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So much emphasis has been placed on home runs in recent years that few fans know or care who collects the most singles.   That may change because players who hit a lot of singles can also wind up with batting titles.   In 1973, for example, both Pete Rose and Rod Carew led their respective leagues […]

Major League Baseball implemented a package of rule changes for the 2023 season designed to address complaints that the game had become tedious to watch.1 Those complaints centered on pace of play and lack of action, with fans and media noting fewer balls in play and stolen bases and more strikeouts and home runs.2 Some […]

Gavy Cravath led the National League in home runs six times in seven seasons. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   What more is there to say about Clifford Carlton “Gavy” “Cactus” Cravath, the enigmatic Deadball Era slugger relegated to the dustbin of baseball history by George Herman Ruth? How about this: He was likely the first player to […]

Introduction and Context America was engulfed in the Great Depression when the 1932 Winter Meetings arrived, and like everything else, its greatest pastime was affected negatively. For lack of funds, only 16 minor-league circuits completed the 1932 season, down from the 25 that did so three years prior.1 As a result, many baseball players were […]

In the history of New York baseball broadcasting, Sid Loberfeld is as far removed from Red Barber and Mel Allen as Crash Davis is from Babe Ruth. He was a downtown Brooklyn lawyer, and his place in baseball circles came through his decades-long contacts with local sports stars. But Sid holds a distinction that he […]

At SABR’s 2006 convention one speaker analyzed the commissioners of baseball and rated Judge Landis the best of all. In the question-and-answer session that followed, a member of the audience challenged the speaker: “How can you stand here in the year 2006 and praise Landis, who was so instrumental in keeping blacks out of Major […]

This article was originally published in the 1991 SABR convention journal (New York City).   It might have been just a case of being in the right place at the right time. But whatever it was, it brought Utica’s George Joseph Burns to professional baseball and eventually led him to a brilliant career as an […]

It might have been just a case of being in the right place at the right time. But whatever it was, it brought George Joseph Burns to professional baseball and eventually led him to a brilliant career as an outfielder in the National League. Burns was in the grandstand with his father at the Utica, […]

Introduction Deep in the heart of Texas, the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (better known as the minor leagues) huffed and puffed at their major-league brethren and tried to … well … not blow the house down but remodel it into something they could live with more comfortably. But from New York, the majors […]

I doubt that any thoughtful person would disagree with Norman Macht’s contention that “what we know about the past is laced with uncertainty.” Another way of making the point comes in the opening epigraph to L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, later a film, The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently […]