.

Two regulars had joined the Grays the year after Hines: veteran first baseman Joe Start and, late in the season, rookie second baseman Jack Farrell. Start, when he joined the Grays in ’79, was already thirty-six. He had played in the old National Association, the first professional league, and before that, as an “amateur” star with Brooklyn’s Atlantics and other clubs going back to 1860. Now, in 1884, at age 41 the league’s oldest player, Start was still a fine fielder and, next to Hines, the Grays’ most consistent hitter. He was the team captain, a responsible position in those days when a nonplaying manager (like Bancroft and, before him, Harry Wright) sat in the grandstand and conveyed through his captain whatever instructions he had for his players. Jack Farrell, after a rocky beginning (he twice led league second basemen in errors), developed into one of the league’s surest fielders and led all keystoners in fielding average for 1883.

Three Grays regulars were in their fourth year with the club in 1884. Third baseman Jerry Denny, whose major league career began with the Grays in 1881, had developed into something of a slugger, tying for second in league home runs (with 8) in 1883. But he was better known for his fieldings: Though known to throw the ball away upon occasion, he was splendid at stopping and catching it. Able to field the ball with either hand, he became—and remains today—the all-time leader of major league third basemen in his career averages of 4.2 chances and 1.6 putouts per game.

Also joining the Grays in 1881 were the battery of Charley Radbourne (most sources today omit the final “e,” but Old Hoss signed his name “Radbourne”) and Barney Gilligan. Gilligan came to the Grays after two years as catcher and outfielder with Cleveland, but Radbourne, though two years older than Gilligan, at age 26, was a virtual rookie. He had played six games in the infield and outfield for Buffalo in 1880, but he never pitched a major league game until he joined Providence. He quickly developed into one of the league’s most respected box artists, and in 1883 carried the team’s pitching, starting or relieving (four times) in 50 of the Gray’s 58 victories. Overall, he pitched 632 innings in 76 games, winning 49 and losing 25.

Manager Bancroft was confident that Radbourne would not be as overworked in 1884, even though the league was expanding its schedule from 98 to 112 games. Charlie Sweeney, a young pitcher/outfielder from San Francisco, was overwhelming batters in California winter ball. Though he had seen limited service with the Grays since joining them in 1882, Bancroft planned to alternate him in the box with Radbourne in 1884.

A second San Franciscan, catcher Vincent (Sandy) Nava, also broke into the majors with Providence in 1882. His heritage has been variously assessed over the years. Harry Wright, who signed him for the Grays, described him as a “Spaniard”; others have called him Portuguese or Cuban; his death certificate gives his father’s birthplace as “America” and his mother’s as Mexico; contemporary press accounts hinted that he was black. Whatever his race and ancestry, he caught well, and formed with Sweeney the Grays’ “California battery.”

The 1882 season saw not only the major league debuts of Sweeney and Nava, but also of left fielder Cliff Carroll, a hunting buddy of Radbourne and, like Radbourne, a resident of Bloomington, Illinois. Sporting Life described him as the best man in baseball at beating out a bunt.

The regular team of1884 was rounded out by shortstop Arthur Irwin, who came to the Grays in 1883 after three years in the league with Worcester. (One of Bancroft’s finds, Irwin played shortstop for him at Worcester in 1879, when the team was in a minor league, and the next year, when the team graduated, nearly intact, to the National League.) Irwin was a native of Toronto, but for many years had made his home in Boston. He was a daring though sometimes reckless baserunner, and like Carroll was known for his ability to bunt hit.

In addition to the eleven regulars, Providence had signed two extra catchers—Miah Murray, another Bostonian, and Charlie Bassett, a student at Providence’s Brown University—anticipating a “breaking up” of catchers under the new league rule permitting overhand pitching for the first time. Bassett, who would join the Grays after Brown finished its baseball season in June, was also an infielder, and became the Grays’ general utility man late in the season when injuries and illness afflicted the team. Murray caught only seven games in 1884, and Bassett none at all, as Gilligan and Nava proved more durable than expected.

