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Players wearing the uniform of the San Francisco Giants have performed many amazing feats in the four decades since the franchise moved west from New York. but no player has produced a more intriguing record than Billy Pierce did during the 1962 season. As the Giants engaged a season-long pennant race that culminated in a […]

New York Giants stalwarts Christy Mathewson and John McGraw. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)   They open the door. They’re opening thirty doors at once, but I can only talk about mine. Air from 2040 goes out, and air from 1905 comes in. The first thing I do is cough. It smells like horseshit and coal smoke […]

With a little luck and considerable pluck, the 1898 Boston Beaneaters were able to overcome injuries to three of their regulars to capture the National League pennant. While injuries would figure in 1899 as well, none matched the far-reaching consequences of the deteriorating mental health of one of the team’s most popular players. During the […]

An industrial lot on the eastern edge of downtown Greenville, Texas, covered with heavy equipment, gives no sign of its grand history, except for one feature: a brick and concrete arch still stands with the welded metal inscription “Majors Stadium,” coated with a layer of primer paint, across the top. It takes an excellent imagination […]

A thing of beauty and suspense, the triple may be the most exciting twelve seconds in sport. Unfortunately, it’s rapidly disappearing from the baseball box score.   WITH THE EXCEPTION OF the almost extinct inside-the-park home run, the triple is rarest of hits. This was not always So. For more than fifty years after the […]

The odds on the Boston Red Sox winning the 1967 American League pennant were 100-1 at the beginning of the season. But when they completed the Impossible Dream, it was “Pandemonium on the field!”The Boston Red Sox embarked on their 1967 season with a five-man rotation that had collectively won only 25 major league games […]

Nolan Ryan celebrates his 7th no-hitter on May 1, 1991. (MLB.COM)   A pitcher usually needs good command and quality stuff to toss a no-hitter.1 Stellar fielding and a dollop of good luck doesn’t hurt, either. A bad-hop single or a flare off the end of the bat that falls for a hit is all […]

The intentional base on balls was a part of professional baseball long before it became a part of baseball’s official statistics. The Sporting News’s Baseball Record Book lists Napoleon Lajoie of the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League as the first player to receive an intentional walk with the bases full, in the ninth inning […]

Kenichi Zenimura (right) with his cousin Tasumi Zenimura (left) in 1928. (Rob Fitts Collection)   Few baseball fans know the story of early twentieth-century Nikkei (Japanese American) baseball. Despite this lack of awareness, the Nikkei impact is still visible in today’s game. It’s subtle, though, visible only to the well-informed. The legacy is not a […]

“With the bases full Foley caught the sphere fair on the end of his ash and away it went over the left field fence for a home run.”1 This first-inning grand slam on May 25, 1882, by Buffalo Bisons outfielder Charles “Curry” Foley sparked a 20–1 rout over the rival Cleveland Blues. Along the way, […]

Entrance to Replay Operations Center, New York City.   In 1955, a producer on Canadian television used a kinescope to show a replay during a Hockey Night in Canada telecast, the first time anyone had shown a play a second time on television. In the early 1960s, a director for CBS Sports invented a replay […]

The slugger stands at the plate in the bottom of the ninth, the score tied. The crowd rises in anticipation. The windup. The pitch and…there it goes! We’ve all seen them. Game-ending or “walk-off” home runs are shown on SportsCenter almost every night and many fans consider them to be among the most exciting plays […]

Olean, New York, sits in a plateau in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. It is surrounded by rolling hills whose forests burst into a rainbow of color in autumn, mimic crystal and silver spires in winter, explode with new life in the spring, and cover the land with cooling shade in summer. Residents and […]