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A wag once wrote a history of the Philadelphia Phillies and entitled it “One Hundred Years in the Cellar.” He was not far off the mark. In fact, in the first seven decades after the Phillies entered the National League in 1883, save for two brief periods of success in the 1890s and the mid-teens […]

There are two main objectives for the hitter.  The first is to not make an out and the second is to hit for distance. Long-ball hitting is normally measured by slugging average. Not making an out can be expressed in terms of on base average (OBA), where:       OBA    =  Hits + Walks […]

Editor’s Note: On this page, Parts One and Two, which were published separately in the Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 issues of the Baseball Research Journal, are combined into one article as the author intended. Sandy Koufax (SABR-Rucker Archive)   American Jews have long had a love affair with baseball. They have played baseball since […]

Part I: The Great Glass Era In the damp and chilly spring of 1907, at the height of the great glass era, an erudite professor of languages, a polite young first baseman and an eccentric left-handed pitcher came to the Hilltop in Kane, Pennsylvania to play professional baseball. While their time together as teammates would […]

When a team is going through a disappointing season, its fans are likely to plead for changes. Since acquiring new players may be impossible because of trading deadlines or lack of quality players to offer in exchange, and since general managers and owners usually do not wish to replace themselves, the team often will fire […]

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from the chapter on the 1926–32 Yankees and 1928–32 Athletics found on the author’s website, www.thebestbaseballteams.com. In the annals of baseball history, the New York Yankees are often remembered as being most formidable when they had Babe Ruth batting third and Lou Gehrig right behind him in the cleanup […]

1931 All-Americans in front of the Oriental Hotel in Kobe (National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, NY)   It was a tour initially framed by the dreams of retired fringe major-league outfielder Herb Hunter, the continuing quest of a Japanese newspaper publisher to bring Babe Ruth to Japan before he retired as a player, and the metastasizing […]

Shortly after the invasion of Normandy in 1944, cities throughout the United States selected players to appear in the first Esquire All-American Boys Baseball Game in New York. From the time the first Pittsburgh player, Bill Herstek, was selected for the Esquire game in 1944 to the time Glenn Beckert was selected for the Hearst […]

The 1934 baseball winter meetings could very easily have just gone to the dogs. The talk leading up to the convention was the desperate attempt of the Boston Braves owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, to pull his team out of the red by requesting that Braves Field host nightly greyhound racing. These were desperate times during […]

Editor’s note: The following biographical sketch of Larry Corcoran — the first pitcher to ever throw three career no-hitters — appeared in SABR’s “Nineteenth Century Stars”, published in 1989: Larry Corcoran appeared on the mound for the Mutual and Chelsea clubs of his native Brooklyn in the early weeks of the 1877 season, transferring to […]