Manager Bancroft’s confidence in pitcher Sweeney seemed well placed. He pitched well in the month of exhibition games that preceded the opening of the championship season—so well, in fact, that Radbourne must have wondered if he were about to be superseded by the brash twenty-one-year-old as darling of the fans.

Not only Sweeney, but the Grays as a team were impressive in preseason play. After defeating Brown University in Providence on March 29, the club traveled south to Hampton, Va., and rolled north through April, flattening every minor league and American Association club in its path. The Grays’ only preseason loss was a forfeit to Brooklyn on April 21, when Sweeney insisted on throwing overhand although the game was being played according to American Association rules, which forbade deliveries in which the pitcher’s arm came higher than the shoulder.

The Grays kept their momentum as the regular season began. After a close opening day loss to Cleveland on May 1, they won seventeen of their next eighteen games, with winning streaks of five and twelve games. The California battery of Sweeney and Nava worked the opening game and thereafter were generally alternated, as Bancroft had planned, with Radbourne and Gilligan. The pitchers matched won-lost records through May 24 (when both stood at 8-1) before Radbourne began to pull away from Sweeney with a victory on May 26 which Sweeney followed with two losses.

On May 22 the Grays had for the first time moved into the league lead ahead of Boston. Though the two successive losses dropped them back into second place for a day, Radbourne’s two victories (morning and afternoon) on Memorial Day, and a third the day after, brought the Grays to the end of May in first place by a few percentage points. Boston regained the lead three days later.

Providence and Boston were by geographical proximity natural rivals, and their struggle for first place intensified the rivalry. The teams did not play each other the first month of the season. By the time they met in Providence on June 6, Boston was a game ahead of the Grays, but would slip into second place in percentage if they should lose the game. Excitement ran high, and the crowd of nearly 4500 that packed the Grays’ Messer Street grounds included from 300-1500 fans (news accounts varied) who had traveled by train from Boston expecting a close and exciting game. They were not to be disappointed.

One Boston writer, recalling the 1884 Providence-Boston games a decade later, called them “the greatest ever played between two clubs in the history of base ball.” This first game set the tone for the seventeen the clubs would play that season. In a monumental pitchers’ duel, Radbourne and Boston’s “Jumbo” Jim Whitney overpowered batters for sixteen innings without giving up an earned run. Darkness ended the game in a 1-1 tie. It turned out to be the league’s longest game that year, and was hailed by one writer as “the most memorable in the history of the national sport.” Boston still led the league.

The next day the teams played in Boston, but the league lead returned to Providence as the writers revised their judgment about baseball’s most memorable game. Whitney unexpectedly was sent in to pitch again, and again permitted no earned runs, striking out 10 men. But Providence’s Sweeney was the hero of the game, striking out 19 Boston batsmen for a new record (since tied but not surpassed), as the Grays defeated the Reds 2-1 on unearned runs.

The Grays returned to a jubilant welcome in Providence that evening, complete with a torchlight parade and a banquet. But the jubilation was short lived: Providence lost its next four games to Boston, falling four games out of first place, before Radbourne pulled out a 4-3 win in the fifteen-inning series finale.

Though they could not know it, the Grays had passed the low point of their season. For all the troubles to come, they would not again be further than three games behind the league leader. With the fifteen-inning victory over Boston they began another of their winning streaks—this one ten games—which included Radbourne’s fourteen-inning 1-0 three-hitter against Detroit.

The game that ended their winning streak—a no-hitter by Larry Corcoran in Chicago on June 27, the third of his major league career—seems to have taken the wind out of the Grays’ sail. By the time they next played Boston on July 11, though they had pulled to within two games, they were becalmed in a ten-game stretch of .500 ball.

And they played no better against their arch rivals, splitting their six games with Boston and ending the series still two games behind. Because Sweeney had developed arm trouble, Radbourne was now pitching nearly every game; against the Reds he pitched the first three games, winning two. A “phenomenal” acquired from the Worcester club, Joseph “Cyclone” Miller, pitched well in the fourth game but lost a close one, 4-3. Radbourne lost the fifth game, on July 16, and that evening was suspended by manager Bancroft for “insubordination” and lackadaisical play. Although Radbourne’s overall record to that date was good (24-8), half his losses had come in the previous two weeks.

