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  The fiftieth anniversary of the passage of Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments of 1972 gives us an opportunity to reflect on its impact on women’s sports as a whole and on specific sports such as baseball. Women’s participation has been overlooked and marginalized in most publications and general discussions about the sport. […]

Defiance College in northwestern Ohio has fielded a baseball team since 1905. Like most small colleges, Defiance places academics ahead of athletics, and the baseball team generally loses more games than it wins. The 1961 baseball season, however, was a shining exception. That season the Defiance College baseball team was invited to the NAIA national […]

The National League and the American Association entered their respective winter meetings — hereafter called the annual meetings1 — buoyed by the growing popularity and profits of the past 1886 season.2 The owners recognized that to further expand the popularity of baseball and, with the consequent rise in attendance, increase their profits, they had to […]

Let me propose a hypothesis: The Cubs and Pirates are each other’s biggest rival. A few years ago I mentioned the idea to Cubs expert Art Ahrens (we were both in our cups), and he looked at me as if I were crazy. But I was researching the Cubs and the Pirates—my two favorite teams—and […]

Nineteen twenty-one was a remarkable baseball season, one that signaled that a seismic shift in how the game was played was underway. Baseball was moving from low-scoring contests dominated by pitching to a power game with more hits, runs, and home runs. It was the year that New York City rose to the top of […]

The rhetorical examples on the opposite page furnish a vivid indication of a social institution’s troubles escalating into a strident national issue. On April 1, 1972, major league baseball players embarked on an all-out strike against the 24 franchise owners over the matter of pension benefits. Before the strike was ended 13 days later, the […]

While baseball’s origin story began on the East Coast, the Midwest has been a vital part of the growth of America’s pastime. Although a disastrous fire in 1871 temporarily stunted the city’s growth, Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century was a growing hub for commerce and culture. As the United States expanded westward, […]

Current defensive statistics are far less meaningful than batting or fielding  statistics,  mostly because  the  correct  information  is  not  collected. Statistics that do exist tend either to be not revealing or incredibly complex. I propose the collection of a single new piece of information that I think might change popular understandings of defense and allow […]

Introduction The 1983 Baseball Winter Meetings were held at the Opryland Hotel, in Nashville, Tennessee, from December 5 to 10. Trades and free-agent signings usually headline the agenda of the annual gathering of executives, managers, scouts, agents, lawyers, accountants, and media personnel. Going into the 1983 meetings, though, there were several unresolved issues, including the […]

The mission of the California Angels in 1973 was to find a way to wrest the American League West Division title from their in-state neighbors to the north, the World Series champion Oakland Athletics. The Angels were counting on improvements engineered by General Manager Harry Dalton after the 1972 season. Now in his second season […]