May 9, 1891: Old Hoss Radbourn’s 300th win, rediscovered

For as long as baseball has kept official statistics, those statistics have been subject to change. Many of the more prominent recalculations involve records of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Multiple revisions to the career win total of nineteenth-century workhorse Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn have brought it back to 310, a number first cited in 1939. But in the process, identification of when he earned his 300th win hasn’t been adjusted accordingly.

Winner of a major-league-record 60 games while a member of the National League’s Providence Grays in 1884, Radbourn was believed to have 310 lifetime victories when he was selected as one of six “star performers of the era prior to 1900” to be inducted in the Hall of Fame in 1939, 42 years after his death.2 (Then, as during his playing days, newspapers spelled his last name Radbourne.) Twelve years later, baseball’s first comprehensive statistical encyclopedia, Turkin and Thompson’s Official Encyclopedia of Baseball, credited Radbourn with 306 wins.3

In 1969 the Macmillan Company’s Baseball Encyclopedia set Radbourn’s total at 309 –  the same figure found 30 years later in the Total Baseball encyclopedia, and in April 2025 at MLB’s official online database.4 Nearly a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, however, a consensus has emerged – from references like Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org, as well as the Hall of Fame – that Radbourn’s win total was, in fact, 310.

Newspapers have heralded the date at which major-league pitchers have reached 300 wins since the late 1930s, but Radbourn’s 300th win doesn’t seem to have been identified until 1990.5 With Nolan Ryan at that time about to win his 300th, the Elias Sports Bureau listed Radbourn as notching his 300th on June 2, 1891, while pitching for the NL’s Cincinnati Reds against the Boston Red Stockings.6 That date, placed alongside an assumed win total of 308 for Radbourn, has since been repeated by many outlets – up through at least January 2025.7

But the recalculation of Radbourn’s total means a reassessment of when his 300th win happened. Under the current accounting, Radbourn’s June 2 victory, his fourth of the 1891 season, was actually number 303. The milestone win instead happened on May 9, 1891, in what was his first victory of the year.

The ace of the 1890 Players’ League champion Boston Reds, Radbourn was left without a team when the PL ceased operations after their lone season – or so it might have seemed. In February 1891 his previous club, the NL’s Boston Reds, included Radbourn on their reserve list for the coming season.8 Former Boston teammate Mike “King” Kelly tried to woo Radbourn to his American Association Cincinnati nine, but proved unable to do so.9

In the second week of  April, Radbourn did agree to play in Cincinnati – but for the National League Reds, under a different former teammate, Tom Loftus. The contract called for Radbourn to receive a salary of $5,500 ($195,000 in 2024 dollars) and exempted him from playing on Sundays.10

Radbourn made his first start on April 25, at home against the Cleveland Spiders, before a small crowd owing to Mike Kelly’s Queen City debut that same day across town.11 There was no fanfare for what we now would consider Radbourn’s fourth attempt at winning his 300th. In earning his 27th victory for the Reds on September 24 of the previous season, Radbourn had reached 299 for his career, then lost every start he made between then and the end of the 1890 season: on September 25 to the Cleveland Infants, on September 29 to the Buffalo Bisons, and on October 3 to the Pittsburgh Burghers.12

Cleveland pummeled Radbourn in his 1891 debut, to the tune of 23 runs and 26 hits. Content to have the trio of Tony Mullane, Jesse Duryea, and Billy Rhines work the Reds’ next 11 games, manager Loftus finally gave the 11-year veteran another start on May 9.

Radbourn’s fifth attempt at winning number 300 came in the finale of a four-game series against Pittsburgh, a team that was informally beginning to be known as the Pirates.13 Pittsburgh player-manager Ned Hanlon sent curveballer Harry Staley out to pitch the series finale. A 21-game winner for Pittsburgh’s NL team in 1889 – then known as the Alleghenies – and then again for the Hanlon-managed Burghers in 1890, he’d topped the Reds two days earlier, allowing only two runs and five hits.14

A crowd of 1,735 was on hand at Cincinnati’s League Park for the Saturday afternoon game, watching the 4-11 Reds play on what was the warmest day of the spring in the city to that point, with temperatures in the upper 70s.15

Electing to bat first, the Reds immediately ran themselves out of a rally. With one out and runners at the corners, captain Arlie Latham, a two-time stealer of 100 bases who swiped 87 in 1891, was gunned down at home on an aborted double steal. Then his reluctant co-conspirator, Lefty Marr, was thrown out attempting to steal second by Pittsburgh catcher Jocko Fields.16

With veteran umpire Jack McQuaid in charge and the Reds’ newest catcher, Bob Clark, behind the plate,17 36-year-old “Grandpa Radbourne” held the Pirates scoreless in the first, thanks to the first of three double plays that surehanded second baseman Bid McPhee turned that day.18

An inning later, Pittsburgh plated the game’s first run on a leadoff single by Fred Carroll and a one-out single by Hanlon. The Enquirer credited Hanlon’s hit with bringing Carroll home, but the Pittsburgh Press claimed Carroll scored on Fields’ subsequent fly out.19

Cincinnati took back the lead in the third. After Staley retired the first two batters, McPhee walked, stole second base, and scored on a single by Latham. (Before his hit, “the freshest man on Earth,” as Latham was commonly called, had presciently shouted, “Now look out for fire-works.”20) Latham, who played this game “like a Hambletonian yearling with a chestnut burr under his tail,” according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, stole second, then reached third on a grounder fumbled by shortstop George Miller.21 He scored when third baseman Sam LaRocque, making his lone major-league appearance at third base (and his only 1891 appearance for Pittsburgh), in place of an otherwise-engaged Charlie Reilly,22 muffed a popup off the bat of Bug Holliday, one of seven Pittsburgh errors in the game.

