Interesting facts about Pre-War Players - share yours

[Rad_Hazard]

Paul Hines achieved the first Triple Crown in baseball history.

Excerpt from Fifty-Nine in '84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had by Edward Achorn:

Hines was a notorious character. Vain, competitive, and poorly educated, he was so deaf that he needed to hold a brass trumpet to his ear to hear what others were saying, and he often talked out loud to himself, as if such a conversation were as natural as any other. At one point that season, when umpire Billy McLean warned him that he would be fined if he kept sassing umpires in his audible monologues, Hines grumbled to himself, “If me was out of debt, me would not play ball another day.” He liked to boast to his teammates that he had been raised in an affluent Washington family, but when one actually looked up Hines’s “good Hibernian parents” one day, he was shocked to learn they lived in a shanty.

His honesty was suspect in other ways, too. Once he stole another man’s prized buckskin baseball shoes, and when the man asked Hines if he had seen them, he got no answer. “Paul is very deaf when he wants to be, and the shoes were carried off,” a Cleveland Herald reporter recounted. The next time Hines played against the man’s team, he did not dare to wear the stolen shoes, and went out on the field in his street shoes. Hines cost his team the game by slipping, trying to field a fly ball that soared over his head, prompting his manager to fine him for his poor performance—more than the stolen shoes were worth. On another occasion, a reporter had deposited at a hotel front desk his official score of a game, for use by a fellow newspaperman. Upon returning, “I found Paul at work on it, with a carpenter’s pencil as thick as a club, changing his single hit into two. He was at once so deaf as to be unable to hear my admonition against any future trick of the kind.” Even without the benefit of fraudulent scoring, he was a great hitter, and had twice led the National League in batting.