About
Edward Achorn, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Distinguished Commentary, is the deputy editorial pages editor of The Providence Journal. He has won numerous writing awards and his work appears in Best Newspaper Writing, 2007-2008.
Achorn’s “must read” weekly columns often touch on baseball, which he considers the best game ever invented, but usually center on the weird and contentious politics of Rhode Island. He inspired revolutionary change in the state’s Constitution, championing an amendment that balanced power and put an end to a 340-year legacy of inordinate control by the legislature. Pulitzer judges cited his “clear, tenacious call to action against government corruption in Rhode Island,” while Common Cause Rhode Island declared: “Ed Achorn’s clear trumpet turned the tide in this historic battle.”
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News
Radbourn’s immortal season July 28, 1884: Did Old Hoss win?
(A daily diary of the greatest season a major-league pitcher ever had.)
PHILADELPHIA – The Providence Grays beat the Phillies, 11-4, in a game most notable for igniting a controversy a century later among baseball historians and statistics freaks.
Cyclone Miller, who starts it, is once again found wanting, and...
Hollywood goes for “Fifty-nine in ’84”
Kirker Butler, a co-executive producer and writer on Fox series “The Cleveland Show,” has optioned movie rights to Edward Achorn’s “Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had,” the Hollywood Reporter reveals.
“Butler said he’s not a baseball buff, just a fan of...
Rave reviews greet Fifty-nine in ’84
The first round of reviews are in for Fifty-nine in ’84 and the vote is unanimous! Here’s a sampling:
Los Angeles Times: “It’s the vibrancy of his story that resonates, the sense of Radbourn and these others not as historical figures but as human beings. The game they played was brutal,...
Boston Globe: Fifty-nine in ’84 a top Father’s Day gift!
Boston Globe book critic Kathleen A. Powers says Edward Achorn’s “Fifty-nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had” would be on her Father’s Day wish list if she were a dad.
She writes in The Sunday Globe: “Achorn has dug deep into newspaper...
Radbourn’s hometown paper hails Fifty-nine in ’84 for giving great pitcher his due
The Bloomington (Ill.) Pantagraph, the first newspaper to report on Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn’s pitching feats, covered Edward Achorn’s acclaimed biography of the man, Fifty-nine in ’84, in a Sunday news story.
The paper reported: “The book is getting great reviews across America. They are so good, in fact, it may...
Old Hoss likes his new ‘unauthorized biography’
Twitter legend @oldhossradbourn, who has attracted thousands of followers by pretending to be Hall of Fame pitcher Old Hoss Radbourn, thinks Edward Achorn’s “Fifty-nine in ’84” is a great read about “my favorite subject: me.”
“Achorn writes vividly, and a great strength of the book is that one is near transported...
