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Losers of seven straight and 14 of their last 15 games, the Houston Astros were desperate to get off the merry-go-round as April 1969 drew to a close. Looking up at the rest of the National League West Division from last place, what they got over the next five days was a round trip for […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

He won 247 games in his 23 seasons in the major leagues, plus dozens more in the minors and as a semipro in a pitching career that spanned more than 30 years. Yet we do not know for certain when or where he was born, the national origin of his forebears, or even his birth […]

“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 […]

While professional baseball played a prominent role in the life story of pitcher-umpire-policeman George Bausewine, his impact upon the game was negligible. A one-game winner for the 1889 Philadelphia Athletics of the major-league American Association, Bausewine later spent a single season as a National League umpire. His life, however, was hardly without incident. A talent […]

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 […]

When manager John McGraw needed a clutch win for his New York Giants during their four-year run as National League champions (1921-1924), he often relied on ace southpaw Art Nehf, winner of 184 games for four teams in his 15-year career (1915-1929). Described as a “money pitcher” by sportswriter Frederick G. Lieb, Nehf won the […]

At spring training in 1921, Branch Rickey, vice president of the St. Louis Cardinals as well as the club’s field manager, was looking over the rookies in camp at Orange, Texas. Turning to veteran shortstop Doc Lavan, he said, “Tell that bat boy to get out of the infield.” Advised that the “bat boy” was […]

Despite having an impressive minor-league record, left-handed-hitting Jim Marshall never could crack the starting lineup on a regular basis for five major-league clubs. As a result, he served mostly as a backup first baseman/outfielder and pinch-hitter during a major-league career that started in 1958 and ended in 1962. After his playing days he became a […]

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 […]

After World War II, Frank Jobe followed the proverbial American dream: college, medical school, marriage, and a family. Even though he said he never planned it that way, he pursued a career that helped make the world a better place — particularly the world of baseball, as the developer of the procedure known as Tommy […]

“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 […]

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 […]