 |
|||||||||
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Arthur Irwin, Shortstop
Arthur Irwin was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1858. His family moved to Boston when he was fifteen, and he immediately began playing amateur ball. He came to the majors as a smooth-fielding, weak-hitting shortstop with Worcester in 1880. When Providence acquired him before the 1883 season, he was the last major piece in the championship puzzle. According to the magazine Sporting Life, his "daring and almost reckless baserunning" made him "a favorite of the Providence people." Irwin broke a finger during the 1885 season, and developed a padded fielding glove, believed to be the first in the league except for catchers and first basemen. Irwin was not a dominant player on the 1884 Grays, but he definitely contributed. On June 16, he hit three singles to celebrate the birth of his 11-ounce baby boy. On July 12, he was reported to be the only Gray on the field to "care much whether or not they won" in an ugly loss to Boston. On July 18, with a spare pitcher on the mound, Irwin "was kept busily engaged in capturing ground hits and making his splendid line throws, and his work was remarkably fine and evoked enthusiastic applause." He was the hero of a very important August 9 game versus the hated Boston team, breaking a scoreless tie in the eleventh inning with a home run through a small hole near the top of the right field fence. The next week, on August 15, he "ruptured a small blood vessel" while sliding home, and missed most of the games through early September. This didn't slow down the Grays much, as they were in the midst of their record 20-game winning streak. At the year's end, Irwin had hit a soft .240 as the starting shortstop for the Grays, but hit .300 in the three-game world series that year. Irwin's career as a player fizzled out within a few years, but he became a player-manager in 1889, and led two teams to championships: the 1890 Boston Players League team (featuring Hoss Radbourn), and the 1891 Boston American Association team (featuring Paul Radford at shortstop). He was thus the only one of the 1884 Grays to play on three league champs. His managing career continued through 1899. He also wrote an instructional manual called Practical Ball Playing (1895), coached in the first professional FOOTBALL league, coached for the University of Pennsylvania, scouted for the early New York Yankees, and owned several minor league teams. Irwin also apparently put his brilliant mind to work in his private life, and was reported to have kept wives and children in both Boston and New York that had no idea of each other's existence for thirty years. Finally, either because of illness or because the strain of deception was too great, he disappeared from a passenger steamship, the Calvin Austin, en route from New York to Boston, and supposedly committed suicide on July 16, 1921. His body was never found, and for all we know, he could have staged the whole thing. copyright Rick Stattler 2002 |
|
