The Best Second Baseman of the 19th Century

I understand that we’re now more than a full century removed from the 19th century, and no one reading this was alive within even 30 or 40 years or so of that time period, but we’re traveling back there today anyway. It’s important to do that from time to time, just to remind us how the game began, and the road we traveled to get where we are now.

The game looked entirely different for most of those years. Things we take as staples of the game now - the number of balls needed for a walk, the distance from home to the mound, the existence of catcher’s masks, and so on - we still evolving then. There’s no way we can make a fair comparison of the pitcher from 1885 to a pitcher in 2025, for instance, because there have too many changes to those basic things. They were playing by entirely different rules, so many that it nearly wasn’t the same sport.

The Chicago White Stockings played 113 games in 1885 and John Clarkson was the starting pitcher in 70 of them. He completed 68 of them, and won 53, while throwing over 600 innings. He did this while standing 56 feet from home plate, and throwing overhand for the first time to hitters whose bats could be flat on one side. Someone like Nick Pivetta or Jesús Luzardo can be pretty happy with the first month of their 2025 campaign, but they simply ain’t gonna do well if they are measured on the John Clarkson Scale.