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A version of this article was originally published in the SABR Deadball Era Research Committee’s February 2015 newsletter. The contributions of Dorothy Seymour Mills to our understanding of baseball history can hardly be overstated, as her work with her husband Dr. Harold Seymour on the 1971 book Baseball: The Golden Age laid the foundation for […]

If the most iconic sports-related Coca-Cola television ad features a child offering a Coke to an injured football star—Mean Joe Greene, the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer—countless hurlers and hitters have hawked the product across the decades. The Greene spot first aired in 1979; however, starting in the early 1950s, the Coca-Cola Company has produced […]

Think about your favorite baseball team. Think about the many times a sports team you root for made a baffling decision. Think about the roster rebuild that never seems to end. Now imagine something new. Imagine buying a membership in your favorite team. Imagine voting on who runs the team or on how to finance […]

In general, the baseball Winter Meetings can be viewed as a watershed event, marking both the end of one season and the beginning of the next. Even before the 2007 Winter Meetings got under way in Nashville, however, the offseason had been launched with a major new initiative. Major-league general managers held their annual meetings […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1987 (Vol. 6, No. 1).   Jiminy Christmas! By the great heavenly stars! Was Rickey Henderson born to steal bases? You bet your sweet ephemeris he was. Henderson was born Christmas Day 1958, a good day to be born if you want to grow […]

Star shortstop Dick Lundy was on the Hilldale team that played against the Boston Red Sox on September 14, 1918, just a week after the World Series ended. (HELMAR ART CARDS)   “Every one of the 16 Major League franchises that operated between 1901 and 1960 faced a black team at some point in their […]

For 21 years Theodore Amar Lyons pitched for the Chicago White Sox, endearing himself as no other player to South Side fans. He was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1955. Yet for all of his honors, two major aspects of Lyons’ career have never been properly assessed: the superiority of his own record […]

In 2018, a country auction in Maine handling the estate of major leaguer Harry Lord put a photograph up for bid they touted as the “First Ever All-Star Game.”1 The 1910 photo pictured an American League team of Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, Big Ed Walsh, and ten others including Lord, the former Red […]

The London, Ontario, baseball tournament held toward the end of August 1869 featured a special category reserved for “colored” teams from Canada and the United States. Two years after the country’s Confederation in 1867, Canadians were still held in high regard for having opened their borders to freed slaves in the pre-Civil War era while […]

He was neither a physician nor a trainer, but John O. “Bonesetter’ Reese was probably the best known treater of injured ballplayers in the first three decades of the twentieth century. He built a practice in which he saw athletes, enter­tainers, and statesmen, but also the mill workers of his adopted Youngstown, Ohio. He beat […]