Search Results

NOTE: This is the final installment of a three-part series addressing the founding of the Philadelphia National League Baseball Club.1 Click here to read Part One (1881 Eastern Championship Association) and click here to read Part Two (1882 League Alliance).   Traditional histories of the Philadelphia Phillies portray the club’s entry into the National League […]

The Houston Astrodome was the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned major-league ballpark. It was formally unveiled in an exhibition game that pitted the Houston Astros against the American League champion New York Yankees on April 9, 1965. Unlike previous sports venues, the Astrodome was built to be a massive all-purpose, climate-controlled facility that would serve as […]

“Free-agent frenzy.”1 “Meat Market.”2 Negotiations dominated by “fast-talking, greedy little men.”3 Memories of the 1992 Winter Meetings in Louisville, Kentucky, were unvaryingly ugly. Over a tumultuous four days, baseball’s annual gathering had dissolved into nightmarish chaos and sent major-league executives running. Among the worst incidents, the Rev. Jesse Jackson denounced baseball’s “institutional racism,” threatening to […]

The ruins of old Christ Church in Colchester, Ontario, pictured in this 1921 postcard. According to local memories and historical accounts, the land now lost to erosion once held a baseball diamond and a schoolyard where local children played during the nineteenth century. By the time this photo was taken in July 1921, decades of […]

Appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s research on Babe Ruth’s RBI record.

Here is supporting evidence for the correction of errors in the official RBI record of Lou Gehrig.

Michael Kelley played only briefly in one major league season. Despite this lack of major league success he was a highly respected minor league player and manager. However, he found himself in extremely hot water with Organized Baseball for three years, starting in 1905. From being a part of a sham sale of the St. […]

Keeping it Alive: The Proactive Clark Griffith  At age 72, Clark Griffith again faced the challenge of maintaining the operations and financial stability of his “small market” team, the Washington Senators, during a world war. The Senators, by population, were the smallest team in major-league baseball. During World War I, the major leagues continued to […]

The Mariner Moose entertaining fans at Tokyo Dome. (Photo by Robert Fitts)   On March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9.1 earthquake struck off the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu, near a region known as Tohoku.1 The quake triggered a tsunami, and the world watched in horror as the black waves – some as […]

  This essay will explore the subject of racial and economic integration during the period of approximately 1945 through 1965 by studying the subject of Negro League baseball and the African American community of Kansas City, Missouri, as a vehicle for discussing the broader economic and social impact of desegregation. Of special import here is […]

From youth “select” baseball to the major leagues, the percentage of players who are African American has reached a historic low. As low as the percentage on 2020 MLB teams’ 30-man rosters had ebbed (7.5 percent1), it is even lower among college players and youth players.2 Scholars and pundits have offered reasons for, and solutions […]

Telephone card souvenir from the 1986 Super Major Series (Robert Fitts Collection)   Opposing thoughts can complement one another and fill our lives with elegant contradictions. In ancient Chinese philosophy, this theory was known as yinyang. In Japan, the word is inyo. Although frequently associated with Eastern thought, inyo is a universal part of the […]

In addition to an All-Time Georgia-born All-Star team, the Magnolia Chapter selected an All-Time Atlanta Braves All-Star team. While acknowledging the talent of any number of players who served the Braves franchise during its time in Milwaukee and Boston, we wanted to restrict this team to players who actually played in Atlanta. We suggested that […]

Introduction and Context Some of the best players in baseball traded places at the 1933 winter meetings. The meetings opened amid optimism, with a feeling that baseball was recovering from the Depression and could “be expected to gain steadily” as it moved forward.1 During 1933, all 14 minor leagues that began the season completed it; […]

In 1892, Frank Grant played for the Gorhams and then the Cuban Giants on his way to a Hall of Fame career. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   During a playoff game in October 1905, Leland Giants pitcher Walter Ball rushed onto the diamond at Chicago’s West Side Park and threw a punch “with […]

Baseball fans love numbers — 755, 511, 2,632, for instance, or .300 batting averages, winning 20 games, stealing 100 bases, hitting 100 mph on the radar gun — all are part of the lore of the game. Sometimes those numbers include specific years, generally the year we started watching or the year our favorite team […]

Following years of posturing and outright conflict, first with the Brotherhood, then in the final showdown with the American Association, the National League achieved monopoly status. Twelve clubs, deemed the strongest of the two great major leagues of the 1880s, stood alone in a combination at the top of Organized Baseball. After deep financial losses […]

Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, who played for the Cincinnati Reds 36 years before Jackie Robinson came along, should be credited with crashing the color barrier. — Felipe Alou1   On April 15, 1947, the story goes, Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers became the first black American to play baseball in the major leagues.2 […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2 (McFarland & Co., Fall 2009).   In August of 1932, Gus Greenlee added permanent lights to the Pittsburgh Crawfords home field. (NOIRTECH RESEARCH INC.)   The Story of Greenlee Field Any story requires plot, characters, and setting. In […]

Nelson Rockefeller stands with Jackie Robinson, who served as a special assistant on community affairs for the New York Governor in the 1960s.   Between 1960 and 1968, Jackie Robinson was widely regarded as the most famous Black Republican in the country. Following his announced retirement from baseball in January 1957, and in remarkably short […]

“Sometimes it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. The Reds found this to be true today. Collapsing like a one-horse shay, especially in the finale, they dropped both ends of a sloppily-played doubleheader…”1 In this era, doubleheaders were a regular occurrence on the baseball calendar.2 Many were part of the regular-season schedule, while others […]