Spring 2011 Baseball Research Journal

Once upon a time, the Chicago Cubs dominated the world. They were the  best team in baseball not just for the one incredible year of 1906, but  for five years, winning nearly 70 percent of their games, four National  League pennants, and two World Series.

Cubs fans raise a fundamental question about the nature of games and spectatorship. It seems paradoxical for a franchise that hasn’t won a World Series since 1908, or a National League pennant since 1945, to have such a large, loyal, and vocal fan base, not just on the North Side of Chicago but nationwide.

Compiling an in-progress list of all known instances of a batter taking a swing while being walked intentionally.

A standard baseball plate appearance, with its strategic mix of balls, strikes, and foul balls can — mathematically — take an infinitely long time to complete … in fact, four times infinitely long to complete, which is just infinitely long. Here's how.

On September 10, 2010, a group of SABR members watched a ballgame in an unusual way: They watched the umpires — and only the umpires. Afterward, they met with two of the umpires to discuss their observations and resulting viewpoints.

The run is the most fundamental and the most important statistic in baseball. Regrettably, clerical errors have been made in the process of crediting the runs scored by the individual players in MLB’s official records. This article presents results from a comprehensive investigation of the accuracy of the official baseball records for runs scored by Detroit Tigers players.

Any Red Sox fan with a few years under their cap identified with Cubs fans. Even if they couldn’t name a single player in the NL Central, Red Sox fans knew in their hearts that the Cubs were “their” National League team. Until 2004.

The most striking facet of the Chicago Cubs’ long-term underachievement has been the team’s lack of World Series success. But just how improbable is the Cubs’ run of failure in the Fall Classic?

As publisher of The Sporting News from 1914 until his death in 1962, Spink oversaw production of a weekly newspaper so indispensable to the baseball fraternity that it was venerated for decades as the “Bible of Baseball.”