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Anyone unfortunate enough to attend a seminar or professional meeting is likely familiar with the game “Two Truths and a Lie.” The premise of the game is that in a roomful of more or less strangers, each person will make three statements about himself or herself, and that only two of those statements will be […]

Introduction In January 1942, one month after the attack on Pearl Harbor had made the United States a combatant in World War II, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in which he had inquired “whether professional baseball should continue to operate.”1 Roosevelt’s famous reply, now known as the “green […]

As baseball’s powers-that-be prepared for the 1920 season, the national pastime was in complete turmoil behind the scenes. The American League was in the midst of a civil war over a series of controversial decisions made by its founder and president, Ban Johnson. There were steady rumors that the recent World Series between the Chicago […]

Let me propose a hypothesis: The Cubs and Pirates are each other’s biggest rival. A few years ago I mentioned the idea to Cubs expert Art Ahrens (we were both in our cups), and he looked at me as if I were crazy. But I was researching the Cubs and the Pirates—my two favorite teams—and […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. Damon Runyon once wrote a story about me, saying this fellow McHale, who is not the greatest ballplayer that ever lived, is probably the most versatile man who ever took up […]

[He] could watch a player plow a field and tell whether there was baseball in his bones. — said of baseball coach Frank Anderson at Oglethorpe University    On May 11, 1963, the loyal alumni of Oglethorpe University gathered at historic Hermance Stadium on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, for a joyful occasion. They dedicated […]

After two years of unlawful contract signings and other roster-jumping shenanigans that produced end­less lawsuits, baseball’s Great Tampering War settled down as the 1903 NL campaign began on Thursday, April 16, in Cincinnati and St. Louis. Though person­al disgust and distrust may not have subsided between all franchise owners, a signed truce between the long­ […]

“The general public, or baseball fan, when he thinks of baseball thinks of the major leagues. He thinks of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. He thinks of huge salaries, of terrific baseball parks and beautiful lights and marvelous conditions, hotels, trains. That is baseball. Only 5 percent of baseball players in the United States play […]

Major League Baseball has always been a for-profit business.  It emerged from the Roaring Twenties and survived the Great Depression to emerge firmly entrenched as “The National Pastime,” but despite the reverence held for the game the primary objective of the owners was to fill the stadiums and keep costs to a minimum, maximizing their […]

Chattanooga Lookouts first baseman Jess Levan was the last man to be banned from professional baseball for trying to fix games. The uproar surrounding Levan’s banishment in 1959 revealed evidence linking other players to wide­ spread gambling in Southern ballparks. The Southern Association scandal was either, as The Sporting News dismissed it, “relatively insignificant;’1 or […]