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Each year, SABR’s Deadball Era Committee presents the Larry Ritter Book Award to recognize the best new baseball book primarily set in the Deadball Era that was published during the previous calendar year. The Ritter Award is presented during the Deadball Committee’s meeting at the annual SABR convention. The award is named in honor of […]

“The unionization of professional athletes has been the most important labor relations development in professional sports since their inception.”1 Journalist Studs Terkel called Marvin Miller “the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis,” long-time president of the United Mine Workers and founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.2 Actually, he may have sold Miller […]

In the decade of the 1930s, Detroit was a city uneasily poised between the Paris of the West of the 1920s and the Arsenal of Democracy of the 1940s. Auto industry titans like Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers, the Fisher Brothers, Alfred Sloan, and Walter Chrysler had built a powerful industrial engine, but that engine […]

Background As the 1969 baseball Winter Meetings approached, the central issues on the minds of most owners were the recommendations of the restructuring committee that had been created the year before. At that meeting, in San Francisco, the owners had fired William Eckert as commissioner, and had formed a group to examine ways to restructure […]

You sat so close to the field you could almost touch the players. After the last out, you could run the bases. The stands, usually wooden, were rickety, and monstrosities in construction; the distances to the fences were eccentric. But the quaint old ballparks (not stadiums) had a warmth and charm, a different smell from […]

The story of how Frank Baker, the Philadelphia Athletics star third baseman, earned the nickname of “Home Run” is well known to even casual fans of baseball. As his Hall of Fame plaque states, he “won two World Series games from [the] Giants in 1911 with home-runs thus getting name ‘Home Run’ Baker.” Baker’s two […]

 Minor-League Winter Meeting The prospect of war cast a long shadow over the National Association meeting for 1941. Europe and Asia had been mired in conflict for more than two years by this time, and just days after the meetings concluded, the United States would be forced to enter the second worldwide war of the […]

This appendix accompanies the article “Player Win Averages” written by Pete Palmer and published in the Spring 2016 Baseball Research Journal. To scroll down to pitchers, click here.   Player Win Averages-Batters Player Games PW RW Barry Bonds 2986 120.3 123.2 Henry Aaron 3298 97.2 94.6 Willie Mays 2992 95.7 87.5 Mickey Mantle 2401 92.4 […]

The cover of Tim Darnell’s book Southern Yankees describes the now virtually forgotten Atlanta Crackers as “one of minor league baseball’s most successful and storied franchises.” Over a 65-year period from 1895 through 1960, playing largely in the Southern Association, the Crackers won 17 pennants and six playoff titles. The 1954 Crackers were particularly notable, […]

23 PITCHES The 1934 All-Star Game started ominously for Carl Hubbell. The first two American League batters reached base in the top of the first at New York’s Polo Grounds. The National League’s All-Star infielders gathered in a protective circle around their pitcher. They could offer plenty of advice: Hubbell’s manager with the Giants, Bill […]