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Sox Bid Curse Farewell began as a project of SABR’s Boston Chapter, but as the 20th anniversary of the 2004 Red Sox season approached, it was adopted by the national organization and we are pleased to have it presented as a SABR publication. At the beginning of 2024, SABR published its 100th book in the […]

This article was originally published in “The Northern Game—And Beyond,” the 2002 SABR convention journal.   Like the sea captains of an earlier era, Roland Hemond is a native New Englander who has sailed far and wide and worked in many ports along the way. A kid with a fervor for baseball, he started at […]

Many casual baseball fans and serious sabermetricians alike hold the belief that the home run was not a terribly important part of the game until the arrival of Babe Ruth in the outfield of the New York Yankees in 1920. Just the year before, Ruth had hit 29 homers to slip past Ned Williamson’s single […]

When the movers and shakers of the baseball world descended on the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas for the 2008 Winter Meetings, the sport and the country faced economic uncertainty not witnessed since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The economic downturn that became known as the Financial Crisis or the Great Recession began rumbling […]

The year 1947 was a banner one for the Brooklyn Dodgers. At the same time as the newly desegregated Dodgers seized the National League pennant, the team expanded its appeal to a demographic not traditionally served by organized baseball. It was also a banner year for the advertising industry. With the abatement of wartime shortages, […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume IV (1989).   Good afternoon, students. I am Professor Hailey, and this is Industrial Organization 162, “Baseball as a Business Enterprise” — which is better known around campus, I understand, as “Bats, Balls, and the Bottom Line.” In 1914 a New York court […]

Forfeits were relatively commonplace in the early days of baseball. There was at least one forfeit in the major leagues every year from 1883 to 1907, including 13 in 1884. A review of the reasons for these forfeits reveals how ”bush league” the major leagues still were. In 1889, St. Louis’s American Association team failed […]

  Several players on the 1919 Chicago White Sox agreed to lose that year’s World Series, earning the nickname “Black Sox.” Their manager William (“Kid”) Gleason said publicly after the Series that “something was wrong. I didn’t like the betting odds. I wish no one had ever bet a dollar on the team.”1 Gleason had […]

This article was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s May 2024 newsletter. Fires rage in San Francisco after a major earthquake on April 18, 1906. (Photo: US Army Center of Military History)   In the early hours of April 18, 1906, California was shaken by a major earthquake. The catastrophe was one of the […]

Background The 1972 baseball Winter Meetings played host to over 1,300 people at the Sheraton-Waikiki Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, from Saturday, November 25, through Friday, December 1. “It looms as the largest in history,” said Jack Quinn, general manager of the Pacific Coast League’s Hawaii Islanders, “and it marks the first time that all convention […]