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Baseball is a game of numbers, so it is fitting to begin this story with the number Four Thousand Two Hundred Seventy-Two. No one had ever taken longer to get to the World Series – 4,272 major-league games as player and manager before his first Series game in 1996. As Joe Torre stated in Chasing […]

A number of apparently pennant-bound teams have collapsed in the closing weeks of a season, most recently the 1978 Red Sox, but the most dramatic nosedive in recent decades was that of the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies. By losing ten straight games in the season’s final two weeks, Gene Mauch’s Phils blew a 6½-game lead and […]

The New York Mets surpassed the million-mark in home attendance for the 1975 season on July 21.1 But there was nothing to celebrate at Shea Stadium as the home team lost to the Astros 6-2. Fans did cheer for home runs by Dave Kingman and Rusty Staub. But they also witnessed George Stone’s poor mound […]

With his chokes-up-on-the-bat stance, second baseman Félix Millan built a career as a singles hitter. His 12-year tenure in the majors ended with 1,617 base hits. But extra-base hits and home runs numbered 289—less than 20 percent of the total. Millan’s performance on July 21, 1975, may best represent this cornerstone of his contributions, which […]

The Cleveland Indians were scheduled to open the defense of their first pennant in 41 years on April 1, 1996, against the visiting New York Yankees. But a blizzard on April Fool’s Day covered Cleveland’s Jacobs Field with 4 to 5 inches of snow,1 and the game was rescheduled for the next afternoon. The postponement […]