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Skipper Miller Huggins’s Yankees had rolled over competition all season long and were cruising to their third straight pennant. Owners of the best record in baseball (81-43), the Yankees were 13 games ahead of the second-place Cleveland Indians and shut down opponents with a staff that eventually led the league in team ERA (3.62). Blessed […]

In a career that included 13 seasons as a major-league pitcher and 22 more as an American League umpire, Eddie Rommel proved himself to be both accomplished and unconventional. As a pitcher with the Philadelphia Athletics, Rommel was an early master of an unconventional pitch – the knuckleball – and the winner of 171 games. […]

Before the Yankees-Athletics doubleheader on September 27, 1919, New York pitcher Bob Shawkey had won 20 games in a season once. In 1916, his first full season with the Yankees, the man known as Sailor won a league-leading 24 games. Shawkey was 24-14 and retrospectively had a league-leading eight saves. Entering the doubleheader, the third-place […]

The 1918 season did not start well for either the Philadelphia Athletics or the Detroit Tigers. After a month the two teams found themselves at the bottom of the American League standings. On May 20 they met for the first time to play a four-game series.1 For the A’s, the games provided an opportunity to […]

The 1916 Philadelphia Athletics were the worst major-league team of the twentieth century. And the unfortunate man who bore the brunt of their badness was pitcher Herman John “Jack” Nabors. Just two years earlier, the A’s had won 99 games for the best record in baseball. But facing financial pressure from the Federal League, owner-manager […]

“Such a brand of revenge was never seen before,” gushed sportswriter Harry P. Edwards in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.1 In the game after getting knocked out of the box, yielding six hits and five runs (though just two earned) in a three-inning start resulting in his 20th loss of the season, Philadelphia Athletics right-hander Bullet […]

No matter how much the residents around Shibe Park loved the Athletics, their proximity to the ballpark was a mixed blessing the night before the fourth game of the 1913 World Series. Not long after Philadelphia won the third game in New York and took a two-games-to-one lead, fans started gathering outside the ticket windows. […]

It was the “most wonderful pitchers’ battle ever in a World Series,” gushed sportswriter Bozeman Bulger about the epic battle between Christy Mathewson and Eddie Plank.1 Syndicated columnist Hugh Fullerton praised the hurling duel as “a wonderful game, tense in situations, magnificent with the courage and nerve displayed by these two veteran pitchers.”2 The future […]

As the 1913 regular season neared its end on Tuesday, September 23, the Philadelphia Athletics under Connie Mack had clinched the pennant behind a stellar 1-0 shutout performance by Eddie Plank the afternoon before. Plank’s gem was the second game of a doubleheader following a 4-0 shutout by Bullet Joe Bush earlier in the day. […]

Eddie Plank won 326 games in the major leagues – and a game in which he pitched 16 scoreless innings wasn’t one of them. That stretch of shutout pitching came in a game that went 19 innings and lasted more than four hours before the Athletics’ Hall of Fame lefty lost to another Hall of […]