238. "Old Hoss" 7" x 10.5"

Size: 7 × 10.5 inches art print (not a comic book) Availability: Pre-order ends Sunday, March 22nd at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET Shipping: Expected to ship approximately 40–60 days after the purchase window closes. Estimated timeframe. Not guaranteed. From the Artist: CHARLES “OLD HOSS” RADBOURN: FIFTY-NINE IN EIGHTY-FOUR Every so often you come across a baseball number that makes you pause for a second. Fifty-nine wins. That’s not a misprint. That’s not a quirky stat from a small sample size. That’s fifty-nine actual games won by one pitcher in a single season. The pitcher was Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn of the Providence Grays, and the year was 1884. Baseball looked very different then. Teams relied heavily on one arm, schedules were relentless, and the idea of a “pitch count” would have sounded like science fiction. Still, even in that rugged era, what Radbourn did bordered on the unbelievable. Providence handed him the ball over and over again, and he kept winning. By the time the season finally came to an end he had thrown an astonishing 678 innings and carried the Grays all the way to the championship. No one has ever come close to matching it. And Radbourn himself was exactly the kind of personality you might imagine behind a season like that : fiercely competitive, stubborn, a little combative, and not particularly interested in pleasing anyone who happened to be standing in his way. If you look closely at the corners of this piece, you might notice a small nod to Radbourn’s personality... and to a rather unusual distinction he holds outside the game Baseball history is full of great numbers. But fifty-nine wins in one season remains one of the strangest and most remarkable of them all.