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Since the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota in 1961, the team has boasted many stars, including several of the greatest players in the game. Minnesotans have embraced these players differently, highlighting the changing nature of our complicated relationship with our sports heroes.

When the Senators moved from Washington to Minnesota in 1961 the roster that became the Twins included an incredible combination of young, established stars and MLB-ready prospects. Harmon Killebrew was already one of baseball’s elite sluggers at age 24, catcher Earl Battey and right fielder Bob Allison were among their respective positions’ top players at […]

When Brandon Nimmo took his position in right field on September 26, 2018, in a game at Citi Field, he was wearing his usual number nine and would bat ninth in the batting order. It seemed to me that this was an interesting confluence of facts: a player whose uniform number matches his fielding position […]

After a World Series appearance in 1965 and finishing second to the Baltimore Orioles in 1966, there were many reasons to believe the Minnesota Twins had a good shot at the American League pennant in 1967. Decades later, this remains one of baseball greatest and most historic pennant races. On September 30, 1967, a Saturday […]

INTRODUCTION This article reports on MLB “played-with” relationships for the time period 1930 through 2016. We define player A as having played-with player B if the two appeared in the same major league game for the same team. This doesn’t necessarily mean both players stood on the field at the same time. We also include cases where […]

Power-Plus and Thunder and Lightning are just two of the names given to a select group of players who are capable of generating offense via the home run or the stolen base. A great emphasis has been placed on this dual prowess in recent years. For a single season there is the 30 home run […]

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 […]

Now that Henry Aaron has closed out his illustrious career and there is no home run hitter of note around to challenge his record, it is a good time to sum up his contributions in the context of an over-all home run review. As practically every baseball fan knows, Aaron closed out with 755 roundtrippers. […]

A quarter century has passed since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball. His appearance in a Brooklyn Dodger lineup in 1947 and the outstanding performance which he gave also opened, the door wider for players from Latin America, who previously had never appeared in significant numbers. The Society for American Baseball […]

ORIGINAL BULLPEN PLACE FOR FRUGAL FANS THE TERM “BULLPEN” IS generally believed to have come into baseball with the advent of relief pitchers who usually warmed up in the area where Bull Durham signs were located. The term, however, goes all the way back to the beginning of major league baseball itself, and its original […]

Merle Harmon interviews Herb Score. The 1955 American League Rookie of the Year winner later joined the baseball broadcasting fraternity after his career ended prematurely. (COURTESY OF MERLE HARMON)   He was a sports broadcaster and former college football player from the Midwest. Tall and gray­ haired, he sported a crooked nose as a football […]

Most modern-day fans see a close connection between large numbers of home runs and equally impressive runs-batted-in figures in a given season. There are certainly sound reasons for this perception, based both in the ancient rules (a four-base hit scores all runners ahead of the batter) and six decades’ evidence parading Ruth, Gehrig, and their […]

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 […]

There are two main objectives for the hitter.  The first is to not make an out and the second is to hit for distance. Long-ball hitting is normally measured by slugging average. Not making an out can be expressed in terms of on base average (OBA), where:       OBA    =  Hits + Walks […]

This spring, baseball attention will be focused on Henry Aaron as he strives to reach and pass that magic number in the home run summit of fame — 714.   There is another historic home run number that is being approached and soon some one will be achieving that milestone.   That will be the 100th home […]

The odds on the Boston Red Sox winning the 1967 American League pennant were 100-1 at the beginning of the season. But when they completed the Impossible Dream, it was “Pandemonium on the field!”The Boston Red Sox embarked on their 1967 season with a five-man rotation that had collectively won only 25 major league games […]

There is no shortage of arguments either for or against Keith Hernandez’s enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. I have no horse in this race. I am not a rabid Mets fan, and I did not know much about Hernandez prior to this project. I was aware he played an important role for the 1986 […]

In 100 years of major league’ baseball, there have been nearly 117,000 home runs hit in regulation games. Less than 2 percent of these, or 2150, have been hit in extra innings. Yet, these overtime homers have been very important. About 90-95% of the time they provide the winning margin. In 1975, for example, there […]

Named to the 1964 National League All-Star Game roster as a reserve outfielder, Johnny Callison wound up as the game’s hero, hitting a dramatic walk-off three-run homer with two outs in the ninth inning to give the NL a 7-4 victory.Named to the 1964 National League All-Star Game roster as a reserve outfielder, Johnny Callison […]

In 1967, Carl Yastrezemski wasn’t just the sparkplug for the Boston Red Sox with his hitting and his fielding. He also posted some stats that no one matched for 45 years, winning the last Triple Crown in Major League Baseball until Miguel Cabrera in 2012. “And if I have my choice between a pennant and […]

Introduction and History I have taught or co-taught sabermetrics in the mathematics department at the United States Military Academy several times. We covered all the metrics but what always interested me most was the direction student projects took to solve or analyze various issues in baseball. In one of these courses, for example, the group […]

On October 14, 1965, the Minnesota Twins lost a heartbreaking World Series Game Seven to Sandy Koufax and the Los Angeles Dodgers, 2–0. While the disappointment was palpable, there was every reason to believe the Twins would soon be back in the Series. The team had won the pennant convincingly with a record of 102-60, […]

When Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers slugger and baseball’s first Jewish superstar, decided to sit out a game in the midst of the 1934 pennant race because it fell on the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar, Edgar Guest penned a poem to mark the occasion. Guest ended his tribute, “Speaking of Greenberg,” which […]

Few single-game achievements are as highly-regarded as the cycle: “A single, double, triple, and home run (not necessarily in that order) hit by a player in the same game.”1 Since 1876, there have been 344 documented regular-season cycles in the history of major league baseball (excluding the Negro Leagues).2 Table 1 breaks down the players […]