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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 […]

Third-string catcher Charlie “Legs” Dorman played in his lone major-league game on May 14, 1923, for the Chicago White Sox only after the starting catcher was removed and the backup split his finger open on a foul ball. Dorman took quite the circuitous route to his one moment on the big stage: from a San […]

Do we call him Junior or Gene? Was Junior his given name or a nickname? Could it be both? No matter. As a fresh-faced youngster Junior Thompson helped the Cincinnati Reds win two consecutive National League pennants. As a mature veteran Gene Thompson impacted the game of baseball for half a century. Junior Eugene Thompson […]

For those of you have never heard of the Magnus Force, as first described in 1852 by the German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus, it is a force generated by a spinning object moving through a fluid experience with a sideways deflection in its path. The force is perpendicular to the velocity vector of an object, […]

During his late 19th-century heyday, right-handed pitcher Ad Gumbert was regarded as one of the game’s most well-rounded performers. That status was founded on 123 major league victories led by two seasons of 20-plus wins; fielding skills that made him an outfield option; and a formidable bat with extra-base power. Gumbert was just 29 years […]

Bob Lennon hit 64 home runs for the Southern Association Nashville Vols in 1954, but his most memorable homer came on April 30, 1957, when he was playing for the Chicago Cubs. “It was what I had dreamed about,” he recalled in a 1993 interview. He hit it in Ebbets Field, where he had rooted […]

Gary Kroll, a hard-throwing right-hander who once pitched 20 consecutive hitless innings in the minors, made his big-league debut for the Philadelphia Phillies on July 26, 1964. Less than two weeks later, the 22-year-old pitcher was gone, traded to the New York Mets for 35-year-old slugger Frank Thomas. Kroll had been regarded as a tremendous […]

Billy Sorrell was the type of player scouts coveted: a 6-foot, 190-pound left-handed hitter with power and speed who could play both infield and outfield. Legendary scout Tony Lucadello tracked and signed Sorrell for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1959. Sorrell was a good batsman, often clutch, who played 14 professional seasons from 1960 until 1973, […]

In four years of high school and two in college, Daryl Spencer won just one varsity sports letter. In his first season of Ban Johnson baseball, he hit about .260. Not a single major league scout even nodded toward him until well into his first season of professional baseball. Yet he was in a major-league […]

 A nickname like Squanto is a pretty good clue that George Francis Wilson was portrayed as Native American. Newspaper stories remarked on Wilson’s dark complexion and Indian nickname, though it is possible that people just dubbed him Squanto the way they might call another player Nig (Nig Cuppy, for instance) or another such name. There […]

Marty Griffin made a name for himself pitching in the Pacific Coast League, but fell short in his one chance in the major leagues. He was a native of San Francisco, and his first five seasons in professional baseball were spent with his hometown San Francisco Seals, though most of 1927 was in Nebraska with […]

John Ryn’s career was spent in the Midwest, South and West far from the eyes of the major East Coast newspapers and fans. All of it was spent in the minors or below. Considering this and the fact that his career ended more than a century ago, few have heard of him. Physically, he was […]

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 […]

With crews on hand from all three major television networks and reporters from a dozen newspapers that did not normally cover the Brewers crowding the press box, all eyes at County Stadium were fixed on Paul Molitor. Molitor had stretched what was already the fifth longest hitting streak since 1900 to 39 games by lining […]

The Minnesota Twins were fully aware of how, just one year before, the Philadelphia Phillies had blown a seemingly insurmountable lead with very little time remaining in the season. The Twins had been on the verge of clinching the pennant for about a week when they traveled to Washington in late September of 1965. They […]

On October 4, 1969, nearly 40,000 fans filed into Memorial Stadium in Baltimore for the first-ever American League Championship Series. Beginning in 1969 the American and National Leagues were separated into two divisions, East and West. At the end of the season, each division winner would square off in a best-of-five series to decide who […]

The Philadelphia Phillies opened a two-game weekend series at Wrigley Field on Saturday, April 17, 1976, in a bit of a slump. Their record four games into the new season was an uninspiring 1-3, putting a damper on the enthusiasm surrounding a team that had been picked by many to win the National League East. […]

“The Cubs had 25 base runners, and (the public-address) announcer grew hoarse saying, ‘Next batter …’” 1 The league-leading Cincinnati Reds completed a four-game series at Wrigley Field with a doubleheader on June 28, 1961, and found that the seventh place Cubs were not without life. Despite their lowly station, the Cubs (25-41) had won […]

After the Cubs had split the first two games of the 2016 World Series in Cleveland, they returned home to the friendly confines of Wrigley Field for what would be the first fall classic game at the venerable stadium since October 10, 1945. On that date, Chicago’s North Siders had lost the seventh game of […]

When Cubs fans preview the day’s game, they look at the weather report for Wrigley Field, even before asking, “Who’s pitching?” This afternoon they could expect warm temperatures (upper 70s) with steady winds from the southwest (10 mph gusting over 30 mph, from home plate toward the batter’s eye in center field). If the light […]

In the 1950s announcer Jack Brickhouse dubbed Wrigley Field the “Friendly Confines.” Baseball fans know there is nothing friendly about the ballpark when the winds are blowing. As longtime WGN weatherman Tom Skilling put it, “When the northeast gales off nearby Lake Michigan howl in toward home plate, the most mediocre pitchers can perform as […]