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John William “Ziggy” Sears was a minor-league outfielder from 1912 to 1928, a Texas League umpire from 1929 to 1934, a National League umpire from 1934 to 1945, a Pacific Coast League umpire in 1946, a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1947, a Texas League umpire from 1948 to 1951, and an actor in […]

Granite City, Illinois was – despite its name – a city that specialized in manufacturing iron-based kitchen supplies and utensils. It was a planned community, a company town, and is part of the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area, just across the Mississippi River and six or seven miles north of St. Louis. The town was […]

Baseball has no player like Joe Pate today. He was a minor-league superstar, “the idol of Fort Worth baseball fans for a generation.”1 The burly left-handed pitcher won 257 games in 20 seasons from the bottom to the top of the minors. “Joe Pate was the greatest pitcher and put more money into the till […]

It was not surprising that Detroit Tigers scout Billy Doyle wanted to talk with right-handed pitcher Bob Gillespie after the game he saw in 1939. Gillespie’s team had won, 15-1; Gillespie had struck out 21 batters and had hit a single, a triple, and two home runs. A handwritten note by Bob Gillespie in his […]

Two-time minor-league batting champion Ralph Sharman enjoyed a productive late-season tryout with the 1917 Philadelphia Athletics. Eschewing a potential full-season roster spot for 1918, Sharman instead enlisted in the Army in order to serve his country. Tragically, the 23-year-old soldier became the second player who had reached the major leagues to die while serving in […]

Winner of 158 major-league games, Willis Hudlin was a mainstay of the Cleveland Indians’ pitching staff in the 1920s and 1930s. His best pitches were his fastball and sinker. He was later a team owner, manager, coach and scout, in a professional baseball career that lasted nearly 50 years. George Willis Hudlin was born in […]

June 14, 1908, South Side Park, Chicago. The White Sox had won 10 straight games. Manager Fielder Jones might well have uttered what would become a Hawk Harrelson catchphrase more than a century later: “Don‘t stop now, boys!”1 But Jones could see win 11 slipping away. After four innings, the New York Highlanders led 4-1. […]

Bob Peterson moved from one stage to another, with a life working in theatrical staging and one on the stage of baseball. His father likely led the way in the theater. In Philadelphia, George W. Peterson worked in theater in 1900 and was listed as a stage manager in 1910. By the time of the […]

Texan outfielder C. L. Taylor was the first star of the new West Texas League in the summer of 1920. The “sphinx-like speed merchant”1 also led the Texas-Oklahoma League in hitting in 1922. At age 27, in the spring of 1925, he reached the majors but went hitless in six at-bats with the Chicago Cubs. […]

Jack Kibble’s cup of coffee with Cleveland in the summer of 1912 amounted to just five games, but with teammates the likes of Nap Lajoie, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Ray Chapman, it surely amounted to a lifetime of stories told at his cigar shop and sporting goods store back home in Montana. John Westly “Happy […]

How about batting third in the lineup, between eventual Hall of Famers Max Carey and Honus Wagner, in your first major-league start? Frank Edington could rake, and he gave the second-place Pittsburgh Pirates an offensive shot in the arm for three weeks during the summer of 1912. Yet as it turned out, the 20-year-old never […]

In life James Donaldson Brown’s journey took him from humble beginnings in Laurel, Maryland, to a nondescript death in an Oregon logging town. In between his birth and death he completed an odyssey that entailed stops in at least 28 minor-league cities, one foreign country and two major-league cities. He crisscrossed the county playing in […]

Former Detroit Tigers righthander Leslie Clyde “Les” Mueller may be best remembered for his single-game record of pitching 19 2/3 innings against the Philadelphia Athletics on July 21, 1945. When he walked off the mound for the last time that evening at Shibe Park, Mueller, the hard-throwing Bengal sidearmer, had surrendered only one run to […]

Supplanting a future Hall of Famer (if only for a spell), a stalwart of the New Orleans semipro circuit, and a historically poor major-league fielder, Larry Pezold is an intriguing figure in the Cleveland Naps history. Lorenz (Larry) Johannes (John) Pezold was born June 22, 1893, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the youngest of eight children […]

It all started to unravel when they returned from Honolulu. A team of baseball all-stars from the Pacific Coast League had sailed across the blue Pacific for a post-season barnstorming escapade to Hawaii. It was 1914, and the ballplayers were surely enjoying what young men do in the tropics. It’s a wonder they ever came […]

Harry Fenton (Larry) Schlafly began his professional playing career in 1901, which many people recognize as the first year of modern baseball. He was actively involved in the game every year thereafter until a month before his untimely death in 1919. He played in the major leagues with the Chicago Cubs in 1902, the Washington […]

Besides having had a key pinch-hitting appearance in the 1914 World Series, Larry Gilbert is arguably the greatest minor-league manager of all time. Managing for 25 years solely in the Southern Association, Gilbert’s record was 2128-1627, good for an astounding .567 winning percentage. His teams won the pennant nine times, won the Shaughnessy playoffs three […]

Although he answered to a variety of nicknames – Rub-Dub-Hub, Hurling Hub, the Tennessee Cyclone, the Untamed Son of Sumner County, the Gallatin Squash – his family, friends, and baseball fans simply called him Hub. Herbert Rodney Perdue was one of the most personable and exciting pitching prospects to emerge from the hills of Middle […]

After a slow start for the first four weeks of the 1944 season, the Detroit Tigers jelled as a club, climbed into pennant contention, and finally fell one game short of winning the American League flag. In the end, the pitching of a tall recruit right-hander, James Ruffus Gentry, helped fuel Detroit’s pennant run. Speaking […]

During Welcome Back, Kotter’s run as a popular television sitcom, one of the “Sweathogs” – Robert Hegyes’ fictional Epstein character – routinely identified himself as a “Puerto Rican Jew” to comedic effect. Less than a decade after the show aired its final episode in 1979, a real-life Dominican Jew commenced his nine-season (1988-1991, 1993-1997) big-league […]

Larry Dale Ray was born at King’s Daughter’s Hospital in Madison, Indiana, on March 11, 1958. The youngest of nine children, he was raised with a farming family near Vevay, Indiana. Ray’s parents, William and Dorothy Ray, had a dairy farm and grew tobacco. Larry worked the family fields as well as those of other […]

He had more to do with its demise than its institution: nevertheless, Rip Radcliff is among that handful of major leaguers who inspired a change in a league’s rules. The rule, established at the December 1939 baseball meetings in Cincinnati, was a bizarre one that lasted for just a short time. The owners of seven […]