Search Results

Who’s the batter? Nowadays, fans attending a Detroit Tigers game at Comerica Park can just look at the player—his name and assigned number are on the back of his uniform, and his name is displayed prominently on a huge scoreboard. However, a hundred years or so ago, Tigers fans attending a baseball game at Navin […]

This article was selected as a winner of the 2023 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. Harry Saisho, promoter of the 1921 Sherman Indians tour. (Courtesy of Jesse Loving, Ars Longa Art Cards)   In the late nineteenth century as the American frontier closed, the myth of the Wild West began. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, dime […]

This article was selected as the winner of the 2017 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. So, turn the key with me and enter Room 509 of the [Hotel Carlos], the most famous place in Chicago that you barely knew existed. — (Kankakee, Illinois) Daily Journal and (Ottawa, Illinois) Daily Times, April 10, 2010 1 The 1932 […]

Sherman Institute, the new federal Indian boarding school at Riverside, California, as it appeared in the popular national Leslie’s Weekly in 1902. (COURTESY OF TOM WILLMAN)   On May 3, 1905, much of California discovered that Native Americans really could play baseball. On that day the team from Sherman Institute, the three-year-old federal Indian boarding […]

  In recent decades, rules in several professional sports have been revised with a goal of reducing the length of games or matches. Both pro and college football have changed their timekeeping rules repeatedly to shorten games. In hockey, five-minute overtime periods, often followed by shoot-outs, have become routine in non-playoff games. Tie-breakers are played […]

Back in the mid-1990s, I published Great Baseball Films (Citadel Press), which charts the manner in which the sport has been depicted onscreen from the late 1890s to early 1990s. Twenty years ago as today, even the most obscure films with obvious baseball themes were readily accessible to researchers. However, seeking out films in which […]

“Most of what I learned about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.” — John Sayles, filmmaker   A ballplayer’s life is rarely if ever finely crafted finish-work carpentry; rather it is almost always rough framing, with all the gaps and gouges exposed to critics and admirers alike. Polishing and puttying and sanding the rough edges […]

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 […]

(Photograph by Duane Rieder.)   It was fitting that Nelson Cruz received the Roberto Clemente Award in 2022 as the 50th anniversary of Clemente’s untimely passing approached. Both Clemente and Cruz hailed from Caribbean islands, and each used his wealth and status derived from playing major-league baseball to help improve the lives of the less […]

As the 1875 baseball season approached, William Hulbert, the president of the Chicago White Stockings, was livid. Chicago’s entry in the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP) had attempted, prior to the end of the 1874 season, to sign their star shortstop, Davy Force, for the next year. Such a move violated the […]

The famous city of Philadelphia totes the title the City of Brotherly Love for many reasons. One intention might refer to a friendship between a pitcher and a catcher that would last for 19 years. The catcher was Jimmie “Ace” Wilson, a backstop born and bred in the great state of Pennsylvania. In the fateful […]

Growing up in New England, it was an article of faith that the 1967 Red Sox won the American League pennant with the help of divine intervention — that it was an “Impossible Dream.” With the passage of time, this depiction has become less satisfying, if for no other reasons than that it gives short […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 29 (2000).   Imagine if a young major-league pitcher, like Andy Pettitte of the Yankees, decided, for whatever reason, to become an outfielder in the year 2001. And imagine if he hit over .300 for the next five years, culminating in 2005 by winning […]

Only one tripleheader has been played in the majors in this century and that was 60 years ago. Considering that, in this Age of Television, nine innings may take three or more hours to play, it is unlikely that we shall soon see another one. The last tripleheader was played on October 2, in the […]

An unusual major league game took place in Chicago on July 11, 1892. That was the year the National League played a split schedule- the only one in major league history. Boston had the first half sewed up and was in Chicago to wind up a series. Cap Anson, boss of the Colts, tried to […]

During a professional baseball career of 18 seasons spread out over a span of 23 years, Guy Terrell Bush only spent one full season and part of another in Pittsburgh. But with bloody fists and a heart filled with frustration, he left a few marks in the baseball history books while wearing Pirates flannel. In […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1985.   “It is always wrong to consider that something which begins in a small way cannot rapidly become important.” — Plutarch On June 5, 1942, Doreston Luke Carmen Jr. became the thin end of a very large wedge. That […]

The New York Yankees’ Babe Ruth gazes towards the right field stands after hitting a ball in front of an unknown Boston Red Sox catcher and unknown umpire at Fenway Park. 1933-34. (Leslie Jones photo, courtesy of the Boston Public Library.)   The ultimate comparison of sluggers in baseball occurs when a player is linked […]

The war for the pennant The 1897 Beaneaters opened spring training in Macon, Georgia, with optimism that may have been out of proportion to their 74-47 fourth-place finish, 17 games behind the champion Baltimore Orioles, a year earlier. The core of the team was familiar: Tommy Tucker, Bobby Lowe, Herman Long, and Jimmy Collins across […]

A fictional tale about a personal rivalry between a Minneapolis player and a St. Paul player in the late 19th century.

The Boston Beaneaters dominated the beginning of the 1890s, winning three straight pennants from 1891 to 1893. The Baltimore Orioles, continual also-rans in the second division, came out of nowhere to win the 1894 pennant, and then followed that up with another title in 1895. Both clubs could boast of being the dynasty of the […]

In the latest edition of an ongoing SABR project, researchers tabulated a banner year for Willie Wells, Rube Foster, and other Negro-league immortals.   LATIN AMERICANS called Willie Wells “Diablo”- the Devil. In 1930 he showed why. The little shortstop hit .404 to lead the western clubs in hitting. (Bill Terry led the white majors […]

  A teenage Willie Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons. Mays’ father did not allow him to join the Black Barons full-time in 1948 until school was over at the end of May. (Courtesy of Memphis Public Library)   In 2020, Retrosheet belatedly extended its work to include Negro League games and Negro League seasons. […]

At the close of the 1890 baseball season the upstart Players’ League had died, the result of its owners bailing out on the players, leaving the National League and the American Association as the only remaining major leagues. And the climate surrounding those two leagues was far from peaceful. In Boston, in particular, there was […]