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When Calvin Griffith sold the Minnesota Twins in 1984, he bowed out of baseball as the last of the family owners whose franchise represented their principal business and source of wealth. Griffith spent practically his entire life in baseball, spending his young adulthood working in one capacity or another for the Washington Nationals organization that […]

Introduction and Context As the American and National Leagues prepared for the 1924 winter meetings in New York City, drama laced the usual business agenda of trades, rulings, and discussion of regulations. The NL had faced trouble internally since the end of September, when its president, John Heydler, disclosed, first to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis […]

Defiance College in northwestern Ohio has fielded a baseball team since 1905. Like most small colleges, Defiance places academics ahead of athletics, and the baseball team generally loses more games than it wins. The 1961 baseball season, however, was a shining exception. That season the Defiance College baseball team was invited to the NAIA national […]

Although Al Kaline obviously deserved the many accolades he received as an exceptional athlete with admirable personal characteristics, misconceptions have long existed regarding the severity of challenges he faced in his youth and during his 22-year professional baseball career. This article will address a litany of circumstances that he encountered and explain how he overcame […]

The Chicago Cubs finished 1941 in sixth place in the National League with a 70-84 record. Their offensive attack was led by Stan Hack, who hit .317 with a .417 on-base percentage; Bill Nicholson, who contributed 26 homers and 98 runs batted in; and Babe Dahlgren, who added 16 homers in 99 games. The staff […]

Baseball parks contain an aura and grandiosity that seem ripe for events beyond the game. Yet their odd angles, inconsistent dimensions, and strange sightlines have made them a historic challenge as a site in which to pull off a concert.1 Still, some of the most famous shows on American soil took place somewhere between a […]

Speculating on ultimately unanswerable questions remains one of most fascinating aspects for those of us who study baseball history. For example, how might many of the all-time records differ if Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, and all of the other great Negro League stars had been eligible to play in white Organized Ball? How […]

In the early years of the American League, Boston fans had a lot to smile about—World Series victories in 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918—but after that, everything changed for the worse. Not only was Babe Ruth infamously sold, but the Red Sox began a string of losing seasons. Faced with teams that seldom left […]

Opening Day in Toronto, April 7, 1977, as a snowstorm blankets the field at Exhibition Stadium. (Courtesy of Elliott and Helene Wahle)   The date was September 4, 1967. As Canada’s centennial summer drew to a close, a sparse crowd of 802 gathered at Maple Leaf Stadium to watch the hometown Leafs of the International […]

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 […]