Search Results

Some sportswriters in the 1960s worried that Willie Mays was actually hurting the Giants. One magazine headline asked, “Is Willie really worth $105,000?” (SABR-Rucker Archive)   If we didn’t have proof, we probably wouldn’t believe it. If there hadn’t been hundreds of magazines published in the 1960s about baseball, a large percentage of them containing articles […]

The 1939 Yankees are known as one of the greatest teams of all time. They were an outstanding squad, finishing 17 games ahead of the second-place Boston Red Sox and winning the AL pennant in a breeze. Sportswriters of the day referred to the 1939 American League as the Yankees and the seven dwarves. The […]

In 1937 most of baseball’s headlines went to slugging exploits of Joe Medwick in the National League and to Lou Gehrig, Joe DiNaggio, Jimmy Foxx, and Hank Greenberg in the American League.   Little attention was paid to a bench-riding rookie of the Tigers named Rudy York, not at least until he worked his way into […]

Many fans and researchers recall that the Brooklyn Dodgers, to stimulate gate receipts, played 7 games in Jersey City in 1956 and in 1957. For the same reason, the Chicago White Sox played 9 games in Milwaukee in 1968 and 11 in 1969. That was in the period when Milwaukee did not have a team […]

Minor-league baseball in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is virtually synonymous with Texas League professional baseball in the region. The small parts not connected to the Texas League are the rise and fall of black baseball in the area and the brief sojourns of the Fort Worth and Dallas teams in other leagues. (The Metroplex is […]

In 2009, on SABR-L (SABR’s online listserv), Trent McCotter cited two instances of a player taking a swing while being walked intentionally and wondered if anyone knew about other instances of a batter hitting a deliberate ball. I responded with two such incidents I had happened on during my research. Several other SABR members, including […]

Introduction The 2016 Baseball Winter Meetings were held at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland (December 4-8). The meetings took place 32 days after a thrilling Game Seven of the World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians. The game went into extra innings tied 6-6, and then […]

Gerry Nugent and the Phillies were flat broke. Worse than that: They were concave broke. Not only were they penniless, they were in debt to the National League. NL president Ford Frick went looking for somebody to rescue the franchise. Bob Paul, sports editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, was approached by local sports promoter […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the SABR 25 Convention Journal in 1995.   Although Philadelphia was the most prominent center of early African American baseball, the 1887 Pittsburgh Keystones produced the leadership for the era’s most successful (or least unsuccessful) Black baseball league, the League of Colored Base Ball Clubs. Commonly referred […]

This spring, baseball attention will be focused on Henry Aaron as he strives to reach and pass that magic number in the home run summit of fame — 714.   There is another historic home run number that is being approached and soon some one will be achieving that milestone.   That will be the 100th home […]