Hardy Richardson

Hardy Richardson could play anywhere on a baseball field and hit at the top of any lineup, one of the most versatile and productive players of the 1880s. Known as Old True Blue, he was a cornerstone of two strong teams, the Buffalo Bisons and the Detroit Wolverines, and one quarter of the famous Big Four whose sale shook the sport. He led the National League in both hits and home runs in 1886, a rare double, and helped power Detroit to a championship the next year. He moved between second base and the outfield without losing a step at either, a .299 hitter across his whole career. The Big Four are remembered as a unit, and Richardson, the least famous of them, may have been the most useful.

Old True Blue

Richardson was born Abram Harding Richardson on April 21, 1855, in Clarksboro, New Jersey, and reached the National League with the Buffalo Bisons in 1879. They called him Hardy, a shortening of his middle name, and Old True Blue for his steadiness and loyalty, and he earned both across a long, dependable career. He could handle nearly any position, spending most of his time between second base and left field but filling in wherever a team needed him. He hit too, with a line drive stroke and surprising power for the era, and he ran the bases well. Buffalo had found a player who did everything and complained about nothing.

The Big Four

Buffalo's lineup of the early 1880s carried four stars so good that their sale became one of the most famous transactions of the century. Richardson, the slugger Dan Brouthers, the veteran Deacon White, and the catcher Jack Rowe were the Big Four, the heart of the Bisons, and in 1885 the Detroit Wolverines bought the entire Buffalo franchise, reportedly for a then unheard of sum, just to get them. The four moved together to Detroit for the 1886 season and turned a good team into a great one. Contemporaries called them the finest quartette the game had yet seen. For Richardson it was the move that lifted him onto a champion.

Detroit's Champions

With the Big Four aboard, Detroit became the best team in baseball, and in 1887 the Wolverines won the National League pennant and then the championship of the world. They beat the American Association's St. Louis Browns in a sprawling fifteen game postseason series played across ten cities, ten wins to five, the high point of Detroit's brief baseball glory. Richardson hit in the middle of a lineup that also held Sam Thompson and the catcher Charlie Bennett, as deep an order as the era produced. The Wolverines burned bright and folded fast, gone within two years, but the 1887 champions rank among the great teams of the nineteenth century. Richardson had reached the top, and he'd been central to getting there.

The 1886 Season

Richardson's best individual year came in 1886, his first in Detroit, when he led the National League in both hits and home runs, a combination almost no one pulls off. He rapped out 189 hits and clubbed 11 home runs, a big total for the era, while batting .351, one of the finest all around offensive seasons of the decade. Leading a league in hits speaks to consistency and leading it in home runs to power, and doing both at once marked Richardson as a complete hitter, not just a useful one. It was the season that should have made him a star for the ages. Instead it became a footnote, the way so much of his career did.

The Versatile Star

What set Richardson apart over the long haul was that he could do anything and did. He played more than 500 games at second base and more than 500 in the outfield, with stretches at third base besides, a genuine all purpose player decades before the term existed. He finished with a career batting average of .299 and roughly 1,690 hits, numbers that stand up well for a middle infielder of his time, and he reached base and ran well on top of it. Bill James, ranking the second basemen of history a century later, placed him among the top forty ever. The versatility was its own kind of value, a player a manager could move anywhere and trust everywhere.

The Brotherhood Year

When the players revolted and formed their own league in 1890, Richardson went with them, and at 35 he turned in one of his best seasons. He hit .326 for the Boston Reds, the Players League champions, and led the new league in runs batted in, proof that Old True Blue had plenty left. The Players League lasted only that one year before the owners crushed it, and Richardson, like most of the rebels, drifted back to the established leagues for a final season or two. The 1890 campaign showed he was no spent force, though, a veteran star carrying a champion deep into his thirties. It was the last great year of a long and useful career.

Utica

Richardson played his last major league games in 1892 and went home to make a quieter living, settling in Utica, New York, the same city where George Gore would end his days. He worked at the trades a former ballplayer could find, kept a few other interests, and wrote some baseball reminiscences for the newspapers as the old days receded. He died in Utica on January 14, 1931, at 75, three of the Big Four gone before the fourth. Brouthers and White reached Cooperstown in time, but Richardson and Rowe were left outside, the overlooked halves of a famous quartet. The most versatile of the four had become the easiest to forget.