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If Catfish Hunter was going to pitch a perfect game, Minnesota Twins manager Cal Ermer was going to make him earn every out.1 Hunter, a 22-year-old right-hander in his fourth season with the Athletics, had retired 24 straight batters going into the top of the ninth inning at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, on May 8, 1968, […]

Jackie Robinson’s debut at Braves Field was originally scheduled for April 22, 1947. But the Dodgers’ three-game series in Boston was a total washout because of rain. Robinson’s first game was in the opener of a Memorial Day doubleheader on May 30. Before both scheduled series, Robinson wasn’t the biggest story in the local news. […]

The St. Louis Cardinals’ chances of making the 2011 postseason looked bleak in late August. They were 10½ games behind the first-place Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Central Division and 9½ games off the wild-card pace on August 28. But the Cardinals went 20-8 down the stretch to edge out the Atlanta Braves for […]

Defending their first World Series championship in 35 years, the Pittsburgh Pirates were in fourth place in the National League in June 1961 when general manager Joe L. Brown restructured their bench with a flurry of transactions. The moves included calling up 29-year-old catcher Don Leppert, whose .386 batting average was leading the Triple-A International […]

Twins manager Sam Mele was not happy. His team had lost four of its last five games. The night before, fielding lapses, particularly a botched rundown, turned a 2-2 game into a 7-2 defeat at the hands of the last-place Washington Senators. So before the game on July 17, 1964, Mele held a drill to […]

“Oh, I’m not really great. I’m just good, darn good.” – Terris “Elmer the Great” McDuffie, August 14, 1935.1   Night baseball came to Ebbets Field for the first time on September 11, 1935, when the Brooklyn Eagles of the Negro National League took on the House of David in an exhibition. Pitching for the […]

In front of a crowd of over 24,000, the New York Mets stole a game from the Houston Astros that they desperately needed to win in order to keep their hopes of earning a wild-card berth alive. The game, which took just over four hours to complete and saw the Mets take three of four […]

When Willie Randolph hoisted back-to-back World Series trophies with the 1977 and ’78 New York Yankees, or Omar Moreno toasted the World Series title won by his Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979, one wonders if they took a moment to think how far they had come since the day they played for a crowd of 69 […]

“For a moment, Watts had spilled over to the National Pastime.”1 The intensity of a rivalry that began decades earlier on the East Coast heated up once again as the Giants and Dodgers contested yet another National League pennant in 1965. Going into action on August 22, the Dodgers led the league and were being […]

After the first game of a doubleheader against the visiting Chicago Cubs on July 4, 1928, rookie outfielder Wally Roettger of the St. Louis Cardinals was hitting a robust .341. In the second game, however, he dislocated his right ankle and broke both bones in his lower leg sliding into third base.1 The injury ended […]

On December 12, 2018, at the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, Museum President Bob Kendrick, with historian Jay Caldwell, announced the Negro League Centennial Team. The team was a key part of the Museum’s celebration in 2020 of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro Leagues. The team of 30 […]

Is Rollie Naylor the unluckiest pitcher in baseball history? Pitching for the then-hapless Philadelphia Athletics from 1917 through 1924, he amassed a 42-83 career record and an ERA+ of 101. Through 2016, more than 800 pitchers with at least 100 decisions to their credit have earned an ERA+ of at least 100. (With this retrospectively-calculated […]

“Willie Foster was the greatest left hander that I ever played with and he was a gentleman on and off the field.” — Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe   If there was a signature moment for a baseball player, Willie Foster’s complete-game victories in both ends of the doubleheader for the Chicago American Giants to decide […]

The 18-year-old student trainer was mortified. A 96-inch roll of cloth athletic tape unwound and rolled across the floor. The football team and adult training staff, along with the thunderstruck Mark Letendre, watched as eight yards of tape uncoiled. “What a rookie,” announced the Head Athletic Trainer. From that day forward Letendre was known as […]

Former major leaguer Ralph Edward “Hap” Myers faced a possible death sentence for armed robbery in El Paso the year after he left the game, but later went on to serve as the director of a number of companies and retired as vice president of Laurentide Finance Corp. He was acquitted of the alleged crime […]

For a pitcher with 474? innings of major-league experience behind him to leave on the note he did – his disastrous one partial inning for the 1908 Red Sox – must have been personally aggravating. But even with that disappointing finale, Jake Thielman won 30 big-league games with an earned-run average of 3.16. Thielman spent […]

If there was one thing the Detroit Tigers could do under player-manager Ty Cobb, it was hit. They set an American League record with a .316 team batting average in 1921, and six of their eight starters in 1922 finished over .300. Even four of their backups hit over .300 that year. They were strong […]

Dave Danforth (1890-1970) is one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the history of the national pastime. He was “the icicle of the swirling vortex” for most of his career, and the mystery of what he threw and how he pitched has never been resolved.1 “Danforth, if you believe the boys in the […]

Team captain Sal Bando was the glue that held the volatile Oakland A’s together during their three-year run as World Series champions (1972-1974). Respected by teammates, peers, and his managers, Bando was Oakland’s unequivocal leader, a durable, rough-and-tumble third baseman who averaged 23 home runs and 90 runs batted in over an eight-year span in […]

Ray Moore was the long reliever and an occasional starter for the pennant-winning 1959 Chicago White Sox. Control problems that plagued Moore, especially early in his career as a highly-regarded Dodger prospect, resurfaced in 1959, limiting the big right-hander’s effectiveness. Raymond Leroy Moore, the ninth of 10 children of Clarence and Mary “Maggie” Moore, was […]

“Good field, no hit” is an assessment of an athlete with lopsided skills on the baseball diamond. In essence, his contributions are far greater on defense than offense. Many of these men were catchers. In fact, of the ten major-league players with the worst career batting averages (minimum 1,000 at-bats), six were backstops. Barney Gilligan […]

Most people who have become baseball fans since 1990 have never heard of Cot Deal. If they look hard, they will find his major league career summarized in six lines of print in the baseball encyclopedias. If they look harder, they will find something about him as a minor league manager or major league coach […]

Late-1880s pitcher Billy George was a flame-throwing but incurably wild left-hander, an early prototype of the Steve Dalkowski model.1 In his rookie season with the 1887 New York Giants, George established an ignominious major-league pitching record that stands to this day – most walks issued by a pitcher in a single game: 16.2 Years later, […]

East Field as pictured in 2021.   Over the course of a month and a half in March and April 1980, East Field in Glens Falls, New York, went from an unremarkable city-owned baseball field notable mainly for its swampiness to a showcase for some of the Chicago White Sox’ top prospects.1 It happened this […]