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In 1943 the New York Giants, a perennial first division team, finished last.  The next year, 1944, the St. Louis Browns, who had owned a winning record only once in 13 seasons, won the team’s only pennant.  World War II upset the baseball world, too. By won-lost record, World War II did not transform the […]

65 players have had 80 or more extra-base hits in a season. Lou Gehrig did it ten times and Babe Ruth nine. Only once since 1941 have four achieved the feat in the same year.   Every fan has an idea of which players qualify as sluggers and which do not. Any definition of slugger […]

The Chicago Cubs’ latest pennant near-miss continues to deny Sammy Sosa, a certain Hall of Famer, an appearance in the World Series. Sammy may yet share the dubious distinction of fellow Cub Ernie Banks, the best-known example of a Hall of Fame player who never played in the World Series. Actually, there have been 31 […]

This article was originally published in the 1984 SABR convention journal (Providence, Rhode Island).   The semi-pro baseball season of 1875 at Adelaide Park was so successful that Gen. Dennis and his associates placed a much faster team on the field in 1876, one that would hold its own with any independent team in New […]

 Minor-League Winter Meeting The prospect of war cast a long shadow over the National Association meeting for 1941. Europe and Asia had been mired in conflict for more than two years by this time, and just days after the meetings concluded, the United States would be forced to enter the second worldwide war of the […]

Recent study has revealed the claim of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York to pioneer status, as well as that of Alexander Cartwright to be the game’s inventor, to be suspect if not altogether baseless. I have taken up the latter claim at length in Baseball in the Garden of Eden and will […]

Move over, Charlie Finley and Bill Veeck – the old Browns’ owner was baseball’s first great promoter. And move over George Steinbrenner – Von der Ahe was a meddler supreme.   PERHAPS THE GREATEST DAY of Chris Von der Ahe’s life occurred in the spring of 1882, when he dedicated his new Sportsman’s Park on […]

Rarely can an athlete lay claim to having been both the most colorful and productive in a respective time period. Ali and Ruth were two colossal examples, but for the underrepresented enigma of nineteenth-century baseball, Charlie “Old Hoss” Radbourn provides a fascinating fusion of personality and achievement. In the days when mounds were only fifty […]

After two years of unlawful contract signings and other roster-jumping shenanigans that produced end­less lawsuits, baseball’s Great Tampering War settled down as the 1903 NL campaign began on Thursday, April 16, in Cincinnati and St. Louis. Though person­al disgust and distrust may not have subsided between all franchise owners, a signed truce between the long­ […]

The Minnesota Twins’ first home baseball game was played on April 21, 1961, but that 5–3 loss was the tip of a large and rocky iceberg. Minneapolis and St. Paul civic leaders, yearning for their metro area to be considered “big league,” had been chasing a major league team for almost a decade. It did […]