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23 PITCHES The 1934 All-Star Game started ominously for Carl Hubbell. The first two American League batters reached base in the top of the first at New York’s Polo Grounds. The National League’s All-Star infielders gathered in a protective circle around their pitcher. They could offer plenty of advice: Hubbell’s manager with the Giants, Bill […]

Graveyards are not a significant part of baseball lore. True, the 1919 Cincinnati Reds held spring workouts in a Texas town’s cemetery. Moe Berg, visiting a Baltimore cemetery after dark, is reported to have stood on the grave of Edgar Allan Poe and recited “The Raven” from beginning to end. Edd Roush administered a cemetery […]

Perhaps the most drastic change baseball has seen during the last quarter century has taken place on the minor league level.   From a high of nearly 60 leagues operating just after World War II,   the minor league system has dwindled to the 18 leagues and 140 teams which operated during the 1973 season. Much of […]

In the early 1960s, each of the recent expansion cities played host to the MLB All-Star Game, New York in 1964, Anaheim in 1967, Houston in 1968, and Washington DC in 1969. The 1968 baseball season took place against a backdrop of racial violence. The late 1960s trembled with social and political turbulence, with the […]

In my years as a traveling baseball writer, namely 1946 through 1958, I believe I bridged the gap between the yesteryear of hero worship and the modern adversary era. When I came along, writers were just beginning to find warts on athletes’ faces. Now? Heck, they’re apt to see nothing but. Somewhere, of course, there […]

The names of so many Hall of Famers convey a magical, almost mystical quality — Cobb, Ruth, Wagner, Hornsby, Gehrig, Foxx, and, more recently, DiMaggio, Williams, Musial, Mays, Mantle. Earl Averill, who turned 80 last May, is not always remembered as one of the great players, yet for a period of ten years, from 1929 […]

The Society launched a research project in 1976 to gather information about — what is now a rather rare baseball occurrence — the inside-the-park home run (IPH). Some of the questions raised at the outset of this project v re rather basic in nature. How many inside-the-park homers are being hit at the present time […]

Havana served for many years as something of a playground for the idle wealthy of the United States, as often as not those of New York, particularly during the Prohibition years (1920-1933), when alcohol was banned in by an amendment to the US Constitution. It was a major tourist mecca and attracted a large number […]

  For most of Babe Didrikson’s life, Major League Baseball was closed off to all but white men, but it was possible for African Americans and women to play professional baseball in other venues. Didrikson, technically the first woman to pitch for a major league team, even though she was unable to be signed, was […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 30 (2001).   As famed radio news commentator Paul Harvey might expound, “And now for the rest of the story.” What story? The one detailing the how and the who of the long-overlooked run batted in that, 69 years after Hack Wilson accomplished the […]