Search Results

This article was originally published in “St. Louis’s Favorite Sport,” the 1992 SABR convention journal.   George Washington Bradley, author of the National League’s first no-hitter, left his mark on St. Louis baseball in a couple of important ways. At the beginning of his career he helped cement the city’s interest in the “national game” […]

When Albert G. Spalding wrote his American National Game in 1911, he hired the well-known cartoonist, Homer C. Davenport, to provide appropriate works of art, and in the front of the book he thanked Mr. Davenport, “to whose genius much of the interest in this volume is due.” Theodore A. Dorgan, who used the nom […]

Introduction and Context By the time the National and American Leagues had held their winter meetings in New York and Chicago, respectively, the internecine trade war that had transpired between the two had been over for three years. Though formal conflict between the two leagues had been extinguished, rivalries between the individual team magnates still […]

The Dictionary of American Biography is a scholarly compendium of 24 volumes, the first 20 of which were issued by 1937. This remarkable reference work includes biographical sketches of 16,000 persons who have made a distinctive contribution to American life. People are chosen from all areas of endeavor, including baseball. But the question is whether […]

In the first years of the American League, its eight clubs added to their ranks by drawing away players from the older National League. Baseball had been slumping, a situation stemming from the country’s economic depression and the failed leadership of team owners. Attempting to snap out if it, the NL magnates had pared down […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, No. 16 (1996).   As much as any other figure in baseball history, Albert Goodwill Spalding (1850-1915), the Rockford-raised star pitcher, manager, and owner of the Chicago White Stockings (predecessors of today’s Chicago Cubs), and the founder of the sporting goods company that bears his […]

This article was originally published in “Baseball in Chicago,” the 1986 SABR convention journal.   In his major league debut in Chicago with the White Stockings on June 27, 1887, Californian George Edward Martin Van Haltren struck out the first batter to face him, then went on to tie a National League record by walking […]

George Davis, one of the turn of the century’s finest ballplayers, remains an enigma with regards to his personal life and character. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   Of the more than 300 individuals enshrined in Cooperstown, perhaps the most enigmatic is George Davis. Despite an outstanding 20-season playing career—and twice being manager of […]

September 29, 1980 marked the 100th anniversary of one of the landmark dates in New York baseball history — the first baseball game played in the original Polo Grounds. This was not a major league game as New York City did not have a National League club at that time. In early September 1880, the […]

Graveyards are not a significant part of baseball lore. True, the 1919 Cincinnati Reds held spring workouts in a Texas town’s cemetery. Moe Berg, visiting a Baltimore cemetery after dark, is reported to have stood on the grave of Edgar Allan Poe and recited “The Raven” from beginning to end. Edd Roush administered a cemetery […]