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Roberto Clemente with the Montreal Royals in 1954. (Courtesy of The Clemente Museum.)   This article focuses on Roberto Clemente’s season in the Brooklyn Dodgers organization – his first in a major-league organization. The subject of the Dodgers “hiding” Clemente from other major-league clubs has been researched and debated by baseball scholars and writers.1 This […]

“I never questioned the integrity of an umpire. Their eyesight, yes.” — Leo Durocher   In September 1941 Brooklyn Dodger president Larry MacPhail was elated. His Dodgers had defeated the Boston Braves and were returning by train to New York City, the National League pennant safely in hand. To celebrate the Dodgers’ triumph, MacPhail waited […]

  With Connie Mack’s election as president of the Athletics in January 1937, the Mack family now controlled all of the senior leadership positions in the club’s front office. From left: Earle, Connie, and Roy Mack in 1937. (Courtesy of Robert D. Warrington)   The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1954. In […]

San Francisco Giants Hall of Famer Willie Mays influenced the lives of two other Giants, Bobby and Barry Bonds, both of whom who had significant careers of their own. He was Bobby’s teammate with the Giants, while taking on the role of godfather for Barry as a youngster. When Barry later became a Giant, Mays continued […]

It seems unlikely that anything new could be said about the storied pitching exploits of Warren Spahn, who put together the greatest career by any left-handed pitcher during the postwar era. He is remembered not only for his excellence, but also for his consistency, having won 20 or more games in a season 13 times, as […]

  The 2014 Little League World Series left baseball fans everywhere awestruck. With her 70-mph fastball, a 13-year-old girl by the name of Mo’ne Davis pitched a complete-game shutout to lead her team, the Taney Dragons, to a 4-0 victory. In doing so, she was the first girl ever to pitch a winning game in […]

Seventy-three home runs in a single season would have been considered absurd only a few years ago, yet Barry Bonds accomplished this astounding feat in 2001. Bonds’ record-breaking season, eclipsing the mark of 70 set by Mark McGwire only four years earlier raises the question of which ballplayers truly own the greatest single-season home run performances […]

Introduction The 2017 MLB season set records for both home runs (6,105) and strikeouts (40,104). Conventional wisdom would suggest that this is not a coincidence. The argument is that players don’t mind striking out more often if they also hit more home runs. The raw data for these two parameters are easily plotted over time […]

Milwaukee County Stadium was in its third season as home of the National League’s Braves when it hosted the inaugural Global World Series in 1955. (Courtesy of the Milwaukee Brewers)   Half a century before there was a World Baseball Classic, there was the Global World Series. The scars of World War II had not […]

Mike Piazza, Sadaharu Oh and Tommy Lasorda (Courtesy of Mark Langill)   What felt like a nostalgia trip unexpectedly served as a dress rehearsal for the next frontier of professional baseball when the 1993 Los Angeles Dodgers staged a modest five-game “Friendship Series” in Taiwan and Japan. Nobody could’ve predicted a “Tornado” on the horizon, […]