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Journal Articles
1981 Winter Meetings: The Post-Strike Intrigue of Kuhn, Smith, and Templeton
Introduction and Context The disquieting year of 1981 featured the worst upheaval in baseball history — to that point in time — due to a players strike that erased roughly one-third of the regular-season schedule. Play was halted on June 12, and after weeks of acrimonious negotiations between players, club owners, and their respective representatives, […]
Stan Hack: Leadoff Batter Extraordinaire
Ross Barnes was the first principal leadoff batter (PLB) for the Chicago National League club. A PLB is defined as the player who is a team’s game-starting leadoff batter for the most games in a given season, and Barnes was at the top of the lineup for all 66 games Chicago played in the […]
Quasi-Cycles — Better than Cycles?
One of baseball’s most highly-regarded accomplishments by an individual player is hitting for the cycle: collecting at least one of each of the four types of safe hits (single, double, triple, and home run) in the same game. While recognized as a rare and remarkable feat, the cycle has been achieved 286 times during the […]
Handy in a Pinch: Dave Philley
Fans of the 1958 Philadelphia Phillies had little to cheer about at the end of a rather dismal season. When the final standings were posted, the club was firmly planted dead last in the National League. One bright note was the team’s pinch-hitting performance: It led both major leagues with an impressive batting average of […]
Scoreboard Numbers vs. Uniform Numbers: The 1931–34 Detroit Tigers and the Letter of the Law
Who’s the batter? Nowadays, fans attending a Detroit Tigers game at Comerica Park can just look at the player—his name and assigned number are on the back of his uniform, and his name is displayed prominently on a huge scoreboard. However, a hundred years or so ago, Tigers fans attending a baseball game at Navin […]
Using Z-Scores to Measure Player Performance
In recent years, statistics have been developed to facilitate comparisons of player performances across seasons and across generations. One such statistic, OPS+, places a players’ OPS (on-base plus slugging) into the context of the league’s OPS, adjusted by a park factor. An .800 OPS in a pitcher’s year such as 1968 results in a higher […]
Stolen Victories: Daring Dashes That Send the Fans Home Happy
The slugger stands at the plate in the bottom of the ninth, the score tied. The crowd rises in anticipation. The windup. The pitch and…there it goes! We’ve all seen them. Game-ending or “walk-off” home runs are shown on SportsCenter almost every night and many fans consider them to be among the most exciting plays […]
Winter Leagues: Dominican Real Fan and Talent Hotbed
Tony Pena sat alone on the top of the dugout steps, his legs sprawled in front of him. He tucked the gold chains around his neck under his jersey and fastened the clasps on his shinguards. After staring at the dirt for a moment, Pena snapped to his feet. Peering into the dugout, he smiled […]
Of Black Sox, Ball Yards, and Monty Stratton: Chicago Baseball Movies
Once upon a time, A.J. Liebling, consummate Manhattanite and writer for The New Yorker, dubbed Chicago America’s Second City.1 But in relation to New York-centric baseball movies, this AAA-league rating is extremely generous. Across the decades, baseball films with Chicago references have been relatively scarce. For every on-screen image of Wrigley Field, there are scores […]
Mike Piazza By the Numbers: The Hall of Fame Case
On September 12, 1992, in the fifth inning of a game between the Dodgers and the Giants at Dodger Stadium, Michael Joseph Piazza hit his first major league home run and his road to the catcher career home-run record began.1 This first four-bagger was a hard shot to right center with men on second and […]
Player Win Averages (1946-2015)
After the 1970 season, two brothers, Eldon and Harlan Mills, unveiled a new approach to baseball statistics: Player Win Averages. Eldon was a retired Air Force colonel and an expert in computer programming and data processing, while Harlan was a professor and mathematics consultant to IBM. What they did was develop a model for calculating […]
Miracle on Beech Street: A History of the Holyoke Millers, 1977–82
Once a very sparsely settled farming community, Holyoke, Massachusetts’s geographic location on the banks of the Connecticut River was ideal for development, utilizing its ample source of hydroelectric power.1 A group of four wealthy executives from Boston, about 90 miles to the east, believed the South Hadley Falls of the river was large and powerful […]
1967 Red Sox: Scouting the opposition with Frank Malzone
Before the Boston Red Sox faced the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, they sent Frank Malzone, a former All-Star infielder, to scout the opposition. “It was a great thing the club did in assigning Malzone to scout the Cardinals. He knows just what to look for, and for me it was just great. He […]
Yankee Stadium on Film
The Detective (1968), starring Frank Sinatra and Lee Remick, featured Yankee Stadium transformed into a football field. (20th Century Fox) “Baseball stadiums are never only about baseball. Their utility is both more dynamic and more poetic.”1 Some landmarks are so burned into our collective mind’s eye that their image tells the story of their […]
Intentional Bases on Balls:The First 25 Seasons
The intentional base on balls was a part of professional baseball long before it became a part of baseball’s official statistics. The Sporting News’s Baseball Record Book lists Napoleon Lajoie of the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League as the first player to receive an intentional walk with the bases full, in the ninth inning […]
Supplement to “Lou Gehrig’s RBI Record: 1923–39”
Here is supporting evidence for the correction of errors in the official RBI record of Lou Gehrig through 1939.
How Bostonians Became the Beaneaters
Most baseball fans, and nonfans for that matter, would consider Beaneaters to be among the most interesting major-league team nicknames with longevity (i.e., multiyear usage as opposed to short-term fad). In 1883 the Boston NL team became unofficially recognized by various sportswriters as the Beaneaters, though like most major-league teams they were generally referred to […]
Diamond Stars: Was Rickey Henderson Born to Steal?
This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1987 (Vol. 6, No. 1). Jiminy Christmas! By the great heavenly stars! Was Rickey Henderson born to steal bases? You bet your sweet ephemeris he was. Henderson was born Christmas Day 1958, a good day to be born if you want to grow […]
The Three Broadcast Amigos: Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner
Lindsey Nelson and Bob Murphy are together on the wall in Cooperstown that honors all recipients of the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting greatness. Between Murphy and Nelson is Bob Wolff, who was considered for the inaugural Mets booth. (Courtesy of MetSilverman.com) The New York Mets were born in sin, cleansed by pain, […]
Fact vs. Fiction: An Analysis of Baseball in Films
Baseball is great theatre. Indeed, baseball stories have been fodder for Hollywood since the era of silent films, both dramatic and comedic. But baseball biographies in movies and TV-movies often sacrifice facts to move the story forward at a watchable pace, increase drama, or provide comic relief. For a sport whose patrons guard its history […]
Relief Pitching Strategy: Past, Present, and Future?
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for Our Hero. After a dozen years in the majors with some success, he was coming off a subpar year and had just been traded for three minor leaguers, who would remain so. Little did he know that along with his manager, he would change the way baseball was played. He […]