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Garvey, Lopes, Russell and Cey The Dodger infield that came to stay Nothing flashy, but steady and true Dating way back to Seventy-Two No, there’ll never be a real poem written about these four players, but they do deserve some recognition as the major league team infield that played together the longest. They just finished […]

For as long as I can remember I have had an unquenchable passion for baseball. Beginning in the 1920s, when I was about five years old, I’d watch my big brother, Marv, playing sandlot games, then high-school and college games. The biggest thrill of all was witnessing his sparkling professional play in a major-league career […]

Cover of the January 1929 issue of Yakyukai showing Ty Cobb with Keio players Takayoshi Okada and Saburo Miyatake (Coutesy of Robert Klevens, Prestige Collectibles)   On an off-day on the road in Cleveland, Tyrus Raymond Cobb, hailed for much of his career as the greatest player the game had ever known, announced his impending […]

Anyone researching National and American League playing managers soon realizes that unlike Gertrude Stein’s rose (“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”), a manager who also played may or may not have been a playing manager. Three examples will make this clear: On September 23, 1930 in a less- than-inspired move the […]

In 1983 Dale Berra of the Pirates set a major league record by being awarded first base on interference seven times in one season. There are six categories of plate appearances – official times at bat, sacrifice bunts, sacrifice flies, bases on balls, and hit by pitch are the other five. Being awarded first on […]

Babe Ruth and Boston Braves executives in a Copley Plaza Hotel room, after signing with the Boston Braves, February 28, 1935. (l to r): Charles F. Adams, Babe Ruth, and Judge Emil Fuchs. (Leslie Jones photo, courtesy of the Boston Public Library.)   When George Herman “Babe” Ruth arrived in St. Petersburg in 1935 for […]

Introduction and Context As the American and National Leagues prepared for the 1924 winter meetings in New York City, drama laced the usual business agenda of trades, rulings, and discussion of regulations. The NL had faced trouble internally since the end of September, when its president, John Heydler, disclosed, first to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis […]

“It was my first spring training ever, at Jackson, Tennessee, in 1927, when I went up with Toledo. Casey Stengel, our manager, was trying to teach me how to turn and throw to first base in one motion. Well, we were playing Chattanooga later in the day and there was a man on first. I […]

Robert L. Ripley, in his syndicated “Believe It Or Not” of September 5, 1931, informed the world of former big leaguer Hugh Bedient’s feat of striking out 42 men in one game. But, this was not the first national recognition of this event. The Jamestown Evening Journal of Monday, July 27, 1908, ran the headline: […]

Rubén Amaro Sr. made a unique contribution to how the history of the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies was recorded. His letters to his parents (as first described in a 1965 article for Sports Illustrated, “The Rise and Fall of the Fabulous Phillies”) were a contemporaneous internal view of the club.Rubén Amaro Sr. made a unique contribution to how the history […]