Search Results

The full track during the early years of Yankee Stadium was a precursor to the “warning track” that is now a ballpark standard. (Library of Congress, Bain Collection)   Yankee Stadium was built for baseball, but it turned out to be an exceedingly versatile structure. Football was played there. Championship boxing, concerts, religious revivals. Popes […]

The baseball fans of the 1930s and 1940s were a special breed, far removed from their counterparts of today. The “colorful” fans of recent years – the sign carriers, the inane and loud-mouthed drunks, the affluent junketeers who follow their teams on a road trip a year – are pale copies of their hardier predecessors. […]

Before the 1947 season began, the Yankees hired Dodgers coach Charlie Dressen away from Brooklyn. The incident precipitated such public animosity between the two clubs that Commissioner Happy Chandler was forced to intervene. Among the accusations were several that smacked of gambling. In the end, Chandler suspended Dressen for thirty days and Brooklyn manager Leo […]

On “Beyond DiMaggio: Italian Americans in Baseball”

Andy “Pruschka” Pafko was born to Czech parents in Boyceville, Wisconsin, in 1921. The Wisconsin native enjoyed a quick rise to major league success. By 1943, at the tender age of 22, he won the Pacific Coast League MVP Award, playing with the Los Angeles Angels. He then appeared in 13 games for the 1943 […]

Today not too many people remember Dexter Park, but in the first half of the twentieth century it played host to many the top baseball stars of the majors and the Negro Leagues. Those who attended games there remember it with respect and affection. Some stoutly maintain that it was in Brooklyn, but it was […]

Most fans with a sense of history know a fair bit about Johnny Sain. Of course, they know all about the doggerel that goes something like “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.” They know, too, that he won 20 or more games four times in his war-shortened career, and that he won one of […]

While the 1951 pennant race was raging between the Dodgers and Giants, dozens of writers and broadcasters covered the dramatic proceedings and turned out classic prose and award-winning broadcasts. The National Football League was just an afterthought. The NBA was not covered in some dailies, and others just listed scores. Besides the classic confrontations and […]

Leo Durocher made the cover of Time magazine just once: the April 14, 1947, issue. Published the day before Jackie Robinson broke into the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Time article did not cast the Dodgers’ manager in a kind light. The words “I don’t want any nice guys on my ball club” […]

The Phillies’ Richie Ashburn hit only 29 homers—approximately one per 300 times at bat—in a 15-year career, and none of them are legendary because of their length. Eight were inside-the-parkers that never left the playing field. Exhibiting a slashing style of hitting that contrasted sharply with the “swing-from-the-heels” approach of most of his contemporaries, he […]