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In the wee hours of July 7, 1920, near Wawa, Pennsylvania, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, prodigious New York Yankees baseball slugger and notorious automobile speeder, careened his $10,000 Packard around a tight corner, lost control, and overturned. Ruth’s passengers were his wife Helen, Yankees coach Charlie O’Leary, and two teammates: backup catcher Fred Hofmann and […]

Hardy, Abbott and Costello, George Burns and Gracie Allen. In baseball it was the great Chicago White Sox tag team of Jerry Staley and Turk Lown. Together they formed the best one-two punch out of the bullpen in 1959 for manager Al Lopez. “That year Lown and (J)erry Staley formed baseball’s most brilliant bullpen combination,” […]

Standing 6-foot-1 and weighing 185 pounds, Missouri native Johnny Sturm could accurately be described as tall, dark, and handsome, a ubiquitous term applicable to literally thousands of ballplayers. What’s rare about Sturm is his abbreviated major-league career, a single season as the regular first baseman on the 1941 New York Yankees. Although he legitimately contributed […]

None other than noted baseball statistics guru Bill James observed and commented, “At the age of 21, Tuck Turner hit .416 and scored 91 runs in 80 games; he also drove in 82 runs.” His career degenerated quickly after that. “I can’t remember that I ever read anything about him, and I have no idea […]

November 1976 was a difficult month for fans of the Baltimore Orioles. After an 88-win, second-place finish in the just-completed season, the advent of free agency during the offseason stood to dramatically alter the team’s chemistry, and within a ten-day period the worst-case scenario was realized: On the 19th of November, 20-game winner Wayne Garland […]

Baseball is a game full of statistics; however, they rarely tell the whole story. Such is the case with Roger Holt, an infielder who grew up in a small town in rural Florida and made it to the major leagues with the New York Yankees late in the 1980 season. Holt – a contact hitter […]

Adam DeBus was one of many “cup of coffee” major leaguers, spending about six weeks with the 1917 Pittsburgh Pirates. By all accounts he was a marginal player, having played only 2½ previous seasons of professional baseball at the Class C level. His opportunity in the big leagues was probably due more to wartime manpower […]

Hard-throwing Bill Caudill pitched in the majors from 1979 through 1987. The righty struck out a batter per inning at a time when that was much less common. “Caudill doesn’t have much finesse,” said The Scouting Report annual for 1983, the year after he emerged as a closer with the Seattle Mariners. “He throws a […]

Horse racing and home run may start with the same letters, but not much more would seem to blend the excitement of the two. Unless Héctor Molina is involved. Then it becomes the foundation for a voice known to Chicago sports fans for decades. When the White Sox opened the 2025 season in celebration of […]

The 6-foot tall, 210-pound catcher for the Jersey City Jerseys looked like a giant to the boy. It was Camera Day at Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium in 1960. The Jerseys were the Cincinnati Reds’ Triple-A club. The catcher was Dutch Dotterer, a charming and intellectual athlete. Years later, Santa Ana High School’s Athletic Director, Frank Alvarado, would […]

Left-hander Clyde Shoun played for the Braves near the end of a long 14-year career in the majors that saw him make all but the last 16 of his 454 appearances in the National League. Typically used in relief, he started just 85 contests and posted a 73-59 lifetime record with a career 3.91 ERA. […]

A nimble catcher before becoming one of the finest defensive third basemen of his era, Lave Cross spent most of his long career with four Philadelphia franchises.1 First came stints with the American Association’s Athletics and Players’ League’s Quakers, before a half-dozen seasons with the talented but underachieving mid-1890s National League Phillies. His fortunes then […]

Leon “Boogie Wolf” Childress is one of many obscure “ghost players” of the Negro Leagues, a player skilled enough to make it onto the rosters and even into group photographs of some very good teams, but never earning regular playing time or appearing in any statistical record. Leon was born on June 23, 1910, in […]

John Sullivan probably caught 10,000 to 100,000 baseballs during his professional baseball career, but none more significant than the last one he caught in the Toronto Blue Jays’ bullpen on October 23, 1993. It was Game Six of the 1993 World Series; the ninth inning. Sullivan, the Blue Jays bullpen coach from 1982 through 1993, […]

In the American League’s first-ever season-ending tiebreaker, the Cleveland Indians’ rookie sensation, Gene Bearden, faced the Boston Red Sox on October 4, 1948 at Fenway Park. At stake was who would face the Boston Braves in the World Series. Bearden’s last two starts had been shutout victories, giving him a 19-7 won-lost record for the […]

“Mystique” is a word often linked with Sandy Koufax. He was dubbed “The Left Arm of God” for his pitching feats – especially over the five years from 1962 to 1966. A long litany of statistics attests to his brilliance during this period, but perhaps the most salient points are these. Koufax became the first […]

No matter how you measure it, Tony Conigliaro’s career got off to a terrific start, but tragedy repeatedly intervened and the great promise of his early years remained unfulfilled.  A local boy made good, Tony was born and raised in the Boston area, signed with the hometown team, and made his major-league debut in 1964 […]

The man who broadcast Jackie Robinson’s first season with the Dodgers recalled that, as a boy in Sanford, Florida, “I saw black men tarred and feathered by the Ku Klux Klan and forced to walk the streets. I had grown up in a completely segregated world.” Red Barber confessed that when he learned the Dodgers […]

“Henry Aaron in the second inning walked and scored. He’s sittin’ on 714. Here’s the pitch by Downing. Swinging. There’s a drive into left-center field! That ball is gonna be … outta here! It’s gone! It’s 715! There’s a new home run champion of all time, and it’s Henry Aaron!”  — Atlanta Braves’ announcer Milo […]

What came to be known as the Yankees Dynasty began under the twenty-four-year stewardship of Jacob Ruppert. Known as “Colonel” because of his prior service in the National Guard, Ruppert owned and operated a profitable brewery, served four terms in the United States Congress, and in 1915 purchased half of the New York Yankees. His […]

With the weather turning crisp in October of 1916, sports fans across North America were looking forward to the World Series. There had been great pennant races in both leagues, and the upcoming battle between Brooklyn and the Boston Red Sox looked like a good one. Though Toronto was still more than sixty years away […]

“So baseball is dead, like watching grass grow,” wrote Clif Keane in the next day’s paper, after the Boston Red Sox held off the Oakland A’s for a one-run win. “It would take the greatest of script writers three weeks of head scratching to come up with the drama that unfolded at Fenway Park last […]

The bankrupt St. Louis Browns were acquired in March 1899 by Frank Robison,1 who already owned the Cleveland Spiders. To maximize his profits and his chance of winning the 1899 pennant, he moved the best players on the Spiders to his new team, which he dubbed the St. Louis Perfectos. The result was a strong […]

“The game will go down in the history of the San Diego Padres as perhaps one of the most dramatic ever played. Gaylord Perry, in the final game of the 1978 season against the Los Angeles Dodgers, accomplished a feat that only two other pitchers in the history of baseball before him were able to […]