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When I first became interested in baseball as a little leaguer in 1960-61, my reading and TV ex­periences eventually led me to San Diego’s Westgate Park (opened two years earlier), home of the Pacific Coast League Padres. There I could see Gary Peters, Suitcase Simpson, and the locals in person. When a player got hurt, […]

Examining the life span of a baseball stadium by profiling its first and last games is an interesting exercise—even more interesting when it becomes a number of different stadiums. This is the case with the Polo Groundses, four or five—depending on how one counts them—samely-named stadiums. Taking a look at ten different games over an […]

Harold Harris Chase was born February 13, 1883 at Los Gatos, Calif., a small town about ten miles south of San Jose.   The fact that years after his death certain baseball reference books listed him as Hal H. Chase or Harold Homer Chase only serves to emphasize the shroud of mystery that surrounded this strange, […]

Cover of the Arizona Diamondbacks expansion draft program on November 18, 1998. (Photo courtesy of Joel Zolondek)   In the first two decades since major-league baseball granted an expansion bid to Arizona Baseball, Inc., the Arizona Diamondbacks franchise has been characterized by the stability of its leadership. The franchise has had two managing general partners, […]

Introduction If you pick the baseball milestone carefully enough, you can always reduce the number of players that qualify to one. For example, the only player to hit more than 72 home runs in a season is Barry Bonds. He hit 73 dingers in 2001. Second on the list is Mark McGwire with 70 in […]

The dictionary defines the word “Elysian” as “something blissful; delightful,”1 and for ballplayers, such a place has existed for 140 years in the city of New York. Brooklyn is one of the five boroughs of New York City and if considered as a separate entity would rank fourth in the country in sending players to […]

In 1943 the New York Giants, a perennial first division team, finished last.  The next year, 1944, the St. Louis Browns, who had owned a winning record only once in 13 seasons, won the team’s only pennant.  World War II upset the baseball world, too. By won-lost record, World War II did not transform the […]

What with Bill Veeck Jr.’s gregarious nature, numerous achievements, and well-known career as “a champion of the little guy” (to quote from his Hall of Fame plaque), it is not surprising that writers have penned quite a few profiles of the flamboyant baseball executive. On the other hand, regrettably little ink has been spilled in […]

Despite the picturesque setting of Honolulu, baseball’s owners were a largely dispirited lot as they headed into the 1982 winter meetings. They were a year and a half removed from a brutal strike in which they had failed to achieve their main objective of direct player compensation for free agents; many teams were losing money; […]

Rock and roll is the métier of choice at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum (a.k.a. O.co Coliseum since 2011). For example, the Allman Brothers Band’s hit “Ramblin’ Man” can often be heard at the baseball Athletics’ 35,067-capacity home. It is fitting, given the franchise’s peregrination from Philadelphia to Kansas City in 1955 and then to Oakland […]

On August 29, 1966, the Beatles played what would be their final live concert ever at Candlestick Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. The event provided much enjoyment for the concertgoers as the band, still wearing matching suits and their mop-top hairstyles, played a setlist of hits and other music they had recorded over […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (McFarland & Co., Fall 2008). Premise By the late 1930s, and particularly during the years of US involvement in World War II, segregation in sport and society was a topic of increasing public interest. Nationalism had at least […]

Back in the Deadball Era, Sherry Magee was called “one of the greatest and most neglected of sluggers,” “a born dynamiter with the bat,” and “a genuine murderer of the pill.” Today we’d call him a five-tool player: he could hit, run, field, throw, and hit with power. We might also call him a psychopath. […]

This article discusses Roger Maris’s 1961 season from a new perspective. This is not a comparison of each home run hit by Maris in 1961 with those hit by Babe Ruth in 1927, but rather proposes a method to compare the Maris performance with the Ruth performance on a near-equivalent basis. Though there exists the […]

When it came to his involvement in the corruption of the 1919 World Series, Shoeless Joe Jackson rarely told the same story twice. When the fix first came to light in late September 1920, Jackson, along with teammates Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, abjectly admitted that he had agreed to join the conspiracy to throw […]

Curt Flood, Gene Conley, and Danny Ainge had nothing on Baltimore native Peck Lerian, who challenged the reserve clause and earned fame on both the basketball court and the baseball diamond. Showing great promise as the leading member of the Philadelphia Phillies’ young receiving corps at the close of the 1920s, he also stood out […]

It has been over 20 years since Baseball Prospectus developed the statistic “Wins Above Replacement Player” (WARP), and 12 years since Sean Smith’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was first posted on Baseball-Reference.com.1 WAR now is widely recognized as a useful metric for assessing a ballplayer’s overall performance. Several performance-based awards are given to players each […]

This article was originally published in the 1991 SABR convention journal (New York City).   In 1902, a 19-year-old, 110-pound Johnny Evers tried out for his hometown professional baseball team. Probably smaller than every player in the league and definitely younger than most of the professional players, Evers was given a tryout along with other […]

In 1902, a 19-year-old, 110-pound Johnny Evers tried out for his home town professional baseball team. Probably smaller than every player in the league and definitely younger than most of the professional players, Evers was given a tryout along with other hopefuls. He was not on the partial Troy roster published in The Sporting News […]

“Now it’s even. It’s neck and neck. We’ll start from here and see who’s boss.” — Reggie Jackson1 There have been two players in Chicago White Sox history that led the American League in home runs. Only two over the first 123 seasons of baseball on the south side of Chicago. The second of those […]

People of a certain age know where they were when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt died, and Bobby Thomson swung. “The most famous sports moment of all time,” Jon Miller termed Thomson’s October 3, 1951, pennant-winning blast. We still recall the Shot Heard ’Round the World: Russ Hodges five times crying, “The Giants […]

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 […]

1908 Reach All-Americans with Mike Fisher (Rob Fitts Collection)   The “King of Baseball” was on the prowl for a new opportunity. Mike Fisher, known by everybody as Mique, was a bom promoter and bom self-promoter. He was a risk taker, tackling daunting projects with enthusiasm and usually succeeding. He was the quintessential late-nineteenth-century American […]

Individually and collectively, baseball and advertising may be said to hold a mirror up to America. The image in the glass, however, is not always pretty. For the first century of its history, with very few early exceptions, “American” as defined by Organized Baseball, did not extend to those of African descent. As has been […]