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Excerpted from The Cool of the Evening by Paula Kurman, to be published in the first quarter of 2024 by Rosetta Books.   Dear SABR members, My beloved late husband, Jim Bouton, asked three things of me if I were to outlive him: to make sure his archives were well and safely placed, to donate […]

(Courtesy of The Clemente Museum.)   Robert Clemente was not the first Latino to play major-league baseball, but he was the first Latino superstar. He saw that as both a responsibility and an opportunity. Like Jackie Robinson, he used his athletic celebrity to speak out on behalf of social and racial justice. And like Robinson, […]

Had Michael Brantley stayed healthy, the 2022 World Series could have avoided becoming the first Fall Classic since 1950 to have no African American players. As it was, the Astros outfielder and lone African American on either team’s roster suffered a season-ending shoulder injury that kept him out of postseason play.1 The only other African […]

Baseball aficionados often argue that certain records will never be broken. A classic example is Cal Ripken’s 2,632 consecutive-games-played streak. However, for the most part, the arguments given to support an assertion that a particular record will never be broken are subjective and not analytically rigorous. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine […]

In December 2007, a huge collection of documents, most related to the Black Sox scandal and all of them originating in the offices of the lawyers of White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, was purchased at auction by the Chicago History Museum for nearly $100,000. Among the documents are the reports from the detectives whom Comiskey […]

The cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul became part of the newly formed American Association in November of 1901. The rivalry budded between these two teams shortly after and would continue for years later. This article takes a look at that rivalry and the history of each city’s team.

A few days after Shohei Ohtani made his major league debut on March 29, 2018, Jay Jaffe wrote, “Ohtani is doing things that haven’t been done at the major league level in nearly a century. … and not since 1919 has a player served as both a starting pitcher and a position player with any […]

On July 3-5, 2015, the Houston Astros visited Boston’s Fenway Park for a three-game series. Crew chief Jeff Nelson was on vacation, so Laz Diaz served as crew chief for the three games. Chris Guccione, Cory Blaser, and fill-in umpire Clint Fagan were the other umpires on the crew. Bill Nowlin sat down and talked […]

Recent study has revealed the claim of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York to pioneer status, as well as that of Alexander Cartwright to be the game’s inventor, to be suspect if not altogether baseless. I have taken up the latter claim at length in Baseball in the Garden of Eden and will […]

The turbulence in the business of baseball reached its height in 1890. The players, through their Brotherhood association and chafing under the owners’ efforts to exert more control over them, assembled the financial backing to form their own league, the aptly-named Players’ League. The magnates of the National League and the American Association — particularly […]