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There are a number of reasons teams complete transactions in major-league baseball. While the goal is clearly to improve the team, the exact nature of that improvement varies considerably, based on the circumstances in which the team finds itself. A contending team will look for upgrades in the field or on the mound in the […]

Ray Brown: Hall of Famer When Negro Leagues great Ray Brown was inducted posthumously into baseball’s National Hall of Fame in 2006 as one of 17 individuals chosen for their essential contributions to “the history of blacks in the game,” he also became the first player with links to the Quebec Provincial League ever to […]

Introduction and Context With the inauguration of free agency in 1976 and the introduction of a second interleague trading period in 1977, the baseball winter meetings had become agonizing to attend. The traditional exchange of players between teams became more limited now that players could bargain for long-term contracts and no-trade clauses. However, the 1980 […]

Several years ago when the Texas Rangers explored the idea of moving their spring training headquarters from Port Charlotte, Florida, one option they briefly considered was building a spring training complex in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Of course, for the move to be feasible, at least three other teams would have to be […]

The year 2022 marks the official 150th anniversary of Japanese baseball. Tradition states that Horace Wilson, a baseball fanatic from Gorham, Maine, introduced the game in 1872 to his students at Daiichi Daigaku (renamed Kaisei Gakko the following year). Since that time, the United States and Japan’s shared love of baseball has spawned thousands of […]

The Chicago Cubs’ latest pennant near-miss continues to deny Sammy Sosa, a certain Hall of Famer, an appearance in the World Series. Sammy may yet share the dubious distinction of fellow Cub Ernie Banks, the best-known example of a Hall of Fame player who never played in the World Series. Actually, there have been 31 […]

  Zane Grey, the great Western novelist, played baseball in college plus several years in the minors but his younger brother, Romer, not only had a long minor league career but actually played one game in the majors. Somehow, Romer has been confused with another player and his name is not listed in any baseball […]

All baseball fans are familiar, if not from the movie, then from the grainy newsreel footage, with Lou Gehrig’s legendary speech at Yankee Stadium home plate on July 4, 1939. Yet that was not the first nor the last time a speech would have a dramatic impact at The House that Ruth Built. Baseball, football, […]

For reporters covering the Red Sox, the 2004 baseball season started in the earliest hours of October 17, 2003. That was when Boston suffered another in four-score and five years of excruciating defeats, a 6-5 loss to the Yankees on Aaron Boone’s game-ending and series-ending – Game Seven at that – home run in the […]

All-Star Football Game program, 1941. (COURTESY OF BRYAN STEVERSON)   “There but for the grace of God” is an expression used when someone avoids a very serious situation, possibly life-threatening, and gives credit to the Almighty.1 In the life of Jack Roosevelt Robinson, this thankfulness applied on December 7, 1941. After a disappointing 1940 football […]