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Baseball is great theatre. Indeed, baseball stories have been fodder for Hollywood since the era of silent films, both dramatic and comedic. But baseball biographies in movies and TV-movies often sacrifice facts to move the story forward at a watchable pace, increase drama, or provide comic relief. For a sport whose patrons guard its history […]

When Brooks Robinson closed out his active career with the 1977 season, it gave him a record 23 years with one club. Furthermore, the Baltimore Orioles were the only major league team he played for in a career that stretched from 1955 to 1977. Previously he had shared the record with four other players who had […]

The U.S. Supreme Court, 1921–22. Back row, left to right: Louis D. Brandeis, Mahlon Pitney, James McReynolds, and John H. Clarke. Front row, left to right: William R. Day and Joseph McKenna, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, and Oliver Wendell Holmes and Willis Van Devanter. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)   […]

Other than being eaten alive and shot at, Waycross was great. — Hank Aaron (1953)   On March 18, 1953, the Boston Braves did something no club had managed to do since 1903, when the Orioles fled Baltimore to become the New York Highlanders. They moved. To Milwaukee. Among the goods and chattels they brought […]

When Bill Veeck and Hank Greenberg arrived at Comiskey Park on March 11, 1959, as the new owners of the White Sox, Chuck Comiskey raced away in his Cadillac. Greenberg waved, but Comiskey did not return the gesture.1 It was as if Chuck, whose grandfather Charles had brought the White Sox to town in 1900, […]

With two games left in the 1933 season, manager Bucky Harris handed in his resignation. Detroit Tigers owner Frank Navin was suddenly in the market for a new skipper. He knew he needed a strong leader to light a spark under his perennially lethargic club. Enter Mickey Cochrane. In the fall of 1933, the Detroit […]

When James “Deacon” White died on July 7, 1939, the obituary in The Sporting News said that his end had been hastened by disappointment at not being named to the Hall of Fame along with such contemporaries as A. G. Spalding, Cap Anson, Charles Comiskey, Buck Ewing, Hoss Radbourn, and Candy Cummings. He had not […]

University of Wisconsin and Keio University, September 22, 1909. (Rob Fitts Collection)   In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt sent his eldest daughter, Alice, and Secretary of War William Howard Taft on a tour of the Far East, making stops in China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. The trip was part of Roosevelt’s plan to act […]

The Society for American Baseball Research has been selecting each year the baseball personality born 100 years ago who has contributed the most to the national game. Last year, for example, the honor went to Christy Mathewson, born in 1880. This is a nice practice, which should be continued. In fact, I have gone considerably […]

The 1965 Winter Meetings took place in Florida, with meeting venues in both Miami and Fort Lauderdale. It was the finale of an exciting year that marked the first free-agent draft (limited to players who were United States residents); the sudden end of the four-decade New York Yankees dynasty; the opening of baseball’s first indoor […]