Paul Hines

Paul Hines won baseball's first Triple Crown and almost no one noticed, which is the story of his career in miniature. In 1878, playing center field for the Providence Grays, he led the National League in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in, a feat the game would not name or fully credit until long after he was dead. He hit .302 across twenty seasons, won back to back batting titles, and made one of the most famous and most disputed defensive plays in the sport's history. Deaf for much of his life and quiet by nature, he did his work without fanfare and slipped out of memory when it ended. He stands as the first Triple Crown winner and one of the most overlooked stars the game has produced.

From Virginia to the Major Leagues

Hines was born on March 1, 1855, in Virginia, a few miles outside Washington by the best accounts the records allow, since the documents of his early life are thin. He broke into professional baseball as a teenager with a Washington club in the National Association in 1872, four years before the National League existed, and he was there at the new league's founding in 1876 with the Chicago White Stockings. In 1878 he moved to the Providence Grays, and the move made him. Over the next eight seasons in Providence he became one of the finest hitters and center fielders in the game. The quiet Virginian had found his stage.

The First Triple Crown

In his first season with Providence, Hines did something no player had done before, leading the National League in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in all at once. He hit .358 with four home runs and 50 runs driven in, the first Triple Crown in the history of the major leagues. Hardly anyone knew it. Runs batted in were not yet a counted statistic, four home runs drew no particular notice, and the league of the day credited a different man, Abner Dalrymple, as its batting champion. Only decades later, when researchers went back and recompiled the numbers, did the full sweep of Hines's 1878 come into view, and the first Triple Crown finally got a name attached to it.

Two Straight Batting Titles

Hines was no one year wonder, and he proved it the very next season. He led the National League in batting again in 1879, hitting .357, which gave him back to back batting crowns at the height of his powers. He was a line drive hitter with surprising pop for the era, a center fielder who anchored the Providence lineup through its best years, including the pennant winners of 1879 and 1884. The 1884 Grays went on to beat the American Association champions in an early version of a World Series, with Hines in the middle of it. For a stretch around 1880 there was no better all around hitter in the National League.

The Disputed Triple Play

On May 8, 1878, Hines made a play that historians have argued about ever since. With Boston runners on second and third and a soft liner dropping in front of him, he charged from center field, made a shoestring catch, and kept going to third base, and a moment later the third out was recorded at second. For years the play was celebrated as the first unassisted triple play in major league history, one man retiring three runners alone. The trouble is that his own teammates disputed it. Providence's second baseman insisted he had taken a throw to complete the play, and one of the Boston runners said he was nowhere near third when the catch was made, which would have made the throw necessary. The baseball research society lists the play as unassisted, the major leagues do not, and the truth has stayed just out of reach for nearly a hundred and fifty years.

Twenty Years in Center Field

Hines lasted, which in his era was its own kind of greatness. He played twenty seasons across three major leagues, the National Association, the National League, and the American Association, from 1872 into the 1890s, and he finished with a .302 average and more than 2,100 hits. He moved on from Providence to Washington, Indianapolis, and other clubs as his career wound down, a professional hitter long after his peak. Durability and consistency were his trademarks, the steady accumulation of a man who came to play every day. By the time he stopped, few hitters of the nineteenth century had piled up more.

The Silent Years

Hines went deaf during his playing days, the exact cause lost to time, and the silence deepened as he aged. After baseball he took a clerk's job with the Department of Agriculture in Washington and lived out a long, obscure life in the capital, far from the diamonds where he had starred. In 1922, an old and nearly forgotten man, he was arrested on a pickpocketing charge that a sympathetic police official blamed on the confusions of age. He spent his final years in a Maryland home, deaf and failing, and died in 1935 at 80. The first Triple Crown winner left the world almost as quietly as he had moved through it.

Credit at Last

The recognition Hines never got in life has come, in pieces, since his death. Researchers digging through the old box scores restored his 1878 Triple Crown, the first the game ever produced, and his name now opens the long list of Triple Crown winners that runs through Cobb and Williams and beyond. He stands among the most accomplished nineteenth century players the Hall of Fame has yet to call, a .302 hitter with two batting titles and a historic first to his name. His case asks voters to value a kind of greatness that needs a footnote to explain. The man who won the first Triple Crown holds his place at the head of that list, whatever Cooperstown decides.