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Rucker Archives
Journal Articles
John McGraw and Pennant Park
As perhaps the greatest of all baseball managers, John J. McGraw had proven himself to be a genius at evaluating talent and developing his teams into commercially successful ventures. He even had some success in off-the-field investments, but he got in over his head when he chose to sponsor a large-scale Florida land […]
Will The Real Rabbi Of Swat Please Stand Up?
The cult-inducing slugger failed with the Giants, but not for reasons previously reported. Nor did he go by the name in the Baseball Encyclopedia. Herewith the facts. HIS STORY WAS THE STUFF of legends. His name was Mose Solomon. He hit 49 home runs in Hutchinson, Kansas, of the Southwest League in 1923 – and […]
Mike Donlin, Movie Actor
Scores of professional ballplayers have made their way from the big leagues to the big screen. A few, including Chuck Connors, Bob Uecker, and John Beradino (who played for the Browns, Indians, and Pirates as Johnny Berardino), became successful actors or media personalities. Some, notably Babe Ruth, appeared in movies as themselves, or as thinly […]
Eddie Brannick
John Drebinger once wrote of Eddie Brannick, “He has legions of friends, remembers the birthdays of many of then, yet once couldn’t recall the date of his own. A gourmet of rare taste, he knows how and where to dine and will order a meal of excellence only to touch scarcely any of it because […]
The Great Philadelphia Ballpark Riot
The Phillies and their fans hated New York Giants manager John McGraw. This fact must be clearly understood if readers are to truly appreciate the story that follows. Nicknamed “Muggsy” and “Little Napoleon,” John McGraw was an easy man to detest. Sportswriter Grantland Rice observed, “There were many who hated John McGraw and to many […]
Ralph Glaze: They Called Him ‘Pitcher’
An All-American on the gridiron in 1905, Ralph Glaze spent three seasons in the majors before launching a 21-year career as a college baseball and football coach and athletic director. In 1889 Walter Chauncey Camp (1859-1925) initiated the practice of honoring the best college football players of each season by naming them to an […]
Four Teams Out: The National League Reduction of 1900
This article was originally published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 19 (1990). Phoenix, Denver, Tampa, Washington, perhaps a dozen cities are all hoping to be tapped by major-league baseball’s magic wand and be initiated into the fraternities of American and National League clubs. Expansion has been a topic of discussion for at least […]
1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York
Nineteen twenty-one was a remarkable baseball season, one that signaled that a seismic shift in how the game was played was underway. Baseball was moving from low-scoring contests dominated by pitching to a power game with more hits, runs, and home runs. It was the year that New York City rose to the top of […]
The Merkle Blunder: A Kaleidoscopic View
On September 23, 1908, as I wrote in The Unforgettable Season, “the Giants and Cubs played the most celebrated, most widely discussed, most controversial contest in the history of American sports. The game was declared a 1 to 1 tie.” This was, of course, the game of the “Merkle blunder.” As Kurosawa’s film masterpiece Rashomon beautifully illustrated, the same event may be […]