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In Babe Ruth’s first year with the Yankees in 1920, he hit 54 homers to break his own American League record set the year before with Boston. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   On the morning of January 6, 1920, New Yorkers awoke to a headline in The New York Times that screamed “Ruth […]

“It is no bad thing to be a king.” — Homer   On a cool October afternoon in Boston in 1914, the Red Sox hosted the Yankees at three-year-old Fenway Park. On the mound for the Sox was rookie left hander George Herman Ruth, already referred to as “Babe” by teammates and press. Ruth was […]

In “Going Beyond the Baseball Adage ‘One Game at a Time’: A Geek’s Peek at Streaks,” published in the Spring 2024 Baseball Research Journal, I developed a set of mathematical expressions to predict the frequency and length of baseball’s winning and losing streaks. In this paper, I will highlight the historical content I uncovered during […]

Frazee kicked off the new year making another move, again with Connie Mack’s Athletics, trading players to be named later for first baseman Stuffy McInnis. Mack termed the deal a “near-gift,” letting McInnis go to the team where he wanted to play even though he could have sold him for more than $25,000. Mack later […]

It was the last game of the 1949 baseball season and George Kell was locked in a close race for the AL batting title. The Detroit Tigers were playing the Cleveland Indians in a game that meant little to either team since neither was destined for the World Series. Ted Williams, who had sat atop […]

During the long segregated era between 1887 and 1947, from the year that Moses and Welday Walker played for Toledo of the old American Association until the arrival of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn, the most visible racial minority in major league baseball, apart from an occasional suspiciously swarthy Cuban, consisted of American Indians. While the […]

Late into the infamous 86-year championship drought of the Boston Red Sox – from 1918 to 2004 – it became nearly taboo to talk seriously about the 1918 team. One reason for that reluctance was the sullied reputation of the team’s then-owner, Harry Frazee – the man who sold Boston’s beloved superstar, Babe Ruth, to […]

Jackie Robinson, right, shakes hands with manager Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers at spring training in Havana, Cuba in March 1947. (SABR-RUCKER ARCHIVE)   In reviewing the career of Jackie Robinson in hindsight, one advantage is that everything seems as if it was a certainty. Robinson was one of the great players in the […]

The year 1906 was one of change for minor league baseball in Ohio. The previous season, independent teams from Ohio and western Pennsylvania had joined organized ball as the Class C Ohio Pennsylvania League. By early spring, the unmanageable number of teams was reduced to eight, six of them in Ohio. New Castle was one of […]

For those of you keeping score, the Oakland Athletics’ 1972-74 infield consisted largely but not exclusively of Sal Bando, third base; Bert Campaneris, shortstop; Tim Cullen and Dick Green, second base, 1972 and 1973-74, respectively; and Mike Epstein and Gene Tenace, first base, 1972 and 1973-74, respectively. Left field was Joe Rudi’s. Reggie Jackson and […]