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Happy Birthday, Mr. K! Royals pitcher Moe Drabowsky presents a birthday cake to Ewing Kauffman as his wife Muriel and ‘Royal Lancer’ Lester Milgram look onwards, September 1969. (Courtesy of the Kansas City Royals)   Charles O. Finley never seemed to connect with the people of Kansas City after acquiring ownership of the Athletics in […]

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 […]

On the afternoon of Sunday, October 15, 1972, Jackie Robinson stood on the field of Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium in the brilliant afternoon sunshine. Game Two of the World Series between the Oakland A’s and the Cincinnati Reds was to be played that day, and in a pregame ceremony, Robinson was being recognized on the 25th […]

Triple Crown Winners: Champions of three different leagues for 1938. (Nikkei National Museum 2010-30-1-3-15 ab)   A curving pitch appears in slow motion from a hurler not in focus. The voice-over is somber, an older man, remembering. “We were born in Canada,” says Kaye Kaminishi. “We spoke English.” On screen, a batter pushes a bunt […]

While professional baseball and politics have always been linked, only once has a major league baseball team become a voluntary part of a Presidential campaign. The visible evidence of this happenstance is the 1920 Chicago Cubs’ exhibition game in a small Ohio town against a squad of local semi-professionals called the Kerrigan Tailors. United States […]

It’s the top of the 10th inning, and there is one out in this hotly contested All-Star Game. A runner is on third by way of the triple, another on first via the intentional walk, but now the pitcher has this batter on the ropes with a 2–2 count. The crowd is evenly split between […]

  Smile. Tilt your head. Lean back. A little more. You’ve got it. Right there. Beautiful! Snap! With each pose, each shutter click, Marla Collins crossed the line from Chicago Cubs ballgirl to Playboy model. Both paying roles relied on sexuality: one teased and implied, the other overt. And before you hyperventilate about “pornography,” know […]

A list of all documented cycles through the end of the 2017 MLB seasonThis is the online Appendix for Michael Huber and Allison Davidson’s article, “Origin of the Phrase ‘Hitting for the Cycle’ and An Approach to How Cycles Occur” in the Spring 2018 “Baseball Research Journal.   Here is a list of all documented […]

The cover of The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson, illustration by Steve Carter & jacket design by Todd Radom. (Courtesy of Penguin Random House)   Consider this quote from eminent baseball historian Donald Honig’s 1985 book Baseball America: “For those who cared to pay attention, Robinson’s style of play should have been both threat and […]

The London, Ontario, baseball tournament held toward the end of August 1869 featured a special category reserved for “colored” teams from Canada and the United States. Two years after the country’s Confederation in 1867, Canadians were still held in high regard for having opened their borders to freed slaves in the pre-Civil War era while […]