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A real “put-down” for a club is to get shut out in both games of a doubleheader. This happened to the Red Sox on Labor Day of 1974 when the Orioles almost put the Beantowners out of business for the season. Actually, they were close games, with Ross Grimsley beating Luis Tiant 1-0 in the […]

The 1927 Pittsburgh Pirates are generally remembered for losing in the World Series to the New York Yankees’ Murderers’ Row, a juggernaut highlighted by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at their offensive peak. Although the Yankees did sweep the Pirates in four straight games, two of them — Games One and Four — were decided […]

The American League was established in 1900 and the following year pronounced itself a major league. The established National League, however, refused to recognize the newcomer as anything other than a minor league.  Finally, as a matter of self preservation as much as anything, the rivals reached agreement on a two-league system in January 1903 […]

The 1884 New York Gothams, featuring catcher Jack Humphries (front row, far right). Humphries’ improbably journey took him from the hamlet of North Gower, outside Ottawa, to Cornell for Latin and Greek, then to New York to catch Mickey Welch and Tip O’Neill. (COURTESY OF DAVID McDONALD)   On September 6, 1993, Denis Boucher pitched […]

Of the many minor leagues that existed in professional baseball at the end of World War II, the Pacific Coast League (PCL) was at the pinnacle, the one with the best players, several fine stadiums, and robust attendance. In 1946, total attendance for the league was 4,068,372, a PCL record, dwarfing that of any other […]

The Chicago White Sox of the early twentieth century provided the inspiration and the subject matter for three of America’s greatest novelists.   JAMES T. FARRELL For most of his youth, Farrell lived with his grandmother and a maternal uncle in several neighborhoods, all close to Comiskey Park. He attended as many as 40 White […]

People of a certain age know where they were when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt died, and Bobby Thomson swung. “The most famous sports moment of all time,” Jon Miller termed Thomson’s October 3, 1951, pennant-winning blast. We still recall the Shot Heard ’Round the World: Russ Hodges five times crying, “The Giants […]

This article was originally published in “St. Louis’s Favorite Sport,” the 1992 SABR convention journal.   In the late 1920s, John George Taylor Spink, publisher of The Sporting News, a weekly newspaper produced then as now in St. Louis, embarked on a European vacation with his wife, Blanche. The Spinks were in the French port […]

The underlying aggressiveness in rivalries between baseball teams has been recorded in the annals and burned into our memories for decades. Fans hear yarns about Ty Cobb’s boiling temperament and witness bench-clearing brawls. When that explosive competitive spirit spreads from the field to the fanatics in the streets, the result can be drunken fist-fights at […]

The only player to appear in every inning of all nineteen World Series games played by the Washington Senators was born in Salem, New Jersey, on October 16, 1900. Rigorous farm work had matured Leon Allen Goslin into a muscular 185-pound young man, standing just a half-inch shy of six feet. His early pitching exploits […]