Search Results

Fathers’ Day in 1964 was a beautiful, hot summer day in New York. At Shea Stadium that day the team with the best record in baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies, was scheduled to play a doubleheader against the team with the worst record in baseball, the Mets. On the mound for the visitors in the first […]

Henry Aaron hit 44 home runs in his first season as an Atlanta Brave. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   The Braves began their first season of play in Atlanta in 1966 after moving south from Milwaukee, the city they had called home from 1953 until 1965. The team featured a number of strong hitters, including catcher-first baseman […]

In this present era of pitch counts, innings limits, and rare complete games, it is difficult to imagine two starting pitchers grinding it out over the course of a 16-inning contest. Yet such was the case on July 8, 1924, when Cincinnati Reds left-hander and future Hall of Famer Eppa Rixey prevailed over Philadelphia Phillies […]

Baseball fans feel many emotions during the course of a game. They may feel joy, anger, euphoria, or despair. But rarely, if ever, does a single, ordinary play become a moving, lump-in-your-throat memorable event. It did on this night. The 45,757 fans who attended the game at Olympic Stadium on September 17, 1993, felt all […]

Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey anticipated that his outfit would be competitive and draw strong crowds during the American League’s first season as a declared major league in 1901, but even he was taken aback by how many fans descended upon South Side Park on April 28 for the first Sunday game of the […]

The first two months of the 1991 season had been a roller coaster ride for the Texas Rangers. After dropping the first four games of a season-opening homestand, they ripped off wins in six of the next seven. Following another four-game skid in early May, the Rangers responded with a team-record 14-game winning streak to […]

It was a bad day. The weather was drab, home plate was missing, and the Minnesota Twins lost their last game ever at Metropolitan Stadium. When the grounds crew reported for work they discovered that vandals had gotten into the ballpark and had sliced through the rubber tarpaulin that covered the home-plate area and removed […]

The managerial move was finally made during the All-Star break. By most accounts, it was not a surprise. Baltimore’s record in the first half of the 1968 season was 43-37, but the Orioles did not appear to be headed to the World Series. So, Orioles personnel director Harry Dalton promoted Earl Weaver to take the […]

Yankee Stadium was the natural choice to hold the All-Star Game in 1939. The game originated in Chicago in 1933, as an activity adjacent to the city’s Century of Progress World’s Fair. Six years later, New York was home to another World’s Fair, touting “The World of Tomorrow.” Companies like Westinghouse and National Cash Register […]

Henry Aaron hit at least 20 home runs in every season from 1955 through 1974. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Six times in his great career, Henry Aaron drove home six runs in a game.1 He accomplished that feat for the final time on August 21, 1971, against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Atlanta Braves slugger hit […]

The Houston Astros (originally the Colt .45s) had begun play in 1962, and the Astrodome had opened in 1965, but the team had endured a long wait for its first postseason appearance. In 1980 the Astros survived a one-game playoff with the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the NL West division with a 93-70 record. […]

The first thing one might note in glancing at the major-league baseball record of left-handed pitcher Tom Borland is that his career line was 0-4, with a 6.75 earned run average. Was it a burden he bore for the rest of his life? Regardless of anything else, he accomplished something that tens of millions only […]

More than 9,000 men played in the major leagues before Chuck Lindstrom, but he was the first to achieve an incredibly rare distinction. In fact, 15 more years passed before another player matched him. He is also among the few twentieth-century major leaguers whose fathers were Hall of Fame players, and though none of these […]

When big-league players heeded the call of duty during World War II, many teams were left scrambling to find replacement players. One such wartime player was slap-hitting Augie Bergamo, who debuted with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1944 after six years in the minor leagues. A versatile outfielder and pinch-hitter with a good eye, Bergamo […]

Stout left-hander Ed Zmich won only one big-league game, but for a few weeks in the summer of 1910, the Class-D hurler caught the attention of the baseball world, resulting in an unusually fierce bidding war. Edward Albert Zmich was born on October 1, 1884, in Cleveland. His father, Max, emigrated from Germany in 1873 […]

On June 6, 1897, King Bailey of the Evansville Brewers and Pete Dowling faced each other in Central League action at Paducah, Kentucky. “The game was the finest ever witnessed. … Bailey was wholly invincible and was not once hit safe,” an Evansville paper reported. Dowling allowed only one hit in Evansville’s 1-0 win.1 Dowling […]

Hailed as the next Robin Yount, Julio Franco debuted with the Cleveland Indians in 1983. Franco came to the Indians from the Philadelphia Phillies as part of a five-player deal for Von Hayes. Expected to be the Phillies’ shortstop of the future, Franco had found himself without a regular chance to play when the Phillies […]

In the first years of Tommy Lasorda’s Hall of Fame career as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, he kept several large photographs on the walls of his office at the team’s spring-training complex in Vero Beach, Florida. There was one of himself and Walter Alston, his legendary predecessor, and another with Hall of Fame […]

June 15, 1977 is a black day in the history of the New York Mets. On that date, in what came to be known as The Midnight Massacre, M. Donald Grant, the team’s chairman of the board, traded away Tom Seaver, a/k/a “The Franchise,” to the Cincinnati Reds for Pat Zachry, Doug Flynn, Dan Norman, […]

The third pitcher selected by the New York Mets in the 1961 National League expansion draft, French-Canadian Ray Daviault (pronounced dah-vee-yoh) debuted in New York’s inaugural home game, at the Polo Grounds versus the Pittsburgh Pirates. He walked the first batter he faced, then chased him home with a pair of wild pitches. After two eventful […]

Disco music peaked in the United States with the top six songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart during the week ending July 21, 1979. At the time, “Disco Dan” Ford was starring for the California Angels club that was headed for that franchise’s first postseason appearance.1 Although the musical genre quickly fell out of […]

Climbing a tree is a common childhood activity. Dexterity, effort, and determination all play a role and afford kids the opportunity to admire the horizon from a higher perspective. As such pursuits give way to teenage interests, youths may choose to remain on firmer ground to determine their possible adult career. In Don “The Rook” […]

Right-hander Bob Purkey learned the knuckleball from Branch Rickey and fashioned a 13-year big-league career with a smorgasbord of pitches plus excellent control. Robert Thomas Purkey was born in Pittsburgh on July 14, 1929. His father, Edward, was an insurance agent and his mother, Anna, a homemaker. The Purkeys had two other sons, Edward and […]

As a kid growing up in Pasco across the river, being able to stand on the mound at Sanders Field was as big for me as going to Yankee Stadium. — Bruce Kison1 Sanders Field, circa 1953 (Photos courtesy of the Eastern Benton County Historical Society)   Sanders-Jacobs Memorial Field, originally known as Sanders Field, […]