YOU CAN READ all you want about major-league baseball in the early days. But you get more of a sense of it standing in the outfield at McCoy Stadium on a blistering hot Sunday morning listening to the zip and smack of a hard baseball slapping the bare hands of Gil Faria during his warm-up tosses.

“You get used to it,” he says with a smile.

“Man, I’ll pass,” says a member of the Pawtucket Red Sox, shaking his head as he watches from the dug-out.

Mr. Faria, who has a five-o’clock shadow by 11 a.m., is the shy but gritty catcher for the Providence Grays Vintage Base Ball Club, a nonprofit organization engaged in a remarkable project, bringing back to life a fascinating part of America’s Gilded Age.

From 1878 through 1885, the booming industrial capital of Rhode Island hosted one of the best teams in baseball history: the Providence Grays of the National League. The original Grays won pennants in 1879 and 1884 — and in the latter year, captured baseball’s first World Series, sweeping the New York Metropolitans.

For the last decade, a hardy band of local men has been giving local fans a flavor of major-league baseball in that age by dressing up in replica gray uniforms trimmed with sky blue, authentically made of wool (“Hot as hell,” shortstop Mike Duggan observes), and playing ball under 1884 National League rules, with 1884 equipment.

That means playing barehanded — all but the catcher, who works during the game with modified hand gloves. It means using exact replicas of a big, heavy 1880s bat stamped with the name Burlingame. The original was produced in Providence at a woodshop on 41 Harrison St., not far from the original ball park on Messer Street.

It means risking injuries.

When I asked Mr. Duggan what it was like to play ball under 1884 rules, he held up an inflamed, swollen finger. “There you go,” he said. “That’s from yesterday.”

First baseman Ben “Spike” Burbank of the Rhode Island Game Hens, the vintage team that battled the Grays at McCoy on June 8, pointed to a teammate. “This guy was hit by a line drive at second base. You would have gotten a nice shot. Blood was spurting,” he said.

With no deep-pocketed glove to hide their sins, fielders have to focus intensely on catching the ball, and — if infielders — returning it to the first baseman with great accuracy since he, too, has to catch it barehanded.

“I’m basically a goalie half the time,” said Grays first baseman Brian Travers, a math professor at Salem State College. “Sometimes they’re right on target. Other times I go home all bruised.”

He showed me one of his hands, with three crooked digits from broken bones and ligament damage.

“I’d make a glove out of cardboard,” PawSox pitcher Devern Hansack offered when he saw the Grays playing barehanded.

Mr. Hansack, who grew up in Nicaragua, where children often played ball with handmade equipment, disappeared into the clubhouse and returned with a “glove” cut out of corrugated cardboard, slapping the replica ball into it with a laugh.

What was it like for pitchers in the 1880s?

They slaved like the old horses that lugged wagons and carriages before the internal-combustion engine. Indeed, the name of the Grays pitcher who turned in the greatest season in history, winning 60 games in 1884, was “Old Hoss” Radbourn. Pitching three times more innings than today’s hardiest pitchers, he hurt his arm so much that he could not lift it above his waist every morning. Until he warmed up, he could not even get the ball from the pitcher’s box to the catcher.

“The fact that he couldn’t even reach the catcher from 20 feet away until he was 10 to 20 pitches in, shows his arm was basically destroyed,” said Mr. Travers, who tore his own rotator cuff throwing too many innings of vintage ball. “Who knows what he was on.”

The Old Hoss’s brother claimed he was on a quart of whiskey a day.

The 1884 baseball, while hard, was “deader” than the modern version, with a rubber rather than cork center, harder to drive for distance. Men of the time thus used heavy bats — war clubs, compared with the easily shattered whips that modern hitters use — to get force behind the ball. The PawSox players laughed in astonishment when they saw them.

The name of the game was slashing at the ball, making contact, since any ball in play in a barehanded game was one that could be fumbled. Runners were more aggressive in the 1880s, since they had better odds of taking extra bases from fielders who wore no gloves. While the 1884 game is still recognizably baseball, it seems a fast, hard game for tough men who had to scrap for everything they got. In that way, it perfectly reflects America in the Gilded Age.

For all their dedication, the vintage Grays cannot duplicate, of course, what the game would be like if played by professionals — extraordinarily gifted athletes who can run faster, throw harder and hit better than the vast majority of people.

Standing in the PawSox dugout with Tim Norton, the avuncular founder of the vintage Grays, I mused that it might be fun seeing modern professionals play under 1884 rules just once.

“Their agents would never allow it,” he said.

Too dangerous.

Edward Achorn is The Journal’s deputy editorial-pages editor.