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In 1944, three years before he broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, Lieutenant Jack Roosevelt Robinson was court-martialed at Fort Hood, Texas. Robinson had volunteered for combat with the segregated 761st Tank Battalion. Although he had signed a waiver for a previous football injury, he was required to undergo extensive medical tests before being transferred […]

The 1985 Winter Meetings had showcased a then-record 62 free agents, but the 1986 free-agent class shattered that mark as 82 players filed for free agency by the deadline.1 Despite the uptick in the number of free agents, however, for the second year in a row none of them signed with a new club at […]

This undated publicity photo (circa 1944–49) of the Clowns includes Edward “King Tut” King and in the lower right inset, “baseball clown” Ed Hamman in full clownface. Hamman would eventually become sole owner of the Clowns. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   Found almost exclusively in black newspapers, box scores for Miami Ethiopian Clowns […]

Cover of the May 1927 issue of Yakyukai depicting O’Neal Pullen and Shinji Hamazaki (Rob Fitts Collection)   Kazuo Sayama, baseball historian, author, and member of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame (enshrined in 2021), states with great passion and conviction that had it not been for the tours of the Negro Leagues’ all-star Philadelphia […]

Entrance to Replay Operations Center, New York City.   In 1955, a producer on Canadian television used a kinescope to show a replay during a Hockey Night in Canada telecast, the first time anyone had shown a play a second time on television. In the early 1960s, a director for CBS Sports invented a replay […]

The major-league portion of the 1907 winter meetings were held by both leagues on the same days, Tuesday through Thursday, December 10-12. It was the second year they’d met simultaneously. The National League met in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria while the American League met in Chicago. New York was the home of […]

As the American League’s pecking order of the 1950s was established, the Washington Senators (or Nationals) suffered greatly from the lack of a strong beak. Even with the 1960 season—the final campaign of the original franchise—tossed in for good measure, teams from the nation’s capital consistently played in a manner that inspired ridicule in an enduring […]

Radio broadcasts of Yankees games in the 1920s were sparse, but Graham McNamee (shown here with Babe Ruth) often called the few that did make the air. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   For New York Yankees fans, Wednesday, April 18, 1923, was a momentous occasion: That was the day the brand-new Yankee Stadium […]

South Florida is notoriously hot in the summer, but conditions heated up another notch in 1952 when the Miami Sun Sox and the Miami Beach Flamingos fought it out in one of the great pennant races of minor league baseball. The 1952 dash for the pennant involved two colorful managers, the contentious Johnny “Pepper” Martin […]

Jackie Robinson playing in a spring training game vs. Havana Cubans. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)   Separated by fewer than three miles, the Hotel Los Angeles near la Habana Vieja (Old Havana) and the Hotel Nacional in the city’s Vedado district were worlds apart. Sitting on a bluff overlooking El Malecón, Havana’s famed coastal roadway, the Nacional […]