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We know it didn’t come to pass, but when Fenway Park was less than 10 years old, there there was discussion of disposing of it. The park was opened in 1912 and at the time had hosted the world champion Boston Red Sox in four of its eight years—1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918. But in […]

Sir Ray Davies of The Kinks wrote and sang in Over the Edge: “Everybody is a victim of society, Comedy, tragedy, vaudeville, variety, Pantomime players in the grand tradition, Forced into roles that leave them totally driven.”1 The melodic lyric unknowingly described the phenomenon of professional wrestling in the United States. On the amateur level, […]

Most casual baseball fans are familiar with such well-known movies as the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees, the myth-making twosome of The Natural and Field of Dreams, and the irreverent Bull Durham, but there are numerous films that have been largely forgotten even by diehard baseball and film aficionados. The 1953 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer […]

As a kid pitcher he was called “School Boy” Hoyt — for he was only 15 years old when he signed to pitch for the New York Giants in the National League.  The year was 1915.  Not wanting the youngster to develop a swelled head, the Giants gave him a snappy bonus of $5 for […]

Introduction and Context As World War II seemed to be winding down (even though the Battle of the Bulge in Europe was only days away and the Pacific invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were still in the future), recovery from the war was the watchword at the 43rd annual baseball winter meetings. The nation […]

Editor’s note: In the Spring 2012 issue of “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game,” noted Black Sox expert Bob Hoie used player salary data to put to rout the long-held notion that the 1919 Chicago White Sox were underpaid. As it turns out, the Sox had the second-highest player payroll in the major […]

Back in the mid-1990s, I published Great Baseball Films (Citadel Press), which charts the manner in which the sport has been depicted onscreen from the late 1890s to early 1990s. Twenty years ago as today, even the most obscure films with obvious baseball themes were readily accessible to researchers. However, seeking out films in which […]

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 […]

Fans of the 1958 Philadelphia Phillies had little to cheer about at the end of a rather dismal season. When the final standings were posted, the club was firmly planted dead last in the National League. One bright note was the team’s pinch-hitting performance: It led both major leagues with an impressive batting average of […]

With the advent of limited instant replay in MLB in 2008, its subsequent expansion in 2014,1 and technological innovations like strike-zone automation on the horizon across baseball,2 it makes sense for us to ask in a serious vein what has been asked before mostly tongue-in-cheek: What do umpires do exactly? Angry musing after a blown […]