Baseball in Rhode Island

Editor’s Note: This is the introduction to SABR’s very first convention journal, produced for the organization’s 14th annual meeting held on July 6-8, 1984 in Providence, Rhode Island.

 

Tiny Rhode Island (40 miles long, 20 miles wide, population less than a million) has contributed more than its share to baseball lore.

• The Providence Grays were awarded a franchise in the National League in 1878, the league’s third season. The Grays won the pennant in their second year (1879), captured the league championship again in 1884, and in that same year defeated the pennant winning New York Metropolitans of the American Association, three games to none, in what is regarded as the first World Series.
• After dropping out of the National League follow ing the 1885 season, the Grays participated briefly in the Eastern League in 1886 and then spent 27 years (1891-1917) and part of another (1925) in the Inter national League and its predecessor circuits. In one of those years (1914), a 19-year-old left-handed pitcher named George Herman Ruth, then the property of the Boston Red Sox, spent a month on the Grays’ roster and won nine games and batted .300 in helping the team win the I.L. pennant. In a game at Toronto that summer, he hit his one and only minor league home run.
• Over the years teams representing Providence and two other Rhode Island cities — Pawtucket and Woonsocket — have played in other minor leagues: Providence in the Eastern League (1918-19 and 1926-30) and the New England League (1946-49); Pawtucket in the New England League (1892, 1894-99 and 1946-49), the Atlantic Association (1908), the Colonial League (1914-15), the Eastern League (1966-67 and 1970-72) and the International League (1973 to the present), and Woonsocket in the New England League (1891-92), the Atlantic Association (1908), the Colonial League (1914) and the New England League (1933).
• Three Rhode Island natives are members of the Baseball Hall of Fame: Hugh Duffy, Nap Lajoie and Gabby Hartnett. Another Hall of Farner, Frankie Frisch, spent his retirement years in the state. Still others — Charles Radbourn, Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx, to mention just a few — played for Rhode Island teams as major or minor leaguers.
• While its population is small and it is not a Sunbelt state like California or Florida, Rhode Island over the years has sent its proportional share of players to the major leagues. At this writing there are three: Davey Lopes, Billy Almon and Mike Stenhouse. (Charlie Hough was born in Hawaii but spent much of his youth in Rhode Island.) Mike Roarke of West Warwick is the St. Louis Cardinals’ pitching coach, and Johnny Goryl of Cumberland is a coach with the Cleveland Indians.
• Two of today’s most successful baseball executives are Rhode Islanders: Roland Hemond, executive vice-president and general manager of the Chicago White Sox, and Lou Gorman, vice-president of baseball operations of the Boston Red Sox.
• Pawtucket was the site of the longest game in the history of professional baseball — 33 innings between the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings of the International League, played April 18-19 and June 23, 1981. The game was suspended after 32 innings with the score tied 2-2. When it was resumed, Pawtucket quickly won, 3-2, in the thirty-third inning.

Because of their New England orientation and the proximity of Boston (an hour’s drive for most people in the state), most Rhode Islanders are Red Sox fans. But because of the state’s sizable Italian population and the Crosetti-DiMaggio-Rizzuto connection, there is a significant minority of New York Yankees rooters. This contributes to what author and SABR member Harvey Frommer has chronicled as “Baseball’s Greatest Rivalry.” With the success of the Yankees over the years, the rivalry from time to time becomes a little one-sided; indeed many Red Sox fans will admit, after some prodding, that they get a bigger kick out of seeing the Yankees lose than in seeing the Red Sox win.

The articles that follow appeared in the Providence Journal in June and July of 1928 and are reprinted with the permission of the Providence Journal Co. The author, Villiam D. “Bill” Perrin, had covered baseball and other sports in Providence for nearly half a century at the time he wrote the articles. Although the prose style may seem stodgy to today’s readers, it is typical of its era. Perrin covered the Grays for most of their minor league years and his accounts of the games were long and detailed — a treat for the baseball fan of those days who had few other sports or activities competing for his attention. Because of the wealth of detail they contain, the stories by Perrin and his contemporaries have proved a boon to SABR members sifting through newspaper microfilm in search of information.

 

Click on the image below to download the PDF edition of Days of Greatness: Providence Baseball, 1875-1885, published by SABR in 1984.