Search Results

Chadwick Boseman portrays Jackie Robinson in the Warner Bros/Legendary Entertainment motion picture 42. (Courtesy of Alamy)   The New York City skyline gleams in the background. A gravelly but urgent voice begins talking as the music swells to the climactic line delivered by the legendary Harrison Ford before it drops to the epic Jay-Z anthem […]

Jackie Robinson, right, shakes hands with manager Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers at spring training in Havana, Cuba in March 1947. (SABR-RUCKER ARCHIVE)   In reviewing the career of Jackie Robinson in hindsight, one advantage is that everything seems as if it was a certainty. Robinson was one of the great players in the […]

For decades, baseball fans have debated who was the better center fielder, Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were both born in 1931 and reached the majors almost simultaneously in 1951, competing against each other as rookies in the World Series. Together with Duke Snider, they appeared in […]

It’s one thing to lead a league in doubles, triples, or homers, quite another to lead in two or three of these categories the same year. It’s truly remarkable-and rare-to hit 20 of each. THREE HALL-OF-FAMERS, one active player who could make the Hall, and one old-timer who probably never will, share an unusual extra-base […]

Evaluating a player’s talent, ability, and contributions to his team is an important task of analyzing the game of baseball. In recent years, the prevalent metric for player evaluation has been Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which distills the evaluation into a single number that can be compared directly with that of other players. WAR measures […]

This is the third special pictorial issue of The National Pastime, following those devoted to “The Nineteenth Century” (1984) and “The Dead Ball Era” (1986). With this offering we bring SABR’s pictorial history of baseball from 1920, where we left on; to 1946. ‘The Big-Bang Era” on display in these pages was a remarkable period, […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume III (1988).   Baseball literature begins with “Casey at the Bat.” While Ernest L. Thayer’s classic verse is neither the first poem to utilize baseball as its subject, nor the first attempt to capture the game under the guise of literature, “Casey At […]

“It takes courage to be a pioneer”1   The Hero Two Doors Down, written by Sharon Robinson, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, and cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi and Mary Claire Cruz. (Courtesy of Scholastic Publishers)   There is a lovely scene in Ken Burns’ documentary series Jackie Robinson in which Robinson’s daughter, Sharon, remembers […]

Editor’s note: In the Spring 2012 issue of “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game,” noted Black Sox expert Bob Hoie used player salary data to put to rout the long-held notion that the 1919 Chicago White Sox were underpaid. As it turns out, the Sox had the second-highest player payroll in the major […]

While considerable attention has been paid to the home run feats of outstanding players such as Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron, comparatively little consideration has been given to outstanding team home run achievements, particularly those occurring in a single game. On 28 occasions, a major league team has nit at least 7 home […]