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September 30, 1962, was a warm, sunny day in Chicago as the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs took the field for the last game of the season. Both teams resided in the National League basement. The Cubs would finish with a record of 59-103. The Mets would end up even worse, 40-120. The Mets’ […]

Baseball looked different in 1969 from previous years. The pitching mound was lower, the number of teams was greater, and the Chicago Cubs looked like a contender. The Cubs stormed to an early lead in the new NL East Division, a creation necessitated by the expansion that brought the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres […]

The 1915 season had been a tough one for Organized Baseball, and murky moods were probably spread widely across the sport as the annual meetings approached in November and December. As noted in a Sporting Life preview of the four-day meeting of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL), membership had plunged from 47 […]

Dick Hall’s trade to the Baltimore Orioles — with Dick Williams — on April 12, 1961, for Jerry Walker and Chuck Essegian, was influenced by Charles Finley’s resolve not to trade with the Yankees, a team he despised. Finley once pointed a school bus in the direction of New York and burned it to symbolize […]

On August 29, 1966, the Beatles played what would be their final live concert ever at Candlestick Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. The event provided much enjoyment for the concertgoers as the band, still wearing matching suits and their mop-top hairstyles, played a setlist of hits and other music they had recorded over […]

For a batter or pitcher, the best—or worst—of the “Three True Outcomes” is a home run or a strikeout.1 The rates of the both home runs and strikeouts have increased substantially over the years. To illustrate, let’s compare 1949 and 2019. In the National League in 1949, 42,711 at bats resulted in 935 homers and […]

INTRODUCTION This paper has two parts. Part I: The Demise of the 20-Game Winner is a statistical analysis on the history of 20-game winners and possible factors contributing to their decline. Part II: A Tale of Two Pitchers is a qualitative analysis comparing two historic pitching seasons—Denny McLain’s 31 wins in 1968 and Justin Verlander’s […]

Jerry Kindall had no trouble making it to the major leagues. All the 21-year-old University of Minnesota 1956 All-American infielder had to do was sign on the dotted line, and the next day he was in Chicago wearing a Cubs uniform. For Kindall, one of 59 major-league “bonus babies” signed from 1953 through 1957, the […]

Near the end of the 1953 baseball season two young men joined the Chicago Cubs and broke the club’s color line. Two shortstops, they became roommates and the first African American keystone combination in major-league history when one of them was converted into a second baseman. The shortstop, Ernie Banks, was purchased from the Kansas […]