The combination of savvy pitching by Radbourn and stellar Cincinnati defense quashed what could have been a big fourth inning for Pittsburgh. A leadoff single by Carroll and a double by Lou Bierbauer gave the Pirates runners on second and third with nobody out. Radbourn pitched around Hanlon, putting Pittsburgh’s second-best run producer on first with “four balls so far away … he could not have touched them with a bed slat.”23 The move proved to be a brilliant one. Fields popped out and LaRocque lined into a double play, with McPhee nabbing Hanlon at first to the delight of the partisan crowd.

Buoyed by his defense, McPhee tripled leading off the fifth. He stayed put when LaRocque bobbled a grounder hit by Latham, but came home along with Latham on Marr’s double to right field. Marr scored the third run of the inning on Fields’s passed ball and center fielder Hanlon’s “mangy little misjudgment” of a Reilly fly ball.24

Staked to a four-run lead, Radbourn had little trouble with the NL’s weakest offense through the middle innings.25 “As cool as the subcellar of an over-the-Rhine brewery,” he held Pittsburgh scoreless in innings three through six.26 The Pirates pulled a run closer in the seventh after Fields reached third on a ball that skipped past first baseman Long John Reilly. He came home either on a single by Miller (said the Pittsburgh Press), or LaRocque’s sacrifice (per the Cincinnati Enquirer).

Radbourn helped his own cause in the ninth, reaching second on the third error of the day by Calliope Miller27 and scoring on Latham’s single. Latham went to second when the ball bounced off the shin of left fielder Pete Browning and scored the final run of the game on Marr’s third hit of the game, a single. Radbourn kept the Pirates in check in the ninth to secure the 7-2 win. The victory made Radbourn the fourth major leaguer to win 300 games, joining the ranks of Pud Galvin, who reached 300 in 1888, Tim Keefe (1890), and Mickey Welch (1890).

“Long live the King!” hailed the Enquirer in its game summary the next day, adding, “Old Hoss Radbourne is himself again.” The article credited Radbourn with inspiring his heretofore downtrodden teammates to “not play ball … as if they were paid for it.”28

Radbourn shut out Brooklyn on four hits five days later, in what proved to be the next-to-last blanking of his career.29 After an up-and-down four months in which his record fell below .500 for just the third time in his career and he compiled a 4.25 ERA that was nearly a run above league average, on August 22 Radbourn asked for and was given his release.30 Content with what he’d accomplished, in a career that included 488 complete games in 502 starts, he returned home to Bloomington, Illinois, to begin a well-earned retirement.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Thomas Merrick and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Old Hoss Radbourn, SABR-Rucker Archive.

Sources

In addition to the Sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Brian McKenna’s biography of Radbourn and Ralph Berger’s Arlie Latham biography in the SABR Biography Project as well as the Baseball-Reference.com, Baseball-Almanac.com, and Retrosheet.org websites.

Notes

1 For example, Rube Waddell’s 1904 strikeout total was changed from 343 to 349 in 1969, giving him a single-season American League record; and a 1940 adjustment of Christy Mathewson’s career win total from 372 to 373 pulled him into a tie with Grover Cleveland Alexander for third-place, all-time. Dave Smith, “A Number of Changes,” Baseball Hall of Fame, https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/baseball-history/changing-nature-of-statistics, accessed January 22, 2025. Waddell displaced Bob Feller, who fanned 348 batters in 1946, as the AL single-season strikeout king. After the game in which Feller reached that mark, Associated Press sportswriter Joe Reichler contended that the Cleveland ace had fallen one strikeout shy of Waddell’s total. Waddell held the record until Nolan Ryan came on the scene in the mid-1970s.

2 Earl Hilligan (Associated Press), “Hoss Radbourne Added to Hall of Fame,” Bloomington (Illinois) Pantagraph, May 3, 1939: 12. The other pre-1900 stars inducted with Radbourn were Al Spalding, Cap Anson, Candy Cummings, Buck Ewing, and Charles Comiskey. The date of their selection, May 2, 1939, was arguably more renowned in baseball history for something that didn’t happen that day. In Detroit, New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig held himself out of the lineup in an afternoon clash with the Tigers, ending his consecutive-games-played streak at 2,130.

3 Hy Turkin and S.C. Thompson, The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1951), 259.

4 The Baseball Encyclopedia (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969), 2068; John Thorn et al, eds., Total Baseball (New York: Total Sports, 1999), 1766.