With Radbourne out, Miller became the starting pitcher for the next two games, winning the first with Sweeney’s help in the ninth (to conclude the Boston series), and giving way to Sweeney in the second inning the next day against New York in a game Providence went on to win. Sweeney’s arm trouble seemed to have cleared up. It wasn’t his arm that would bring him down. The next day, July 19, Providence introduced its second phenom of the month. Pitcher Ed Conley, a frail amateur up from the Woonsocket, Rhode Island, “OSRC’s” (for Orcutt’s Sure Rheumatic Cure, which supplied their uniforms), stunned Harry Wright’s Phillies with a two-hit 6-1 victory.

Two days later, on Monday, July 21, during an exhibition game in Woonsocket against Conley’s old team, Sweeney (who was not playing) began drinking between innings in the dressing room. When the Grays returned to Providence after the game, he and Nava remained behind, and failed to show up for practice in Providence the next morning before a game with Philadelphia. Sweeney finally appeared at one o’clock and, taking manager Bancroft aside, said to him: “If you want to know why I was not here this morning I will tell you. I was drunk last night and did not get home.”

Despite Sweeney’s defiant attitude, Bancroft decided to give him his first start in two weeks. But he put Miller in right field to be available for relief if necessary. (Until 1891, substitutes could not be brought off the bench into a game unless one of the starting nine was injured or became ill.)

Sweeney pitched without will or effort, and it was only the Grays’ strong fielding that held the Phillies to two runs in the first four innings. At the start of the fifth, Bancroft asked captain Joe Start to have Sweeney and Miller exchange positions, but Sweeney refused, and continued to pitch the next two innings. In the seventh, Bancroft called Sweeney over to the stands and asked him directly to let Miller relieve him. Sweeney refused, said “I guess I’ll quit,” and left the field.

Providence completed the game with eight men—Miller pitched, and Carroll and Hines covered the outfield. They managed to preserve their 6-2 lead into the ninth, but then balls began to fall between the fielders and two runs scored. The rattled Grays began to commit errors, and by the time the inning was over Philadelphia had scored eight runs. Final score: 10-6, Phillies.

Sweeney was expelled from the team, and the league, that evening. (There is some reason to suppose Sweeney acted deliberately to provoke his dismissal. Once freed from his league contract obligations, he promptly signed with St. Louis of the outlaw Union Association for higher pay; winning 24 games for them in the half season that remained, he completed 1884 with a combined record of 41-15.)

Although the New York Times report of the Sweeney incident suggested that the Grays might have to disband, that option seems not to have been seriously considered by the club directors. When they expelled Sweeney, they also reinstated Radbourne, revising his contract to pay him extra for pitching Sweeney’s games in addition to his own. Radbourne, for his part (as baseball sage Henry Chadwick put it), “settled down to carry out his intention of ‘pitching the Providence team into the championship,’ and he did it splendidly, his work in the ‘box’ never before having been equaled.”

For the next two months, until the Grays felt they had the pennant well in hand, Radbourne played every game. Most of them he pitched, but in the four games when Miller or Conley was started in the box, Radbourne played in the field to be available for relief. He did relieve Miller once, preserving the Grays’ lead with four innings of no-hit pitching.

On August 7, in New York, after losing to the Maroons (also known as the Gothams, soon to be the Giants) 2-1 in 11 innings the day before, Radbourne came back to defeat them and begin the Grays’ longest winning streak of the season—twenty games—and begin for himself a major league record eighteen consecutive wins. (Only two pitchers have surpassed Radbourne in the hundred seasons since then: Tim Keefe in 1888 and Rube Marquard in 1912, both with nineteen.)

