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For a youngster passionately devoted to baseball and living on the north side of Chicago during the 1950s, every summer revolved around the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs and getting to Wrigley Field as often as possible. There, in a ballpark that dominated the immediate neighborhood, we were always swept up by the most colorful […]

Gavy Cravath led the National League in home runs six times in seven seasons. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   What more is there to say about Clifford Carlton “Gavy” “Cactus” Cravath, the enigmatic Deadball Era slugger relegated to the dustbin of baseball history by George Herman Ruth? How about this: He was likely the first player to […]

At SABR’s 2006 convention one speaker analyzed the commissioners of baseball and rated Judge Landis the best of all. In the question-and-answer session that followed, a member of the audience challenged the speaker: “How can you stand here in the year 2006 and praise Landis, who was so instrumental in keeping blacks out of Major […]

On the afternoon of Sunday, June 20, 1965, New York Mets announcer Ralph Kiner described for listeners on WHN Radio in New York one of the more awesome sights in major-league baseball in the mid-1960s: “Sandy Koufax, one of the top left-handers in the history of baseball …”1 Baseball Hall of Fame writer Roger Angell […]

Data visualization is an art. Alli Torban, a Washington, DC-based data visualization consultant, defines the art as a tool to “widen the circle of people who know what you know”—a truly apt description of the value of data visualization in an environment of information overload.1 Data visualization is also a science, using charts and graphs […]

Chadwick Boseman portrays Jackie Robinson in the Warner Bros/Legendary Entertainment motion picture 42. (Courtesy of Alamy)   The New York City skyline gleams in the background. A gravelly but urgent voice begins talking as the music swells to the climactic line delivered by the legendary Harrison Ford before it drops to the epic Jay-Z anthem […]

ORIGINAL BULLPEN PLACE FOR FRUGAL FANS THE TERM “BULLPEN” IS generally believed to have come into baseball with the advent of relief pitchers who usually warmed up in the area where Bull Durham signs were located. The term, however, goes all the way back to the beginning of major league baseball itself, and its original […]

A boy on a pony, his glove hitched to his belt, emerges from the fields along Venezuela’s Oeste 1      highway and pauses while a cane truck lumbers by. A bus sweeps past, enveloping him in dust, but brakes for the slow-moving truck. The boy, with a whoop, gallops after the crawling caravan. Waving wildly, he […]

The 1964 Phillies enjoyed a six-and-a-half game lead in the National League with 12 games left in the season, proceeded to lose 10 in a row, and surrendered the pennant to the St. Louis Cardinals. The closing two weeks of the 1964 regular season inflicted psychic baseball wounds which began to heal after the Phillies’ […]

  Bill Veeck had a decades-long baseball career. He was known for bringing a little person up to bat with the sole intention of getting a walk because his strike zone was impossibly small. He was the first big-league owner to put names on the backs of uniforms. He erected a huge center field scoreboard […]

A group of boys hung over their dorm’s balcony railing, hardly believing that their hero was playing catch in the courtyard below with some of their schoolmates. The tall, rangy man throwing the ball to some of the older students was barely in his twenties, moving with the strong but casual grace common to athletes.1 […]

San Francisco Giants Hall of Famer Willie Mays influenced the lives of two other Giants, Bobby and Barry Bonds, both of whom who had significant careers of their own. He was Bobby’s teammate with the Giants, while taking on the role of godfather for Barry as a youngster. When Barry later became a Giant, Mays continued […]

“I don’t give a damn about O’Malley.” Hank Greenberg was furious. The 6-foot-4 Hall of Famer towered over Commissioner Ford Frick, who had just told him what he did not want to hear: Before Greenberg could put an American League expansion team in Los Angeles, he would have to pay tribute to Dodgers owner Walter […]

Introduction and Context As World War II seemed to be winding down (even though the Battle of the Bulge in Europe was only days away and the Pacific invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were still in the future), recovery from the war was the watchword at the 43rd annual baseball winter meetings. The nation […]

This article was honored with a SABR Analytics Conference Research Award in 2016.   In 1976, for the first time in thirty-three seasons, total stolen bases exceeded total home runs in Major League Baseball.1 A consistent turn towards more frequent basestealing had already become evident on the field, as teams collectively stole over 1,000 more […]

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 […]

Willie Mays batted .298 in 399 career games at the Polo Grounds and hit 98 home runs. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   Certain ballparks complement the strengths of specific players. Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923, was termed The House That Ruth Built. One reason for such a slogan was the short distance […]

Baseball fans love numbers — 755, 511, 2,632, for instance, or .300 batting averages, winning 20 games, stealing 100 bases, hitting 100 mph on the radar gun — all are part of the lore of the game. Sometimes those numbers include specific years, generally the year we started watching or the year our favorite team […]

National League president Warren Giles was in San Diego for Opening Day, April 8, 1969, and here joins Buzzie Bavasi holding an aerial photograph of the Padres’ new ballpark, San Diego Stadium. (Courtesy of Tom Larwin)   San Diego’s quest for major-league baseball began in the mid- to late 1950s, around the time Los Angeles […]

The band struck up “Hail the Conquering Heroes Come,” and cheering Philadelphia fans opened a gauntlet at the depot October 24, 1910, to let their victorious Athletics pass through. The A’s had just arrived from Chicago, where they had whipped the Cubs four games to one to win the baseball championship of the world. At […]

Jackie Robinson, United States Army. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   The course of history can flip on a dime, the course of one’s life often defined by a series of watershed flash-points. Some we control; others are thrust upon us. On December 7, 1941, Jackie Robinson was two days into his journey from […]

What was George Sisler thinking when he signed a contract to play professional baseball in Akron, Ohio, in January 1911 at the tender age of 17? After all, he had not consulted with his family or any other adult except for Jesse Goehler, who, acting as a representative of the Akron club, signed the future […]