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If the Philadelphia Phillies played their August 7, 1969, exhibition against their Double-A farm team as a farce, it might have been because they couldn’t handle any more drama. Phillies manager Bob Skinner resigned on the day of the game, blasting team management for perceived lack of support in his disciplinary struggles with slugger Dick […]

As most baseball fans know, in 1988 the Chicago Cubs were the last team in the major leagues to install lights at their home ballpark – decades after every other team had turned on the switch from day to night. Across town, Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was experimenting with night baseball at his […]

The “greatest hitter who ever lived”? Ted Williams said his goal in life was to have people say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.”1 Very few would say he wasn’t in the conversation. He was not particularly known for his defense, though most judged him at least adequate in playing Fenway […]

Fans often remember the ends of seasons more readily than the beginnings. What is often associated with the beginnings of the 1975 season for the Cincinnati Reds is that on Saturday, May 17, 1975, the Reds stood at 19-19 and in second place 5½ games behind the rival Los Angeles Dodgers and just a half-game […]

After nearly a century, many baseball historians still wonder how Shoeless Joe Jackson’s career might have turned out were he not permanently banned from baseball after the fixing of the 1919 World Series. The same question remains for another slugging outfielder who was also thrown out of Organized Baseball after he was accused of taking […]

The casual fan of the game might know Ron Swoboda for “The Catch“ in the 1969 World Series, or for his home run heroics in a game against Hall of Famer Steve Carlton, or for Casey Stengel’s early summation: “He will be great, super, even wonderful. Now if he can only learn to catch a […]

Hub Walker and his younger brother Gee debuted for the Detroit Tigers in 1931. While Gee became a standout hitter and one of the most popular Tigers in the 1930s, Hub, a scrappy, hard-nosed journeyman center fielder, played in just 297 big-league games in parts of five seasons with the Tigers and Cincinnati Reds. A […]

Speedy Everett Booe was one of a multitude of major-leaguers who played only a year or two in the big leagues, and then spent the majority of their careers in the minors. Booe was a rookie flash in the pan for the Pirates in 1913, and then jumped to Indianapolis and Buffalo of the upstart Federal […]

England has contributed 33 players to major-league baseball. About two-thirds of them played in the late nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century. Charles Joseph Hanford, who made his major-league debut in 1914 at the age of 31, is one of a minority of English-born major leaguers who made his major-league debut after […]

Eugene Joseph Bremer Sr., sometimes known as Gene, was born in New Orleans on July 18, 1916. He grew up in the city with his parents, three sisters, and grandmother. His father, Joseph, worked as a driver and his mother, Amanda, as a washerwoman. As a youngster he loved all sports and that led to […]

His prep school coach almost kicked the youngster off the team, saying he was too hardheaded to ever make it as a ballplayer. The coach was wrong. Dutch Ruether had a long and successful career in professional baseball. He had a number of things in common with his future roommate, Babe Ruth, and outperformed the […]

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, John Leovich excelled at baseball, football, and hockey with the talent to play each sport professionally. He made national headlines in 1941 when he decided to leave college to pursue a baseball career with the Philadelphia Athletics. That same summer Leovich joined the elite fraternity of players who have […]

“The tallest thing on spikes in this neck of the woods.”1 Clarence “Shovel” Hodge, who earned his nickname by working as a railroad fireman, stood 6-feet-4 – without spikes. In his major-league debut for the Chicago White Sox on September 6, 1920, the righty pitcher allowed no hits against Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers […]

For several years baseball was very, very good to Danny Tartabull. The game gave him honors and recognition, though not quite as much as he thought he deserved. Baseball paid him millions of dollars, enabling him to live a luxurious life style that most people could barely imagine. But it wasn’t enough. He was unable […]

Tim Teufel, who played mostly at second base but filled in at all three other infield positions, had good line-drive power, with 86 home runs in the majors. After breaking in with the Minnesota Twins in September 1983, he went on to play 10 full seasons. He spent a little over half that time with […]

In the waning weeks of the 1962 season a player with a career .190-1-10 batting line played a crucial role in the National League pennant race. On August 23, San Francisco Giants’ infielder Ernie Bowman launched his only major league home run in New York’s Polo Grounds. Five innings later he delivered the game-winning single […]

Johnny Ostrowski shares the same Polish ancestry as Carl Yastrzemski, but his Red Sox career was in many ways the polar opposite of that of the Hall of Fame legend. While Yaz accumulated a team-record 11,988 regular season at-bats over 3,308 games, Ostrowski is one of 12 position players to appear in only one game, […]

Outfielder Al Shaw played from 1907 to 1909 with the St. Louis Cardinals, for nine end-of-season games in 1907 and for more than 100 games in each of the following two years. For the next four years he played in Single A and Double A, until he came back to the majors for the two […]

On page 1,444 of the fourth edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia published in 1979, Joe Staples nestles in obscurity between journeyman outfielder Leroy Stanton and Hall of Famer Willie Stargell.1 The scant entry is the reflection of a rather unremarkable career. He appeared in seven games with the 1885 Buffalo Bisons, recorded just one hit […]

Though acknowledging that Fred Luderus “is not a Stuffy McInnis on defense, nor a Jake Daubert in batting, nor a Fred Merkle on the baselines,” J. C. Kofoed in the July 1915 issue of Baseball Magazine called the Phillies first baseman “the most under-rated man in baseball today.” A pure fastball hitter who feasted on […]

Patrick W. Purtell died in his longtime hometown of Columbus, Ohio, on June 1, 1920, and his obituary in the Columbus Dispatch mentioned a notable distinction: all three of Purtell’s sons were professional baseball players, including William, a major leaguer. But not a word was said about the fact that the younger Purtells were following […]

Joe Girardi had the big hit in the deciding game of the 1996 World Series, caught a perfect game, won a Manager of the Year Award with one team, and skippered another to a World Series win. An above-average major leaguer for 15 seasons, Girardi will be remembered most for his time helming the post-Joe […]

The novelty had long since worn off. On Friday, May 17, 1963, a mere 8,223 fans came through the turnstiles at Colt Stadium, less than half the number that were in attendance exactly one year earlier when the sheer newness of the expansion Colt .45s was enough to attract larger crowds. Yet when Don Nottebart […]

This article was originally published in the December 2025 edition of the SABR Black Sox Scandal Committee Newsletter. One of the unsolved puzzles of the Black Sox Scandal is the inclusion of substitute infielder Fred McMullin in the plot to throw the 1919 World Series. Given that there was little prospect that McMullin, a bench […]