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The southpaw from Wasseralfingen? The German suburb is now part of the city of Aalen, in the Swabian Mountains, today about an hour’s drive from Baden-Württemberg’s state capital, Stuttgart. That’s where one of the pitchers for the 1902 Boston Americans was born on October 10, 1877. He pitched in only two games, and not that effectively. […]

On February 27, 1999, Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas, rededicated its baseball park Katt-Isbel Field in honor of Ray Katt, the Bulldogs’ head baseball coach from 1971 until his 1992 retirement.1 For Katt it was a bookend event to a lifetime spent in baseball, including eight full or partial seasons (1952-1959) in the majors […]

Infielder Albert Roberge played portions of three seasons with the Boston Braves during the 1940s. He appeared in 177 games and compiled a lifetime .220 batting average. Three years of military service during World War II interrupted his baseball career. After playing a brief period in the majors on his return from the war, Roberge […]

In the only major league box score in which he’ll ever appear, Bill Schlesinger can’t even find his whole name. It was shortened to Schles’ger. The space taken by the apostrophe replaced the “n” — leaving his name actually shortened only by the width of the typset letter “i.” Tony Conigliaro got his full name […]

Few players have been as coveted by professional clubs as Paul Pettit was in the spring of 1949. During that high school season, the hard-throwing left-handed pitcher drew crowds to the small southern California town of Lomita. They echoed the influx to the region after oil was discovered there in the early 1920s. Pettit’s powerful […]

Billy Jurges, a star shortstop for the Chicago Cubs (1931-1938, 1946-1947) and the New York Giants (1939-1945), played a part in Babe Ruth’s called home run during the 1932 World Series, and perhaps provided some of the inspiration behind Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural and the movie by the same name. He helped prompt the […]

Jim Derrington’s major-league career was brief, but historic. When Derrington took the mound for the Chicago White Sox at the age of 16 years, 306 days on the final day of the 1956 season, he became the youngest pitcher since Willie McGill in 1890 to start a major-league game. Derrington, who singled off Kansas City […]

Right-handed pitcher “Wild” Bill Luhrsen spent three weeks in the major leagues, winning each of his first three games, only to lose to Christy Mathewson in his final appearance. Advancing from the low Class D Cotton States League to the majors in two months, the spitballer was a minor bright spot during the tail-end of […]

Dietrich and Marian Loepp began their family in Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1892, bringing with them their first five children. They added eight more after arriving and settling in Detroit. Dietrich was a broom manufacturer, employing among others his eldest son, Frederick. George Loepp was the tenth of the 13 children, […]

The fifth-winningest pitcher of all time, Warren Spahn went 363-245 over parts of 21 years from 1942 to 1965. Only by remaining in the game two seasons too long did he fail to finish with an ERA under 3.00 (3.09) and a winning percentage over .600 (.597), and his totals are all the more impressive […]

Donald Ray Mincher was a two-time member of the Oakland Athletics. In 1970 he was the team leader in home runs with 27. Before being traded for the second time to the Athletics on July 20, 1972, Mincher homered off Joe Coleman at Detroit on July 10. It was a personal career milestone, his 200th […]

Billy Gardner played 10 seasons in the big leagues from 1954 to 1963. A feisty leadoff hitter and scrappy infielder, Gardner threw and batted right-handed, standing an even 6 feet tall and weighing 170 pounds. Gardner had stints on the New York Giants, Baltimore Orioles, Washington Senators, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox in […]

A small, mild-mannered, prematurely bald man with a prominent mustache, Frank Selee looked more like an insurance underwriter than a baseball manager, especially in team photos next to his strapping young athletes. Nevertheless, he was one of the most successful field leaders of his era, directing the Boston Beaneaters to five National League pennants between […]

Like classmate Jim Thorpe, Frank Jude was one of many outstanding all-around athletes at the Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Indian Industrial School in the early 1900s. He was rushed to the major leagues before he was ready because teams hoped to uncover another American Indian star like the Philadelphia Athletics’ Chief Bender. News features at the time […]

Time and time again over the decades, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have met in high-stakes, high-intensity games with a direct bearing on the American League pennant race. Their game played on Tuesday night, May 18, 1965, was not one of those epochal battles. Both teams were struggling, showing early signs of […]

Ted Williams bounded down the first-base line at Briggs Stadium like the kid he was. He clapped his hands twice as he neared the bag then bounded over it with a joyful skip as he made his way around the bases. Williams’s three-run homer with two outs in the bottom of the ninth had just […]

Historian Bill James has called the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers “that close to being a perfect team,” citing their lineup that had future Hall of Famers Joe Medwick in left field, Pee Wee Reese at shortstop, and Billy Herman at second base and included such other luminaries as Pete Reiser, Dixie Walker, and Dolph Camilli. “In […]

In mid-September of 1894, the New York Giants were 3½ games behind the Baltimore Orioles, leaders of the National League. Despite losing only two of its next 12 games (nine wins and a tie), New York did not gain any ground in the standings. So, with only three games left to play (starting on September […]

By September 30, the next-to-last day of the regular season in 1933, the teams playing in that season’s World Series, the Washington Senators and New York Giants, had already clinched their respective league pennants.1 However, there were still tight races for second and third places in the National League. The Pittsburgh Pirates held a one-game […]

On June 19, 1999, Todd Helton became the third person in the Colorado Rockies’ seven-season history to hit for the cycle.  Helton had just four at-bats, but he had four different hits — a single, double, triple and home run — and he became the first batter to hit for the cycle while leading off an […]

Longtime Chicago Tribune writer Irving Vaughan left no doubt in his readers’ minds as to who won the May 5, 1938, rubber-match contest between the Cubs and Phillies: “Albert Paul Epperly, the Iowa farm boy, was introduced yesterday in his maiden start as a big leaguer and his Cub mates turned the event into a […]

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So said the reporter at the end of the 1962 movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.1 Upon hearing a popular politician confess that he was not the real shooter, the journalist ignored the fact to preserve the lawmaker’s legend. Thirty years earlier, baseball writers at the […]

It had been over two decades since the Dodgers won the 1920 National League pennant. Most of those years were spent in the second division. By 1937 the Dodgers were in dire straits financially. They were $700,000 in debt to their bank, the Brooklyn Trust Company, “$470,000 on a refinanced mortgage for Ebbets Field. (The […]

  Wahconah Park: an outdated barn or a precious relic? A swamp or a hallowed slab? A money pit or a landmark? After well over a century, the dichotomy persists. Baseball players were facing off there before Babe Ruth was born, before “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was written, before architects sketched the […]