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This article discusses Roger Maris’s 1961 season from a new perspective. This is not a comparison of each home run hit by Maris in 1961 with those hit by Babe Ruth in 1927, but rather proposes a method to compare the Maris performance with the Ruth performance on a near-equivalent basis. Though there exists the […]

The term “hero” has come to mean a fictional or actual figure known for his bold exploits or daring adventure. As a youngster in the early fifties I was impressed with the cinematic heroics of John Wayne, as he battled the forces of world aggression and the romanticized bravado of Gene Autry and Roy. Rogers, […]

The run is the most fundamental and the most important statistic in baseball. Regrettably, clerical (e.g., transcription) errors have been made in the process of crediting the runs scored by the individual players in MLB’s official records.[fn]Two possible sources for errors can enter the official records. The first possible source for errors in the official […]

There is some irony in the fact that baseball recordkeepers have been compiling annual leaders of most strikeouts by a batter. This is a negative category; yet, for years these tabulations have been carried right along with the annual leaders in home runs, batting, etc. A much more positive and meaningful listing would be the […]

In the 1996 Baseball Research Journal, I presented some­thing I call “Normalized Winning Percentage,” or NWP. After a decade’s passage of time, and the emergence of a new all-time leader and number two man, it seems a good time to revisit this statistic. NWP projects how a pitcher might perform on a .500 team, thus putting […]

If the business of baseball seemed bleak following the previous season, the 1893-1894 offseason started from a different place in attitudes toward the business of baseball. Following the upheaval of recent seasons, Sporting Life proclaimed, “Both artistically and financially the season was the most successful since 1889.”1 Just as the negative outlook following the 1892 […]

Once upon a time, A.J. Liebling, consummate Manhattanite and writer for The New Yorker, dubbed Chicago America’s Second City.1 But in relation to New York-centric baseball movies, this AAA-league rating is extremely generous. Across the decades, baseball films with Chicago references have been relatively scarce. For every on-screen image of Wrigley Field, there are scores […]

Graveyards are not a significant part of baseball lore. True, the 1919 Cincinnati Reds held spring workouts in a Texas town’s cemetery. Moe Berg, visiting a Baltimore cemetery after dark, is reported to have stood on the grave of Edgar Allan Poe and recited “The Raven” from beginning to end. Edd Roush administered a cemetery […]

He was neither a physician nor a trainer, but John O. “Bonesetter’ Reese was probably the best known treater of injured ballplayers in the first three decades of the twentieth century. He built a practice in which he saw athletes, enter­tainers, and statesmen, but also the mill workers of his adopted Youngstown, Ohio. He beat […]

At the ballpark, when the home team loads the bases, people stand up and cheer. You don’t see many fans slapping their heads, saying, “Rats, now there’s a force at every base. I wish the bases weren’t loaded.” Yet in a surprising number of 1999’s postseason games, the team in the field chose to load […]