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  The old saying “timing is everything” has been proved true in most everybody’s life at one point or another. For Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck, this adage came to fruition when he moved his club’s home games from League Park to Cleveland Stadium on a permanent basis in 1947. The lakefront stadium, with its capacity of over 70,000 and […]

After winning the World Series in 1946, the St. Louis Cardinals had two straight second-place finishes and in 1949 were trying to capture the National League pennant once again.1 With five games to play in the season, the first-place Cardinals held a 1½-game lead over the second-place Brooklyn Dodgers. The Cardinals had just swept a […]

When a rookie pitcher for the Detroit Tigers named Mark Fidrych made his major-league debut in an April 1976 road contest against the Oakland Athletics, it attracted little attention. In front of a tiny crowd (3,080) at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, Fidrych entered a tie game in the bottom of the ninth inning and promptly […]

The 1975 season was a dreadful one for the Detroit Tigers, who went 57-102 and finished 37½ games out of first. At one point, they lost 19 games in a row, and volatile manager Ralph Houk faced assault charges for allegedly slapping a reporter in the clubhouse before a game against the Baltimore Orioles — […]

A hit that wasn’t a hit turned an exciting, but hardly unique, pitchers’ duel into baseball history. The scene was Chicago’s South Side Park; the opponents were two Players League teams, the Chicago Pirates and Ward’s Wonders of Brooklyn. Played before a crowd estimated at between 4,000 and 4,500, the game was the first of […]

A native of Eau Claire, Wisconsin (born on May 4, 1888, according to both the 1900 Census and his World War I draft registration), Ralph Benjamin Pond became a star  baseball player for the University of Maine, and seems to have joined the Boston Red Sox on the road in Chicago in 1910 right after […]

Known for his white-blond hair, Silver King emerged as a star in his rookie season, winning 32 games and helping the St. Louis Browns to the 1887 American Association pennant. He recorded at least 30 victories in his first four big-league seasons, including a league-best 45 in 1888, at a time when the pitching distance […]

On a summer afternoon in 1935, 17-year-old Ed Head was on a bus to Mer Rouge, Louisiana. Head, a left-handed pitcher for the semipro Pioneer (Louisiana) team, was on his way to play a game against the Mer Rouge team. He and his girlfriend were seated on the left side of the bus (facing forward), […]

The title of a Shakespearean play, All’s Well That Ends Well, seems to fit the life of George Provens. In the midst of some tough years in his 20s fell a genuine bright spot, a brief stint with the Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro American League in 1945. Though that achievement didn’t turn his life […]

The 1914 home run leader in professional baseball wasn’t Gavvy Cravath or even Frank “Home Run” Baker, but an unassuming 21-year-old Georgia lumber farmer named Everett Bankston, who banged out 31 homers with Cordele in the Class D Georgia State League in his very first professional season. He never came close to matching that production […]

Baseball is a game in which one or two numbers can become burned into collective memory, ultimately defining a player’s career. In the case of Babe Ruth, the numbers are 60 and 714. In the case of Ty Cobb, they are 4,191 and .367 (even though those numbers were shown to be inaccurate more than […]

Over a 50-year career in baseball, a man is likely to pick up a few nicknames, and for Jack Onslow this was no exception. He liked to call himself “The Travelling Man,” and the logic to that will become obvious. He also was referred to as “Happy Jack” and “Honest John,” names that could have […]

Harvey Smith was born on July 14, 1871, in Union Deposit, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Fetterhoff Smith and Dr. John K. Smith, who had been born in Union Deposit 27 years earlier and worked as a physician there until 1873 when he relocated with his family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he remained in practice […]

Phil Cooney1 signed contracts with two major-league teams, neither of which was the team he played for in his one and only major-league game. Born Philip Cohen, he changed his name to Cooney to insulate himself from the anti-Semitic prejudices that prevailed throughout professional baseball. Still, during his entire career, he was given many affectionate […]

Tony Lloyd at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field in 2023 (Courtesy of Jeb Stewart)   Tony Lloyd1 was a second baseman for the Birmingham Black Barons in 1959, which was his only season in professional baseball. He was a right-handed hitter and thrower who stood 5-feet-9 and weighed 150 pounds.2 Anthony Carl “Tony” Lloyd was born on […]

Visiting Cincinnati hurler Elton Chamberlain was in Boston’s Congress Street Grounds pitcher’s box for the afternoon game of the May 30, 1894, Decoration Day doubleheader. “Icebox” had no-hit the champ Beaneaters the previous September in Porkopolis (in a game called due to darkness after seven innings) and he was about to face half the same […]

In 1916 Stan Coveleski of the Cleveland Indians and Jack Nabors of the Philadelphia Athletics played their first full season in the major leagues, and each pitched more than 200 innings. They had similar ERAs — 3.41 for Coveleski and 3.47 for Nabors — but while Coveleski’s won-lost record was 15-13, Nabors’s record was abysmal: […]

Kenneth William Penner was a baseball lifer. From the time he broke into organized ball as a 17-year-old pitcher in 1913, until his final pitch, thrown at the age of 47, Penner spent parts of 28 seasons in the minor leagues, pitching for 17 teams in 11 leagues and four classifications. In between, the right-hander […]

Virtually every book or article on the St. Louis Browns during World War II portrays a team made up of colorful individuals variously described as alcoholics, carousers, or players whose careers had been resuscitated because of the exigencies of the worldwide conflict.  One of the players on the Browns roster during this era who did […]

The train pulled out of South Station in Boston on February 18, 1911, heading for Los Angeles and the new location for Red Sox spring training (Redondo Beach, California). Several stops were made along the way as the party picked up players from Western League teams as well as returning veteran players. Manager Patsy Donovan […]

Boston fans who liked the way Jason Varitek handles the Red Sox pitching staff would have loved Sammy White. Sammy, who was selected as an American League All-Star catcher in 1953, was the team’s number one catcher from 1952 to 1959. White was a credible hitter, averaging .264 during his eight full seasons with the […]

After the lefty pitched three games for the 1888 Cleveland Blues, Syracuse-educated Doc Oberlander found his way out west as a federally appointed subagent and physician with the Crow (Apsáalooke) tribe in southeast Montana, and the superintendent of Pryor Creek Boarding School. Hartman Louis Oberlander was born May 12, 1864, along the western shore of […]

A historical database of Major League Baseball team employees is a project of SABR’s Business of Baseball Committee. This initiative offers a new lens into major-league front and back offices, from team owners to ticket sales. The MLB Team Employee Database is now available for viewing to all SABR members on the Research Resources page. […]

The baseball team known as the Braves makes its home in Atlanta, but traces its diamond ancestry back through Milwaukee and to Boston, where it began in 1871. In fact, the Atlanta Braves are the only baseball team that has played every season consecutively since 1871, outdating even the National League itself. While forgotten by […]