When the Grays traveled to Boston two days later for the first game of their final series with the Red Stockings, they entered the most crucial period in their race for the pennant. Boston, only a game behind the Grays, knew it could come out of the series with as much as a three-game lead over Providence. Boston’s pitching was impressive. In the first game, Charlie Buffinton faced only twenty-seven men in nine innings—the two Grays who hit safely were promptly retired on a pickoff and a double play. But Radbourne was invincible. He matched Buffinton’s pitching in the first game, which the Grays finally won in the eleventh, 1-0. In the second game, two days later, Boston scored a run, but Radbourne pitched his second two-hitter in a row and the Grays scored three runs to win. The next day Radbourne shut out the Reds for the second time in the series (4-0), and after a day’s rest (a rainout) he finished them off with a third shutout, 1-0. The Grays’ sweep left Boston five games behind.

For a time, Boston kept pace with an eight-game winning streak, but as Providence was now embarked on its twenty-game streak, and would win twenty-eight of twenty-nine games before easing up, the Reds were out of the race.

Radbourne’s endurance was as impressive as his effectiveness. In the two months following Sweeney’s departure he pitched thirty-five complete games (plus four innings of relief, winning thirty, losing four and tying one. Two of his losses came at the end of this marathon as he pitched a twenty-first and twenty-second consecutive championship game for the Grays.

Radbourne’s endurance and effectiveness are all the more remarkable in light of his agony in preparing for each game. Frank Bancroft, although he went on to other triumphs (culminating in a long, distinguished career as business manager for the Cincinnati Reds), never forgot 1884, and never tired of telling the Radbourne story. In an article he wrote for Baseball Magazine in 1908 he recalled Radbourne’s warmup exercises:

Morning after morning upon arising he would be unable to raise his arm high enough to use his hair brush. Instead of quitting he stuck all the harder to his task[,] going out to the ball park hours before the rest of the team and beginning to warm up by throwing a few feet and increasing the distance until he could finally throw the ball from the outfield to the home plate. The players, all eagerness to win, would watch “Rad,” and when he would succeed in making his customary long distance throw they would look at each other and say the “Old Hoss” is ready and we can’t be beat, and this proved to be the case nine times out often.

The Grays’ schedule called for them to play the final month of the season away from home. As the day approached for their departure they were variously honored by their fans. Before the game of September 2, for example, Radbourne and his catcher Gilligan were presented “life-size portraits of themselves, in crayon, handsomely mounted in heavy gilded frames.” A week and a half later, “Radbourne was given a great bunch of flowers, in which was a valuable envelope, while Farrell received a magnificent crayon portrait of himself, and a gold watch, chain and charm, the latter articles being valued at $185.”

The Grays rewarded their fans, too, with their splendid play. Their loss on September 9 which ended their twenty-game winning streak was doubtless a disappointment, especially as poor umpiring seems to have contributed to Buffalo’s two runs. But on the whole the Grays were awesome. On September 5, third baseman Denny hit “the best home run hit yet made on the Messer Street grounds. The ball went far above the roofs of the houses beyond the left field fence, and ere it had dropped Farrell was home and Denny nearly to second base. This won the game.”

When the team left for Cleveland in mid-September, Conley and Murray were brought along as the change battery. Miller and Nava were loaned for the remainder of the season to a military team at Ft. Monroe, Virginia.

On September 25, in Chicago, Radbourne missed his first game as pitcher or fielder since returning from his suspension on July 23. He pitched only five of the Grays’ twelve remaining games. With his two consecutive losses in late September, the whole team slacked off, winning only half of their final fourteen games. Nevertheless, they clinched the pennant two weeks before the end of the season when Boston, weakened by injuries, lost its third game of the week to last-place Detroit.

On October 15 the Grays’ championship season came to an end with a makeup game in Philadelphia. Radbourne pitched and won easily, 8-0, his eleventh shutout of the year. He started 73 games as pitcher and completed them all, winning 59, losing 12 and tying 2. Twice he came in from right field to relieve the starting pitcher and preserve his team’s lead; by today’s scoring guidelines he would be credited with two saves. (Saves, of course, were not calculated in 1884, and neither were pitching wins and losses. Radbourne, had he been asked, would simply have said he had pitched in 61 Providence victories. The 60-win figure that appears in baseball encyclopedias and record books was arrived at in the early years of this century by crediting one of his relief appearances as a victory in addition to his 59 complete-game wins.)

