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Carl Mays is unfortunately remembered for two incidents. To some, he is remembered as the man who threw the pitch that felled Ray Chapman. To others, he is remembered as the man who lost a suspicious game during the 1921 World Series. He should be remembered for much more. Mays’s career accomplishments from 1915 through […]

A look at the 1935 Detroit Tigers’ opponents in the World Series. Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley and first baseman Charley Grimm pose in 1934 with … a goat. If only they had known. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)   In 1935 the Chicago Cubs celebrated their 20th season playing in Wrigley Field […]

Can there be a star quality team without any All­ Stars? Can a team compiled entirely of All-Stars be mediocre? The answer to both questions is a resounding yes, at least theoretically. Kirk Gibson won an MVP Award but was never named to a single All-Star roster during bis entire career. John Denny won the […]

It has been over 20 years since Baseball Prospectus developed the statistic “Wins Above Replacement Player” (WARP), and 12 years since Sean Smith’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was first posted on Baseball-Reference.com.1 WAR now is widely recognized as a useful metric for assessing a ballplayer’s overall performance. Several performance-based awards are given to players each […]

This spring, baseball attention will be focused on Henry Aaron as he strives to reach and pass that magic number in the home run summit of fame — 714.   There is another historic home run number that is being approached and soon some one will be achieving that milestone.   That will be the 100th home […]

  Chocolatier William Klein Sr. of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, had a problem. The year was 1918. Soldiers were returning from the war in Europe. Klein was looking to expand to a national market for his “Lunch Bar,” a three-cent candy bar that was in direct competition with the chocolate bars produced by Milton Hershey at his […]

This is the musical score to one of the songs devoted to Mays in 1954, written by Willard Robinson and performed by Johnny Long and His Orchestra. (Courtesy of KeyMan Collectibles)   James S. Hirsch, a biographer of Willie Mays, wrote that even before his Rookie of the Year Award, his MVPs, batting title, numerous […]

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 […]

When the United States entered World War II on December 7, 1941, one question among the many to be answered was: What will baseball’s place in American society be during wartime? Thanks to a letter written by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1942, baseball’s role became clear. In that communication, known as the ”Green […]

Willie Mays with the New York Mets (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   Willie Mays returned to New York in a trade on May 11, 1972.1 “It’s a wonderful feeling to be coming back here,” said the longtime Giants superstar, who left with the team for California after after the 1957 season. “I’ve always […]