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In 1922, the New York Yankees played the New York Giants in the World Series; the majors produced three .400 hitters; Rogers Hornsby won the Triple Crown; and Organized Baseball reached the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Baseball had long been a popular pastime on the Shore. Almost every town supported a team, and competition among […]

Creative heckling is one of the more interesting features of a baseball game. Fans yell things at many sports events, but baseball’s timing and pace make it more congenial for heckling than do other team sports; so does the focus on the individual performance. Creative heckling—educated yelling—can be entertaining, even an art form. True, some people […]

On the afternoon of Saturday, December 14, 1996, a 700-foot, 70,000-ton bulk cargo ship, fully loaded with grain, lost engine power and glided ominously toward a shopping mall along New Orleans’ Mississippi River. Acting quickly, the cool-headed pilot dropped his anchors in an attempt to slow the massive vessel and blasted the emergency horn. As […]

The history of Wrigley Field is intermingled with that of the city of Los Angeles. It hosted the fiercest rivalry in minor league baseball between the Pacific Coast League (PCL) Angels and Hollywood Stars as well as other baseball, boxing, football, high school and a myriad of community events.

This article was originally published in “St. Louis’s Favorite Sport,” the 1992 SABR convention journal.   Sixty years ago there were no millionaire ballplayers in St. Louis. No night baseball, no artificial turf, no exploding scoreboards, no plane travel, no West Coast baseball teams, no television, no helmets, no batting gloves, no blacks in the […]

The Phillies’ Richie Ashburn hit only 29 homers—approximately one per 300 times at bat—in a 15-year career, and none of them are legendary because of their length. Eight were inside-the-parkers that never left the playing field. Exhibiting a slashing style of hitting that contrasted sharply with the “swing-from-the-heels” approach of most of his contemporaries, he […]

In May of 1957, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley took a helicopter ride over Chavez Ravine, the eventual home of his iconic new ballpark. In Brooklyn he had loaded the team with Italian and African American players to reflect the demographics of that borough. He wanted his team to reflect the large Mexican American population in […]

They were decades apart in time and hundreds of miles apart in where they played, but they had some things in common. Both were outfielders who set enduring records, one of them among the oldest in Organized Baseball. And both were involved in unusual incidents en route to their crowns. What Joe Wilhoit did was […]

While the New York Yankees had a wife swap between pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich in Florida in March of 1973, the Oakland A’s went about the business of getting ready to defend a world championship in Arizona. The only snag was that the A’s had no experience as world champions. The organization had […]

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, from Four Quartets   If it hadn’t been for my mother Jaqueline’s suggestion that I apply for a job as a Little […]