It was pitching and fielding that carried Providence to its .750 record of84 wins against only 28 losses. In batting and slugging, the Grays ranked only fifth among the league’s eight teams. Their .241 batting average was six points below the league average, and a full forty points below league leading Chicago’s .281. Paul Hines led the Grays in batting with .302. Sweeney in his half-season hit .298, and Start batted .276. Denny led the club in home runs with 6.

In fielding the Grays were much more impressive, their fielding average of .918 second only to Boston’s .922. Two Grays were at the top of the league in their positions: Joe Start led first basemen with .980, nine points ahead of his nearest rival; second baseman Jack Farrell ended the season in a virtual tie with Boston’s Jack Burdock at .922. Most impressive, of course, were the Grays’ pitching statistics. In earned run average (estimated in modern times), Providence pitchers led the league: Radbourne was first (1.38) and Sweeney second (1.55). The team’s 1.59 was nearly half the league average (2.98), and nearly a run less per game than second-ranked Boston (2.47). Sweeney gave up the fewest hits per nine innings of anyone in the league (6.23); Radbourne was second (with 7.00). Radbourne led the league in strikeouts with 441.

On their return to Providence October 17, the Grays were once again paraded and banqueted. With Sweeney, the hero of the previous celebration, gone, Radbourne was king. He rewarded his fans’ adulation by pitching a one-hitter the next day in an exhibition game against Cincinnati of the American Association—his final appearance of the year in Providence.

For Radbourne and the Grays there was one more triumph. Late in July Jim Mutrie, manager of New York’s Metropolitans, who were headed for the American Association championship, began to talk about how his team could beat any team in the older National League.

When Providence players heard this, they persuaded Bancroft to challenge the Mets to a postseason series to settle the question of league superiority. Mutrie accepted the challenge and, after much negotiation, a three-game series was scheduled for New York’s Polo Grounds, then located just north of Central Park, for October 23-25 (six months to the day after the Grays—without pitching Hoss—had defeated the Mets in three preseason games).

This October series looms in importance through the mist of a hundred years as the forerunner and prototype of America’s premier sporting event. But in 1884, even though some papers described it as a series to determine the championship of the world, the public remained unimpressed.

American Association teams were regularly defeated in exhibition games by National League clubs—although this pattern reversed itself in the next two years—and the Association champion Mets, before meeting Providence, had done no better than tie the Maroons, fourth place in the NL, in a series for the city championship. Furthermore, the weather turned windy and cold suddenly, dropping into the low fifties on the afternoon of the first game from a summer-like 76° the day before. Only 2500 spectators saw Radbourne shut out the Mets 6-0. Even that number dropped the next day, along with the temperature, as only 1000 fans saw Grays’ third baseman Denny win for Radbourne the second and deciding game, 3-1, with a home run over the center field fence.

As the outcome of the series had been decided and the weather remained cold, fewer than 500 fans showed up’ for the final game. The Grays, who were to split with the Mets the profits of the final two games, saw no profit in this small crowd and wanted to go home. When at last they were persuaded to take the field after being given the choice of umpire, they were given the game as well by the Mets’ sloppy fielding. Scorers lost count, but when darkness mercifully halted the game after six innings, Radbourne and the Grays were once again victorious, by a score of 11—or perhaps 12—to 2.

Henry Chadwick, reflecting on Radbourne’s success while pitching nearly every game, argued his example as a paradigm for all those pitchers who claimed to need rest every other day. But even Radbourne couldn’t maintain his 1884 pace beyond that season. The next year he pitched only two-thirds as many games as he had in 1884. And though he often pitched well thereafter, not once in his seven remaining major league seasons did he win even half the number of games he had won in his miracle year.

As for the Providence Grays, in 1885 they slipped below .500 and into fourth place for the first time in their history. Their fans deserted them, and at the end of the season the club was disbanded. Frank Bancroft,just a year after his greatest triumph, had for the first time managed a failure.