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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 […]

The 2010 draft was broadcast nationally in prime time, the third year in a row that Major League Baseball had put its draft on TV. Its top talent, Las Vegas sensation Bryce Harper, was on the cover of Sports Illustrated when he was just sixteen. As that draft approached, the star of the 2009 draft, […]

In anticipation of hosting SABR 40, the Magnolia Chapter has selected an All-Time Georgia-born All-Star team. Any major-league player born in the state of Georgia was theoretically eligible; no residency requirement was stipulated. In order to make the process more efficient, the author screened the master list of players to eliminate most “cup of coffee” […]

The St. Louis Browns’ American League (AL) Championship in 1944 was followed by a 1945 campaign best remembered for one-armed Pete Gray and a late season pennant rush which seemed unlikely as late as August. The surprise Cinderella pennant winners of the last full year of World War II stumbled badly the following spring, showing […]

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. But shouldn’t there be some long-lasting special recognition when a player gets four extra-base hits in […]

A list of hit sequences for players who completed a cycle during the 1920-2017 period.This is the online appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s “‘When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It’: Who Took the Cycle or Quasi-Cycle?”   Click here to scroll down for Table A-2: Sequences for Players Who Completed a Quasi-Cycle […]

A list of all documented cycles through the end of the 2017 MLB seasonThis is the online Appendix for Michael Huber and Allison Davidson’s article, “Origin of the Phrase ‘Hitting for the Cycle’ and An Approach to How Cycles Occur” in the Spring 2018 “Baseball Research Journal.   Here is a list of all documented […]

Red Smith wrote of Willard Mullin, the cartoonist: “There is no estimating how many sports columns were inspired by his sketches.” Likewise, it would be difficult to overestimate the influence of sports cartoonists on our memory of baseball from the 1940s and 1950s. The cartoonists created many of the best-remembered images from that era of […]

It’s an article of faith these days that batting average is an old-fashioned statistic and that the new Holy Grail for batters is OBP—on-base percentage. The “walk’s as good as a hit” approach has a lot to recommend it. After all, the hitter’s goal is to get on base and, if possible, help score runs. […]