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“He looked like a Texan ought to look — like a Texas Ranger or a man who could have fought at the Alamo,” said Richie Ashburn.1 He was “Hondo,” a two-sport athlete in college who was pushed too far too fast by the bonus-baby rule. Stan Hollmig could have been a major-league star, but without that early […]

A turn-of-the-20th-century left-hander with a singular first name, Welcome Gaston’s brief major league career included events out of the ordinary, as well. During his October 1898 audition with the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, for example, Gaston started four National League games – but only two made the record books; his other two outings were called off before […]

On March 9, 1914, youthful pitching prospect Harry Juul1 took two giant strides toward adulthood. Within hours, he signed a major-league playing contract with the Brooklyn Tip-Tops of the Federal League, and he married former high school classmate Hilda Marie Johnson. Shortly thereafter, Harry informed his doubtful father, “Yes, Pop. It’s true. Hilda and I […]

He is Dick Culler in the baseball encyclopedias, but at home in High Point, North Carolina, he was Broadus Culler, star athlete, schoolteacher, basketball referee, entrepreneur and civic leader. Richard Broadus Culler was born on January 15, 1915, in High Point, a community in the state’s central Piedmont region that today calls itself “the Home […]

Venezuelan infielder Dámaso Blanco was 30 years old and in his 12th pro season when his dream finally came true with the San Francisco Giants. He told me the story in 2010. “The most important moment in my baseball career as an active player came on May 26, 1972. That day I played in my […]

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 […]

War was raging in Europe as the 1941 baseball season came to a close. News of the fighting kept fans justifiably preoccupied, while the pennant races served as a badly needed diversion. The New York Yankees captured the American League flag, and then defeated the National League champion Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. A […]

To discuss Paul Derringer is to discuss two men-a pitcher with exceptional control of his pitches and general work on the mound and a man with little or no control of himself anywhere else. Derringer (called “Oom Paul” for his 6-foot-3.1/2-inch height and admitted 205 pounds) was a belligerent man who often used his fists […]

Overcoming potentially career-ending shoulder injuries in the early 1950s to develop into one of the most feared sluggers of his era, Roy Sievers became just the 18th player to hit 300 home runs. With a powerful and graceful swing that Casey Stengel called “one of the sweetest,” 1 Sievers, known as Mr. Clutch for his […]

In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, two men lead such intertwined lives in London and revolution-torn Paris that it can simultaneously be the best and the worst of times. Bill Sweeney’s major league career was bookended by dramatic moves between two cities, but it was his unhappy fate to discover that, like Dickens’ […]

A genuine pre-modern national star, one of the major league game’s pioneers, and one of the sport’s most enduring and intriguing figures, Louis Rogers “Pete” Browning was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on June 17, 1861, at 13th and Jefferson on the city’s west side. A lifelong resident of Louisville, Pete Browning was the youngest of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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,” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

It was a battle for the American Association pennant, but “not a good game from a scientific standpoint,” opined the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.1 The first-place Philadelphia Athletics (63-28) arrived in the Gateway City to kick off a pivotal three-game series with the second-place St. Louis Browns (61-31). On a season-ending 13-game road swing, the Athletics […]

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 […]

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 […]