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“I saw it all happen, from beginning to end. But sometimes I still can’t believe what I saw. This 19-year-old kid, crude, poorly educated, only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over – a man loved by […]

“St. Louis is one of the greatest baseball towns in the country. It has probably turned out more professional baseball players than any other city. … The youngsters of St. Louis know more about big league baseball than the adult fans of the average city.” – Damon Runyon   August 26, 1914, was an improbable […]

On October 14, 1965, the Minnesota Twins lost a heartbreaking World Series Game Seven to Sandy Koufax and the Los Angeles Dodgers, 2–0. While the disappointment was palpable, there was every reason to believe the Twins would soon be back in the Series. The team had won the pennant convincingly with a record of 102-60, […]

Just what is the Baseball Reliquary, anyway? There are as many answers to that question as there are multitudes contained by Walt Whitman, the Brooklyn-based author of Leaves of Grass and the first American artist to embrace the game and assimilate it into his poetic vocabulary.

One of America’s oldest commercialized sports spectaculars, major league baseball has adjusted repeatedly and dramatically to significant ideological and technological changes. Indeed, so cumulative have been these forces of change that each passing decade of baseball history reveals profound changes in the game’s social organization and in the behavior of the players. Thus, to scrutinize […]

It could be compared, in a way, to a romance novel — first they hate each other, then they start to learn more about each other to where they like each other, and finally they fall in love and get married. Unlike the two protagonists in this popular style of fiction, though, the National and […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, No. 20 (2000).   Urban Shocker is one of baseball’s forgotten stars, even though he was one of the American League’s dominant pitchers in the 1920’s. He won 156 games in that decade, most with the lowly St. Louis Browns, despite the fact that his […]

  In the modern game, a team’s fortune or failure is often the burden of the general manager. The GM hires the field manager, signs or passes on available free agents, makes transactions with teams, and, with the farm director and his legion of scouts, oversees the amateur free agent draft. Out of all that […]

Analysis of front page coverage of Boston’s largest-circulation newspaper demonstrates the degree to which the Impossible Dream season of 1967 was an entirely unexpected phenomenon.Every springtime, Boston Red Sox fans hope for a pennant and the chance to win the World Series. It wasn’t always this way. There were fallow periods in Red Sox history […]

George Edward “Rube” Waddell was an original oddball lefty, who could endear himself to fans, provide fodder for sportswriters, and alienate his teammates and manager. He was also immensely talented. Hijinks notwithstanding, he was the premier power pitcher in the opening decade of the 1900s. The enigmatic Waddell struggled during the first few years of […]

On September 5, 1929, Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees played an exhibition game against the Mutual Welfare League team inside the walls of Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. “I hear we’re going to Sing Sing next Thursday,” Yankees catcher Ben Bengough announced in the Yankee Stadium dugout. “Yeh,”said Babe Ruth, […]

The 1927 Pittsburgh Pirates are generally remembered for losing in the World Series to the New York Yankees’ Murderers’ Row, a juggernaut highlighted by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at their offensive peak. Although the Yankees did sweep the Pirates in four straight games, two of them — Games One and Four — were decided […]

As we are told by the good-hair talking heads on 24-hour sports networks—as well as by any newspaper, electronic fish wrap, podcast, or blog—the 2021 season featured nine no-hitters. But in 11 games a team was held hitless. Why the discrepancy? Two of those games were seven-inning games, and a 1991 committee had declared that […]

Cupid Childs was one of the best-hitting major-league second basemen during the late nineteenth century, not to mention a better than average fielder who possessed great range on the diamond. Only four other second basemen in the history of major-league baseball have averaged more total chances per game than Childs. His all-around outstanding play made […]

When it came to his involvement in the corruption of the 1919 World Series, Shoeless Joe Jackson rarely told the same story twice. When the fix first came to light in late September 1920, Jackson, along with teammates Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, abjectly admitted that he had agreed to join the conspiracy to throw […]

Forfeits were relatively commonplace in the early days of baseball. There was at least one forfeit in the major leagues every year from 1883 to 1907, including 13 in 1884. A review of the reasons for these forfeits reveals how ”bush league” the major leagues still were. In 1889, St. Louis’s American Association team failed […]

The San Diego Padres have retired the uniform numbers of five of their players. Three are Hall of Famers: Tony Gwynn (number 19), Dave Winfield (31), and Trevor Hoffman (51). The fourth was the franchise’s first star player and a fan favorite, Cy Young Award winner Randy Jones (35). The fifth? He played only four […]

1962 Detroit Tigers Goodwill Tour program (Robert Fitts Collection)   For the Detroit Tigers 1962 was a year to forget. They finished the season in fourth place, 10½ games behind the pennant-winning Yankees, with 16 fewer wins than the second-place 1961 Detroit club. The best the Tigers could muster in 1962 was second spot in […]

When Houston Astros right-handed flamethrower James Rodney Richard, the number two pick in the June 1969 draft, debuted against the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park on September 5, 1971, he did so in relative anonymity. He received no television coverage, and no radio broadcast beyond the clubs’ local markets. Fans were unaware of his […]

1981 Kansas City Royals Goodwill Tour advertisement (Robert Fitts Collection)   For decades it had been the hope of Matsutaro Shoriki, the owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun Group, a conglomerate that produces the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and owns the Yomiuri Giants baseball team, that there would one day be a “true world series” played between […]

As the story goes, in 1899 Barney Dreyfuss purchased the Pittsburgh National League club, arranged a trade with the team he previously owned, the Louisville Colonels, and spirited away all of Louisville’s best players, including Honus Wagner, Fred Clarke, and Rube Waddell. This established the Pirates as one of the dominant National League teams for […]

Claims pop up with frequency that this team or that invented the pitching rotation. These find life in our modern media and attract proponents. Thanks to David Smith, Tom Ruane, and scores of volunteer researchers, we have Retrosheet, and there are methods to determine rotation patterns and fact-check such comments as one spoken by New […]

Babe Ruth meets Yale baseball player George H.W. Bush in 1948. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   George Herbert Walker Bush began the first year of his term as the 41st President of the United States of America on January 20, 1989. Then, just seventy-three days later (on April 3, 1989), he carried out […]

Any avid baseball fan can tell you about the Miracle Braves of 1914-how they rose from eighth place on July 18 to win the pennant by 10.5 games and the World Series in four straight. But who can tell you much about the Miracle-less Boston Braves of 1935? They had the worst record in the […]