Current Reading: Fifty-nine in '84

 

John Williams, in the Times, has an article, 5 Books to Celebrate Baseball's Return. I decided to start reading one of those books: Fifty-nine in '84 by Edward Achorn. Williams describes the book in these two sentences.

Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn won 59 games for the Providence Grays in 1884, a record that will almost certainly never be broken. This book recounts that grueling feat and the history of the sport in the decades after the Civil War.

I am reminded, over and over, just how different life in Providence, Rhode Island in the late nineteenth century was from the world I live in now. People worked in dirtier jobs, they got sweaty, and they left the long work day exhausted. Baseball was a chance to forget about the work day.

Here is one section of Achorn's book I liked enough to highlight. I associate hot dogs and baseball games, but the two did not always go together.

The classic ballpark frank was still several years away, though the great American journalist H. L. Mencken distinctly remembered something like hot dogs being sold at home games of Baltimore's Orioles during the 1880s. "They contained precisely the same rubbery, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby puerile mustard," Mencken wrote. "Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact." The busy vendors boosted ballpark profits but irritated baseball lovers. They perpetually drowned out the umpire with their shouts, making it impossible to figure out the count of balls and strikes on the batter; or blocked a spectator's view while waiting for a customer to swig his beverage and return the glass.