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Six of the eight most populous cities in the United States were not represented in the National League for the baseball season of 1881. New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Cincinnati were not members of the League, which included only two charter members (Chicago and Boston) and teams from the smaller cities of […]

On the southwest side of Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, lies a plain granite marker with a slightly misspelled inscription, the gravesite pathetically guarded by a twisted sweet-bay magnolia tree. Buried there in lot #549 is Louis Rogers “Pete” Browning, whose occupation at the time of his death on September 10, 1905, at age […]

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 […]

Most casual baseball fans are familiar with such well-known movies as the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees, the myth-making twosome of The Natural and Field of Dreams, and the irreverent Bull Durham, but there are numerous films that have been largely forgotten even by diehard baseball and film aficionados. The 1953 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer […]

On June 28, 1970, the Pittsburgh Pirates swept a doubleheader from the Chicago Cubs and Forbes      Field’s role in Pirate baseball was over. The park was condemned and doomed to the wrecker’s ball. It was 61 years earlier, almost to the day, that Forbes Field opened, with the Pirates hosting the same Chicago Cubs. Over […]

Fred Girard Haney touched all the bases in a 65-year baseball career that led him from athletic stardom in high school to the general manager’s office of the Los Angeles Angels.

Scores of professional ballplayers have made their way from the big leagues to the big screen. A few, including Chuck Connors, Bob Uecker, and John Beradino (who played for the Browns, Indians, and Pirates as Johnny Berardino), became successful actors or media personalities. Some, notably Babe Ruth, appeared in movies as themselves, or as thinly […]

A publicity still of Lou Gehrig in Tarzan garb.   As the 1937 baseball season came to a close, Lou Gehrig was still at the top of his game. Lou had a .351 batting average that year, with 37 home runs and 158 RBIs. He was fourth in voting for the American League’s Most Valuable […]

Introduction and Context The 74th annual Winter Meetings were held in New Orleans from Sunday, December 1, to Friday, December 5, 1974. New Orleans hosted the annual meeting on two earlier occasions, in 1916 and 1938, but had not been home to the event in 36 years. Recent struggles between the Players Association and the […]

This article was selected as a winner of the 2016 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award.   This well-known Chicago Tribune photo of Black Sox defendants, attorneys, jurors, and supporters shows them celebrating the not guilty verdicts on the steps of the Cook County Courthouse on August 2, 1921. A number of the celebrants have numbers inscribed […]

The image of American higher education reflected by college athletics is any­thing but flattering. As of March 1982, 17 schools were on the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s pro­bation list—the highest number for a single period—and the Association’s enforcement department declared that the list would lengthen before it shortened. An additional 35 schools were under investigation […]

The Twenties were still “Roaring,” Lindbergh was in Paris, Coolidge in Washington and Prohibition was the law of the land as Americans celebrated Decoration Day in 1927. It was the “Golden Age of Sport” and newspapers heralded the exploits of Grange, Dempsey, Tilden and Jones. In baseball the New York Yankees were hammering their way […]

The Philadelphia Athletics and the Cleveland Indians played two historic games in Cleveland in July 1932 — games which were a study in contrasts. On July 10, Philadelphia defeated Cleveland 18-17 in 18 innings at League Park, in a game in which many batting records were set or equaled and which featured a remarkable relief […]

In another article, I describe my findings on the accuracy of Major League Baseball’s official runs-scored statistics for each Detroit Tigers player for the period 1945—2007.1 There I report that I discovered—and corrected—26 runs-scored errors affecting 19 players, including four Hall of Famers. Subsequently the Elias Sports Bureau (the official statisticians for MLB), based on […]

The Illinois-Indiana-Iowa baseball league started its ninth consecutive season of play in May 1909. While the league was better known then as the Three-I or Three-Eye league, the name was actually a misnomer. The eight teams in the league that year were located only in Illinois and Iowa. (This would not be the last time […]

It is quite a natural thing to ask, “When was the baseball glove invented?” One answer you are likely to discover is that a glove was first used in the game to protect players’ hands from injury in 1860.1 Early gloves were essentially adapted to base ball from other uses. Compared to the baseball glove […]

When quintessential baseball buff Douglas Heeren first approached me about a player named Ducky Holmes, I failed to grasp the depth of the subject. Pointing out my misidentification of Ducky in a team photo in my book about baseball in Northwest Iowa, Heeren simply wanted to set the record straight.1 A young man from rural […]

Every two years, the nation’s capital sees senators leave town and new senators arrive to take their place. After a while, the suits all begin to look the same; only the bodies filling them out are different. The dance of those coming and going is typically confined to Capitol Hill. But between October 1960 and […]

  In 1904 when Tyrus Raymond Cobb arrived on the professional baseball scene, his first name was not at all well known. In fact, most fans had never even heard of anyone with that particular name—Ty himself apparently among them. That was to change in short order, however, as Tyrus Cobb’s fame spread nationally within […]

A circa 1912 portrait of Chief Bender probably taken for advertising purposes when he was a sporting goods salesman/consultant at Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia. The shotguns in the background have price tags dangling from strings attached to their trigger guards. The gold pendant hanging from a fob on Bender’s waist was given to players by the Athletics’ club for winning the 1911 World Series. […]

By 1951 the Browns were decidedly moribund. They had been last in the American League in attendance every year since 1946 and the usual question one asked before the start of the season was whether they might finish in seventh or eighth place. Underfinanced, Charles and William DeWitt wanted out of what they saw as […]

Supreme Court Involvement On November 9, 1953, a month after the close of the season, the US Supreme Court chimed in on major-league baseball for the second time in history. George Earl Toolson, a longtime pitcher in the New York Yankees farm system, sued the team, claiming the reserve clause violated federal antitrust laws. Toolson […]

When the 2003 Boston Red Sox reported to Fort Myers, Florida, for spring training, state-of-the-art facilities, a battery of instructors, and a full staff of physical-training specialists awaited them. The minor league facility at City of Palms Park, where the team trains before the exhibition season begins, includes eight batting tunnels and sixteen pitcher’s mounds. Every […]

In 1944, three years before he broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, Lieutenant Jack Roosevelt Robinson was court-martialed at Fort Hood, Texas. Robinson had volunteered for combat with the segregated 761st Tank Battalion. Although he had signed a waiver for a previous football injury, he was required to undergo extensive medical tests before being transferred […]