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Corner outfielder Phil Plantier spent most of the 1990s playing major-league baseball, for five different teams. He played 383 games in left field and 126 in right; he was also deployed occasionally as a designated hitter and pinch-hitter. Plantier’s best year by far was in 1993, when he homered 34 times and drove in 100 […]

In Jeff Plympton’s major-league pitching career, he never gave up a run – earned or unearned. Reading a statement such as that, one might correctly guess that his time at the top level was brief. He pitched in 279 games as a professional, but only four in the majors, for the 1991 Boston Red Sox. […]

Deacon White was a baseball pioneer. He caught baseball fever after the Civil War and played until the 1890s. His baseball career spanned the end of the amateur era and the start of professionalism, the establishment and demise of the National Association, the founding of the National League, and a players’ revolt that led to […]

Tom Monaghan has accomplished a great many things in his yet-unfinished life. The billionaire entrepreneur? Certainly. Successful businessman? Sure. Collector? Formerly, but not in any defining sense. Conservative Catholic leader? Definitely. Visionary? Maybe. Twenty-first century evangelist and savior of Western civilization? Possibly, if you talk to him. However you label the owner of the Detroit […]

The Black Sox Scandal shocked the sporting public and led to fundamental changes in the governance of professional baseball. Central to this astonishing fix were eight Chicago White Sox ballplayers, including star center-fielder Oscar “Happy” Felsch. An unpretentious Milwaukee native, the “Pride of Teutonia Avenue” only left his hometown to play ball. Felsch, one of […]

Chris Carpenter spent 15 seasons in major-league baseball, first with the Toronto Blue Jays and then with the St. Louis Cardinals .His won-lost record was 144-94 with an earned-run average of 3.76, and in 2005, his 21-5 season and 2.83 ERA won him the National League’s Cy Young Award. But statistics alone don’t tell the […]

Jeff Bagwell was a dominant player in the National League for most of his 15-year career. Eight seasons he drove in more than 100 runs. Nine times he hit 31 or more home runs and scored over 100 runs. In 1994 he was unanimously selected as the Most Valuable Player. Despite these and other accomplishments, […]

William H. Conant, Arthur H. Soden, and James B. Billings were the majority owners of the Boston Nationals1 from its difficult early years, through its ascendancy to the position of one of the best teams in the National League, to its eclipse after the entry of the American League team in Boston in 1901. Held […]

Montreal mayor Jean Drepeau with (from left) John Bateman, Jim “Mudcat” Grant, and Maury Wills on Opening Day in New York, April 8, 1969 (COURTESY OF THE McCORD MUSEUM, MONTREAL)   It somehow seemed inevitable when it all came to an end in 2004. Fate didn’t really smile on the ’Spos (Les Expos de Montreal) […]