5 A few months after Radbourn’s 1939 Hall of Fame selection, Lefty Grove spoke openly of his desire to reach 300 wins, which he did in his final season, two years later. “Lefty Grove’s Comeback Keeps Red Sox on Trail of Leading Yanks,” Uniontown (Pennsylvania) News Standard, August 18, 1939: 12.

6 “300-Game Winners: When They Did It,” Fort Myers (Florida) News-Press, July 24, 1990: C1.

7 See, for example “On This Date,” Spokane (Washington) Spokesman-Review, June 2, 2023: B3, and National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Facebook post, December 11, 2023, https://www.facebook.com/baseballhall/photos/hall-of-fame-pitcher-charles-old-hoss-radbourn-was-born-on-this-date-in-1854-the/678787837748764/?_rdr. In mid-January of 2025, Baseball-Almanac.com also carried the June 2 date on its 300-game-winner webpage, but revised it to reflect the corrected date from this article: “300 Wins Club by Baseball Almanac,” Baseball Almanac, https://www.baseball-almanac.com/pitching/pi300c.shtml, accessed January 14 and 22, 2025.

8 “Can Reserve Fourteen,” Boston Globe, February 1, 1891: 18.

9 Multiple newspapers reported that Radbourn had in fact signed with Kelly, but it turned out that he hadn’t. “As Expected,” Cleveland Leader, March 17, 1891: 3; “Cincinnati Gain,” Boston Globe, March 20, 1891: 5.

10 “‘Rad’s Big Salary,” Fall River (Massachusetts) Globe, April 11, 1891: 1. Loftus and Radbourn had been teammates in the late 1870s with the independent Peoria Reds and Dubuque Red Stockings of the Northwest League.

11 “Tornado of Hits,” Cleveland Leader, April 26, 1891: 6.

12 “Bostons 5, Clevelands, 4,” Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, September 25, 1890: 8; “Lost to Cleveland,” Fall River Globe, September 26, 1890: 1; “Buffalos 7, Bostons 4,” Springfield Republican, September 30, 1890: 5.

13 A charter member of the American Association, Pittsburgh’s team – known as the Alleghenies – had been admitted into the National League in 1887. After the club signed star second baseman Lou Bierbauer from the Association’s Philadelphia Athletics, who’d neglected to reserve their former member upon the dissolution of the Players’ League, Pittsburgh director J. Palmer O’Neil began calling his club “pirates,” a name which immediately stuck. David Nemec, “Lou Bierbauer,” SABR Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/lou-bierbauer/, accessed May 4, 2025; “Baseball Brevities,” New York World, March 4, 1891: 3; “The Gay Old Sport,” Pittsburg Dispatch, May 2, 1891: 6. 

14 “Of the Very Finest,” Pittsburgh Dispatch, May 8, 1891: 6.

15 “Cincinnatis, 7; Pittsburgs, 2,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 10, 1891: 11; NOWData, National Weather Service, https://www.weather.gov/wrh/Climate?wfo=iln, accessed January 21, 2025.

16 “Old Hoss Himself Again,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 10, 1891: 9.

17 A six-year veteran from nearby Covington, Kentucky, Clark was making his Cincinnati debut after recently being acquired from the Brooklyn Bridegrooms in late March. “Base-Ball Gossip,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 9, 1891: 2; “New Players,” Cincinnati Enquirer, March 25, 1891: 2.

18 “In Luck to Break Even,” Pittsburgh Press, May 10, 1891: 6. McPhee came into the 1891 season having led second basemen in the leagues in which he played (the AA from 1882 to 1889 and the NL in 1890) in double plays for nine straight years, fielding percentage six times, putouts five times and assists five times.

19 “In Luck to Break Even”; “Old Hoss Himself Again.”

20 “Old Hoss Himself Again.”

21 “Old Hoss Himself Again.”

22 Reilly, the Pirates’ regular third baseman, was in a Cincinnati court fighting an injunction sought by the American Association Columbus club to keep him from playing for Pittsburgh. Reilly had first signed with Columbus for the 1891 season, then, after the Association elected to abrogate the National Agreement, jumped to the Pirates. The suit was ultimately dismissed in Reilly’s favor. “Cincinnatis, 7: Pittsburgs, 2”; “Reilly in Court,” St. Paul Globe, May 10, 1891; “Reilly the Victor,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 21, 1891: 2.

23 “Cincinnatis, 7: Pittsburgs, 2.” Hanlon’s 60 RBIs for the 1891 Pirates were second only to the 73 RBIs that first baseman Jake Beckley unofficially collected.

24 “Old Hoss Himself Again.”

25 Pitsburgh finished the 1891 season last in the NL in batting average and slugging percentage.

26 “Old Hoss Himself Again.”

27 “Cincinnatis, 7: Pittsburgs, 2.”

28 “Old Hoss Himself Again.”

29 “Radbourn’s Right,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 15, 1891: 2.

30 “National League,” Boston Globe, August 31, 1891: 5; “He Quit the Business,” Bloomington (Illinois) Weekly Leader, August 28, 1891.