Search Results

The 1908 National League race is best remembered for the “Merkle game” between the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs, who were in a dead heat for first place at the end of the season. The clubs met to replay that tie game. The Cubs won and went on to beat the Detroit Tigers […]

Very little has been written about Deadball Era umpires who established the foundations of the modern umpiring profession — the implementation of umpire signals, the two-umpire system, and more support from league authorities for umpires. And yet this group of men who umpired during the Deadball Era established the traditions, rules, and procedures by which […]

New York Giants stalwarts Christy Mathewson and John McGraw. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)   They open the door. They’re opening thirty doors at once, but I can only talk about mine. Air from 2040 goes out, and air from 1905 comes in. The first thing I do is cough. It smells like horseshit and coal smoke […]

Interview with Dean Lewis conducted by Bill Nowlin on July 4, 2015. Dean Lewis has been with the Red Sox since 1980, when he was 16 years old, working in the Red Sox clubhouse with his twin brother Dan. Dan has gone on to other work as a VP in the hotel industry. Dean spent […]

After the passing of nearly 40 years, as is the case since World War II, we are inclined to recall events differently than the way they really happened. Now, there’s nothing wrong with fantasizing a little or adding color to actual events, but the amount of distortion and misleading material that has been published in […]

This veteran observer saw his first big league game at old Columbia Park, Philadelphia, in 1904, and saw the Philadelphia Athletics win the game, 3-0, from the Detroit Tigers. It was the season before the immortal Ty Cobb played his first game in Detroit. But I saw Hall of Famer San Crawford and lesser Tigers […]

The 1911 winter meetings played out in the press as well as in the meeting rooms. Two days before the start of the 1911 World Series, which matched the New York Giants against the Philadelphia Athletics, the newspapers in both cities noticed that large blocks of World Series tickets had fallen into the hands of […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the SABR Deadball Era Research Committee’s “The Inside Game” newsletter for November 2014. With Hank O’Day and Jacob Ruppert being inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2013, it is reasonable to ask which Deadball Era figures — if any — still merit inclusion. Considering that no […]

About 3,000 people were present at the Brotherhood Base Ball Grounds when the championship pennant for 1890 was presented to the Boston Club. Colonel Charles H. Taylor made the presentation speech, complimenting the team upon the high standard of their work during the season. Mike Kelly received the pennant, made no set speech, and immediately […]

From SABR member Warren Rogan at Sports’ Forgotten Heroes on June 5, 2019, with SABR member Dennis Bingham: Hank O’Day is one of the most unique and important figures in the history of Major League Baseball. He broke into the game as a pitcher in the American Association for Toledo in 1884. He finished his […]