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When tasked with discussing the first game in the history of the Montréal Royals, one must decide which one of the club’s first games he or she believes to be the real one. The conventionally accepted description of the Royals as having been around from 1897 to 1917 and from 1928 to 1960, although not […]

   In the modern era of baseball there have been many great minor league clubs. Those that come immediately to mind are the 1937 Newark Bears, the 1934 Los Angeles Angels, the 1925 San Francisco Seals, the 1939-40 Kansas City Blues, the 1933 Columbus Red Birds, the  1928-31 Rochester Red Wings, and those special minor […]

Since January 2001, I’ve been engaged in a baseball-research endeavor that has been fascinating and challenging and sometimes frustrating—the determination of the uniform numbers for Detroit Tigers players, managers, and coaches. In an article in The National Pastime in 2006, I described some of my findings for the uniform numbers retired by the Tigers.1 One […]

Over the past generation, sabermetricians have expended a great amount of time and energy studying the effects of free agency and long term contracts on player performance (Maxcy, Fort, and Krautmann 2002; Krautmann and Solow 2009; Krautmann and Donley 2009; Hakes and Turner 2011; Martin et al. 2011; O’Neill 2014; Paulsen 2020). How ever, they […]

This article was originally published in the 1991 SABR convention journal (New York City).   In baseball’s modem era there have been many outstanding minor league teams. Coming to mind immediately are the 1937 Newark Bears, the 1934 Los Angeles Angels, the 1925 San Francisco Seals, the 1939-1940 Kansas City Blues, the 1933 Columbus Red […]

A 1950 preseason poll of Southern Association sportswriters picked the Atlanta Crackers to finish in the second division of that league.[fn]Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 26 July 1950.[/fn] The pick surprised almost no one. After three consecutive firstplace finishes—under manager Doc Prothro in 1944 and Kiki Cuyler in 1945 and 1946—the Crackers had slipped into the second […]

A rainout in the Astrodome? How is that possible? It’s domed, protected from the elements. The Astros don’t even have the traditional rain check printed on their tickets! Yet on Tuesday, June 15, 1976, the supposed impossible happened. A game between the Astros and the Pittsburgh Pirates was postponed because of rain. A powerful thunderstorm developed […]

For the past two years I have pored over approximately 2,000 media guides, from the  1960s through 2007, to find material for this article. In addition to learning about players’ off-season jobs, marital status, children, fathers, brothers, hobbies, and other oddities, I found out a great deal about media guides themselves. Let others devour reams […]

The irony of baseball behind barbed wire was that Japanese Americans were considered enemy aliens and confined to camps during World War II. Donning a baseball uniform, however, gave them free passage to road trips.

All batters think it’s great to hit a home run. They think it’s even better to hit one as a pinch hitter. And when the bases are loaded and you’re called off the bench to deliver — and you do! There’s hardly anything to match the emotional impact of a pinch grand slam! Here’s a […]