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Led by unanimous MVP Hank Greenberg and player-manager Mickey Cochrane, the Detroit Tigers repeated as American League champions in 1935.Despite what a lot of knowledgeable people in the world of professional baseball felt, Mickey Cochrane was nervous. In the spring of 1935, a poll of 194 members of the Baseball Writers Association of America indicated […]

Appendix 2 in Herm Krabbenhoft’s research on Hank Greenberg.

One day in the late summer of 1947, my mom and I were listening to Harry Caray on the radio describe a very exciting play at the plate during a game between the Cardinals and Dodgers. My mom, who had been clipping sliding action photos from the newspapers for many years, said to me: “That […]

April 14, 1925 was a typical opening day of the baseball season. At least it seemed that way at the time. A quarter of a million fan watched the opening games. This included the 45,000 who watched the Yankees, led by Babe Ruth’s stand-in Ben Paschal, beat the Senators 5-1. Babe was hospitalized suffering from […]

The only player to appear in every inning of all nineteen World Series games played by the Washington Senators was born in Salem, New Jersey, on October 16, 1900. Rigorous farm work had matured Leon Allen Goslin into a muscular 185-pound young man, standing just a half-inch shy of six feet. His early pitching exploits […]

In 1937 most of baseball’s headlines went to slugging exploits of Joe Medwick in the National League and to Lou Gehrig, Joe DiNaggio, Jimmy Foxx, and Hank Greenberg in the American League.   Little attention was paid to a bench-riding rookie of the Tigers named Rudy York, not at least until he worked his way into […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1985.   “It is always wrong to consider that something which begins in a small way cannot rapidly become important.” — Plutarch On June 5, 1942, Doreston Luke Carmen Jr. became the thin end of a very large wedge. That […]

Taylor Shaffer, brother of the “Orator,” shortchanged on playing record Taylor Shaffer, younger brother of George “Orator” Shaffer, has a short listing in the baseball encyclopedias: Born, July, 1870; Philadelphia Athletics, American Association, 1890. However, I find that Taylor was born in 1864, was 5-foot-7, weighed 155 pounds, and played in the 1884 Union Association […]

What makes these Detroit Tigers uniform numbers — 2, 5, 6, 16, and 23 — special? Nearly every Tigers fan knows the answer to this question — each of those uniform numbers has been retired, in honor of Charlie Gehringer (2), Hank Greenberg (5), Al Kaline (6), Hal Newhouser (16), and Willie Horton (23). Each of these […]

In the decade of the 1930s, Detroit was a city uneasily poised between the Paris of the West of the 1920s and the Arsenal of Democracy of the 1940s. Auto industry titans like Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers, the Fisher Brothers, Alfred Sloan, and Walter Chrysler had built a powerful industrial engine, but that engine […]