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This article was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s August 2021 newsletter.   If Fred Odwell isn’t the most obscure home run champion in the history of major league baseball, it’s only because the competition is surprisingly stiff. After all, who remembers Oyster Burns, who shared the National League lead in 1890, or Braggo […]

It has been over 20 years since Baseball Prospectus developed the statistic “Wins Above Replacement Player” (WARP), and 12 years since Sean Smith’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was first posted on Baseball-Reference.com.1 WAR now is widely recognized as a useful metric for assessing a ballplayer’s overall performance. Several performance-based awards are given to players each […]

A brief overview of Southern California University baseball programs, and their major league products. 

“Has anybody else told you about Dobie Moore? Well, I’ll tell you something about him. That Moore was one of the best shortstops that will ever live! That fella could stand up to the plate and hit right-handed, he could hit line drives out there just as far as you want to see.” — Casey […]

“My real name is Grover Williams Jones, Junior,” Deacon Jones explained in a 2008 interview. “Everybody started calling me Deacon because my father was a deacon in the Baptist church. My brother Johnny and I, we had to go to church every Sunday, all day, belong to the choir, BYPU, usher boys, you name it…the […]

Scores of professional ballplayers have made their way from the big leagues to the big screen. A few, including Chuck Connors, Bob Uecker, and John Beradino (who played for the Browns, Indians, and Pirates as Johnny Berardino), became successful actors or media personalities. Some, notably Babe Ruth, appeared in movies as themselves, or as thinly […]

  Mike Mussina’s induction was a clear sign that Hall of Fame voters had entered the twenty-first century. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   For an 82-year-old organization, the National Baseball Hall of Fame has remained surprisingly static in some respects. Baseball Writers Association of America members vote on recently-retired players, as the writers […]

 Minor-League Winter Meeting The prospect of war cast a long shadow over the National Association meeting for 1941. Europe and Asia had been mired in conflict for more than two years by this time, and just days after the meetings concluded, the United States would be forced to enter the second worldwide war of the […]

The history of baseball in America has always been closely tied to the history of race in America. The progression of baseball from an exclusionary sport to a beacon for integration and eventually to a global game has paralleled our country’s movement from slavery to the civil rights movement to modern day multiculturalism. While the […]

The oldest professional baseball park in the United States—Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama—adds another chapter to its rich history this summer when it hosts the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals in a regular-season game.1 The specialty game will coincide with Juneteenth celebrations and honor Hall of Famer Willie Mays, who played for the […]