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As a young baseball player in rural Minnesota, Dick Stigman picked the perfect day to pitch a perfect game. Cy Slapnicka, the man who signed Cleveland greats Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, and Herb Score, was watching. In the spring of 1954, three days after graduating from Sebeka High School, Richard Lewis Stigman (born January 24, […]

He was born in Ireland during the Potato Famine, named for an American president, and crossed the ocean as an infant to become a star in a game that was unknown in his native land at the time. Eventually, baseball came to flourish in Ireland. In the present Irish Baseball League the most outstanding player […]

When Jim Holt played for the Minnesota Twins, sportswriter Bob Fowler wrote that he was the type of ballplayer every winning team needed, one who knew how to play the game and was ready whenever called upon. “Every team has an underrated player, a man who isn’t a most valuable player but a most valued […]

James Thomas McGuire, who would be known as “Deacon Jim” based on his gentlemanly, fair-play approach to the game, was the most durable catcher of his era. It was widely reported that he was never put out of a game or fined. He was steady in performance and temperament with some of his greatest baseball […]

Outfielder Greg Harts got into his only three big-league games with the New York Mets during the 1973 pennant race. The lefty was called up from Double-A and got a hit in two pinch-hit at-bats. His only other appearance came as a pinch-runner; he never played in the field in the majors. Harts ran well […]

Richard Leo Gedman fulfilled his childhood dream in his tenure in the major leagues, suiting up for over a decade for the team he grew up rooting for. Gedman, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, spent parts of 11 seasons (1980-1990) as a catcher for the Boston Red Sox. The two-time All-Star also played for the […]

From his key contributions as a rookie on the pennant-winning Boston Red Sox of 1967 to his final games spent entangled in one of the most controversial incidents in World Series history, Mike Andrews packed plenty of memorable moments into seven-plus big-league seasons. And while his baseball career may not have lasted as long — […]

Thomas Williams’s pitching career spanned only eight years, but in that time he proved to be an important member of Rube Foster’s Chicago American Giants teams in the early years of the Negro National League. Although not much is documented about Williams’s early life, he was born on September 28, 1896, in Charleston, South Carolina, […]

The very best parts of a game always were at the end for Eric Plunk. He was a starting pitcher early in his career, but like many hard throwers, he had problems with his command, especially with his secondary offerings, and he found his highest and best use in major-league bullpens for 14 seasons. Plunk’s […]

You know the old cliché: Some fans claim they’ve seen it all. Yet only a crowd of 35,759 at Citi Field can state that they have witnessed in person perhaps one of the greatest comebacks in the history of New York Mets baseball. In a “win that defied all logic,”1 Asdrubal Cabrera led the New […]

On the morning of September 8, 1972, Red Sox fans woke up to a reality unthinkable just a month and a half before – the Old Towne Team was in first place in the American League East. On that auspicious Friday morning, Boston Globe writer Ray Fitzgerald summed up the turn of events when he […]

The Chicago Cubs’ 29-year-old right-handed ace Jake Arrieta was on a roll of historic proportions. “It’s just incredible what he’s done in the second half. He’s Bob Gibson-esque,” said skipper Joe Maddon, making a bold comparison to the former St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer.1 Madden was not entirely correct in his assessment – Arrieta […]

Only two months had passed since outfielder Lee Walls was traded from Pittsburgh to Chicago,1 and he had not yet become a household name in the Windy City as July 1957 began. On July 2 Walls moved up some in Cubs fans’ eyes as he tried to singlehandedly lead his Chicago teammates to a victory […]

From 1946 through 1965, the Hearst newspaper chain sponsored events in as many as 13 cities culminating in the annual Hearst Sandlot Classic between the New York Journal-American All-Stars and the United States All-Stars. Chicago sent two players to the games from 1946 through 1957, and the players were selected based on their performance in […]

During the 2017 baseball season, the Chicago Cubs surpassed 8,000 regular-season games played at Wrigley Field. The season included the raising of the team’s first World Series championship gained while calling Wrigley Field home. A century earlier, the Cubs played their first game at Wrigley (then called Weeghman Park), to a packed Chicago crowd that […]

The Chicago Colts,1 led by 39-year-old first baseman and manager Adrian “Cap” Anson, were on a roll in August 1891 The National League leaders had won six consecutive games entering their August 22 game against the visiting Cleveland Spiders. To make matters worse for the sixth-place Spiders, who were coming off a brawl-filled series in […]

It was “a baseball burlesque … a wild slugfest with a flock of pitchers being rushed in and out of the box.” — James M. Gould, St. Louis Star, May 11, 1923   The Philadelphia Phillies hosted the St. Louis Cardinals at Baker Bowl on Friday, May 11, 1923. It was the final game of […]

Few Flatbushers made the effort to attend the game on a cloudy, warm afternoon.1 Just 3,874 – only 12 percent of Ebbets Field’s capacity in 1955 – bore witness to a record-breaking 10th straight win to start the season.2 Before the season, Dodgers President Walter O’Malley reminded Brooklyn that the Dodgers had won four pennants […]

The Chicago Cubs, managed by Joe McCarthy, were on a roll. They had won 11 of their last 12 games, and had vaulted from fourth place to second place in the National League, when they arrived in Boston for a three-game series with the Braves, July 25-27, 1928. The seventh-place Braves had just returned from […]

The Pittsburgh Pirates clashed with the Philadelphia Phillies on a Saturday afternoon in July at the Baker Bowl in Philadephia. The game “brought out a test of strength between the two pitchers who figured in the recent trade involving the Pirates and Quakers — Lee Meadows and [Whitey] Glazner.”1 On May 23, 1923, Meadows and […]

Baseball’s distinctive aspects – the most scheduled games of all team sports, greatest amenability to playing two games in one day, and highest likelihood of suspended games getting completed at a later date – have produced more than a few chronological oddities. On May 30, 1922, Max Flack and Cliff Heathcote swapped teams between games […]