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He was a high-school phenom who found himself pitching in the major leagues while barely out of his teens. Connie Mack had heard about him when he was just 16 years old.1 But for every Bob Feller there are countless Lafayette Henions. Unlike Feller’s long and successful career, Henion’s experience in the major leagues consisted […]

Part of the story of Willard Eben Mains is typical of the era, but his achievements during his baseball career are not. Mains pitched in professional baseball for 20 years (1887-1906). He played briefly in the majors; the bulk of his career was spent in various minor leagues, where he was the first pitcher to […]

Ezra Sutton matured at the perfect time to join baseball as it morphed from a merely amateur endeavor played by people during the recreational hours to a sport that paid its players, allowing them to pursue their passion as a vocation. Sutton played for teams in the old National Association of Base Ball Players, the […]

Jack Phillips spent almost a decade on Major League rosters and never got into more than seventy games in a season. But that less-than-stellar playing career was followed by an all-star second act: twenty-four seasons as a baseball coach and athletic administrator at his alma mater, Clarkson University. Jack Dorn Phillips, the second son of […]

Perhaps the greatest example of the old baseball cliché “good field, no hit,” Raymond Francis Oyler was the regular shortstop for two late-1960s Detroit Tigers teams, including the world champion 1968 squad, as well as the original Seattle Pilots the following season. Ray compiled a sub-”Mendoza line” .175 career batting average—the lowest of any player […]

Lookin Up It lasted so long it went so fast it seems like yesterday it seems like never — “A Career,” from Days Like This, by Dan Quisenberry1   Sigh. There never was, and maybe there never will be, a major-league pitcher quite like Dan Quisenberry. He literally and figuratively came out of nowhere. Because […]

“Let’s face it, I’m more a thrower than a pitcher,”1 said the frank left-handed Kentuckian whose sudden emergence on the major-league stage in 1966 was described as “one of the strangest make-good-in-a-hurry stories”2 to ever come along. Despite an early diagnosis of an arthritic left elbow, this 43-year-old “thrower” was still hurling a baseball better […]

An excellent receiver but a weak batsman, catcher Walter Van Grofski personified a now-vanished species: the career minor-league ballplayer. Apart from a handful of spring training exhibition games, Van Grofski never came close to playing in a big-league contest. In fact, he was never a serious prospect, only once rising as high as Class AA […]

Before committing suicide under mysterious circumstances in the spring of 1907, Chick Stahl forged a reputation as one of the best center fielders in the game over the course of a 10-year major-league career. A lifetime .305 batter, the left-handed Stahl could also hit with power, and often ranked among the league leaders in extra-base […]

Uninvited and unannounced, “Harold Emerich” traipsed into the 1920 Philadelphia Phillies training camp in Birmingham, Alabama, and made a credible showing before being shipped out to the minors. However, “Harold Emerich” was actually Michigan contract jumper Herrick “Spoke” Emery. Fast forward four years, and the speedy Emery actually donned a Philadelphia uniform in five July […]

Mike McCormick was a $50,000 bonus baby at 17, a sore-armed castoff at 25, and a Cy Young Award winner at 29. Michael Francis McCormick was born in Pasadena, California, on September 29, 1938. His father, Kenneth, a semipro pitcher, built a mound in the backyard, placed home plate 15 feet away, and set out […]

Gene Crumling always envisioned himself as a baseball player. “He dropped the ‘b’ from his name when he started playing professional baseball because he said it looked better in print. Our folks didn’t mind,” said his brother Bill.1 Crumbling turned into Crumling in 1941 when Gene kicked off his 12-year professional-baseball career, spent primarily in […]

At the turn of the 20th century, Emmet Heidrick was one of the best players in baseball. A .300 hitter, he could drop a “tantalizing bunt” or drive the ball to the fence.1 As a baserunner and basestealer, he was speedy and aggressive. And as an outfielder, “Snags” was considered “the best fly catcher in […]

Grover Cleveland Gilmore was born in Chicago on November 1, 1888. He was the son of William Gilmore, born in Chicago, a railroad engineer, and Catherine Nantz, born in New York City, the daughter of German immigrants. Grover Gilmore was a man with legends surrounding his life. Check out his few lines in Total Baseball […]

As winter turned to spring in 1941, war was spreading across the globe, a wildfire uncontained. Nazi Germany had subjugated much of Europe, with invasion of the Soviet Union next. Britain had endured The Blitz for months, Luftwaffe terror raining from above. Hitler’s racist regime brutally persecuted Jews, evolving by 1942 into the genocide we […]

The longest homerless stretch of Joe Mauer’s Hall of Fame career began in August 2014 and carried into 2015, spanning 324 plate appearances and lasting until Mauer’s Minnesota Twins visited the Pittsburgh Pirates on May 20. With the score tied in the top of the 13th inning, Mauer hit Antonio Bastardo’s pitch over PNC Park’s […]

The first years of the 1970s were turbulent ones on American college campuses. In some places the upheaval even invaded that seeming bastion of order and tradition, the baseball diamond. The University of Vermont was a case in point. In mid-May 1971, Edward C. Andrews Jr., president of the financially troubled flagship state university, announced […]

It was a “perfect” Saturday night for baseball: 19 degrees and sleeting, winds at 30 miles per hour, gusting to 45. On the eve of the 1982 season, the Minnesota Twins and Philadelphia Phillies were set for an exhibition game to open the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. “Dome” was […]

By late June 1979, the once-proud Oakland Athletics had fallen into baseball’s basement. After 13 wayward seasons in Kansas City without a winning record, the franchise arrived in Oakland in 1968 with future stars Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris, and Catfish Hunter on the roster. The early 1970s saw five straight division titles and […]

Earmarked for greatness during his rapid rise through the Pirates’ farm system, Aramis Ramirez mixed promise with struggle for three seasons after reaching the major leagues as a teenager in 1998. On the first Sunday of the 2001 season, Ramirez’s career countdown hit liftoff with a three-home-run barrage at Houston’s Enron Field, igniting his breakthrough […]

After a sluggish five-game start in 1984, everything clicked into place for the Los Angeles Dodgers throughout the rest of April. Rick Honeycutt put an exclamation point on the early-season surge, firing a rain-shortened one-hitter against the San Diego Padres on April 27. In the second meeting of a four-game series at Jack Murphy Stadium, […]

In the 1870s it was Hartford, not New York, that was Boston’s biggest diamond rival. As with the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry of recent vintage, a dislike existed between the Hartford and Boston clubs and charges of buying the pennant were alleged against each. The pinnacle of this rivalry occurred on May 18, 1875, when the […]

On the night of July 22, 1978, a future Hall of Famer’s career ended in sudden and disputed fashion – and at the time, nearly no one noticed. Of course, not being noticed was part of this Hall of Famer’s agenda from the beginning. Nestor Chylak, an American League umpire since 1954, embodied the classic […]

When the Washington Senators1 were founded in 1891, they played their games at Boundary Field in Northwest Washington. Boundary Field was named for its location on the northwest boundary line of the District of Columbia at Boundary Line and Seventh Street. The field is labeled on the 1904 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map as “Athletic Fields,” […]