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A brief glance at the box score for the mid-August game between the Boston Braves and the St. Louis Cardinals makes it appear that the Braves’ 3-1 win was a standard affair. However, the August 18, 1915, contest between these two teams was anything but normal. While the game flowed in fairly typical fashion, with […]

On July 23, 1912, Boston Braves pitcher Otto Hess elected to pitch to Honus Wagner in the bottom of the ninth with a base open and the winning run in scoring position. Two pitches later, Wagner, the reigning (and eight-time overall) NL batting champion, singled home the game-winner for the Pittsburgh Pirates.1 Eight days later, […]

Future Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams both homered in the Boston Red Sox’ 18-7 win over the St. Louis Browns in the second game of a doubleheader at Sportsman’s Park on June 9, 1939. It was one of 111 losses that year for the inept Browns, who finished an American League-record 64½ […]

When Boston’s 1918 World Series championship season was over, Babe Ruth asked for more money through his new agent, Johnny Igoe, demanding a two-year contract at $15,000 a year. Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, in economic survival mode, responded with an emphatic no. Negotiations included Frazee’s offer of $8,500 after Igoe insisted on a three-year […]

“You might say I’ve seen some pretty good pitching. But I’ve never seen anything like Smoky Joe Wood in 1912. He won 34 games that year, 10 of them shutouts, and 16 of those wins were in a row. It so happened that that was the same year Walter Johnson also won 16 in a […]

Carl Yastrzemski was legendary in Boston — and throughout baseball. In his 23-season Hall of Fame career with the Red Sox, he made 18 All-Star teams, and won three batting titles, seven Gold Gloves, and the 1967 Triple Crown before retiring in October 1983. Two generations later, the Yastrzemski name returned to the majors.1 His […]

Opening Day is always about new beginnings; the hope associated with a fresh start. But the 1935 New York Yankees were not merely launching a new season; they were embarking on a new era: Babe Ruth no longer was to be found at Yankee Stadium. In February 1935 the 40-year-old Ruth – his weight increasing, […]

The attendance at Cleveland’s League Park for a Tuesday afternoon game was pretty small at 2,500 — which might be just as well, because of the loss that Indians fans endured that day. Manager Steve O’Neill’s Cleveland squad was hosting the Boston Red Sox, led by shortstop-manager Joe Cronin. One wouldn’t have known it at […]

“Cupcake,” a euphemism for a should-be-easy-to-beat opponent, entered the sports lexicon in the 1970s.1 Forty-some years earlier, the New York Yankees would’ve agreed it applied to their September 23, 1932, opponent: the cellar-dwelling, 63 games back2 Boston Red Sox. The hapless 1899 Cleveland Spiders were the last major-league team to face an opponent 60 or […]

To Boston Red Sox management, it must have seemed like an ordinary Tuesday in August 1909. The Detroit Tigers were in town to play five games over three days, including two makeup games from earlier in the season. It was ladies day, so perhaps a few additional fans might cross the turnstiles at the Huntington […]

As the 1917 season reached its next-to-last day on October 3, the Boston Red Sox, winners of the American League pennant and World Series in the two previous seasons, were in second place, eight games behind the Chicago White Sox, who had dethroned the Red Sox and wrapped up the pennant a week earlier. The […]

Tommy Moore was drafted as an outfielder but made it to the majors as a pitcher. He appeared with four teams in parts of four seasons from 1972 through 1977, posting a won-lost record of 2-4 and an ERA of 5.40 in 42 games, largely in relief. “He would have been a great candidate for […]

Wes Schulmerich, a much-loved sports figure in his native Oregon, had an eventful and colorful fourteen-year professional baseball career and a long life filled with sports and laughter. A large, boisterous man, as his baseball days wound down, the laughter often came first. Edward Wesley Schulmerich was born August 21, 1901, in Hillsboro, Oregon, about […]

With a weak heart that would eventually fail prematurely and a 4-F designation that allowed him to play wartime ball at the highest level,  Ben Cardoni failed to record a win in 36 appearances for the Boston Braves from 1943 to 1945 but did manage a quartet of single milestones with exactly one career complete […]

Whispering Bill Barrett was a Cambridge, Massachusetts, man through and through: born in Cambridge (May 28, 1900), died in Cambridge (January 26, 1951), and buried in Cambridge (Cambridge Cemetery, 7113 Chapel section).  He’s also one of four Cantabrigians who played major league ball for the Boston Red Sox; the other three are Fred Mitchell, Carl […]

The first year the Red Sox wore uniform numbers was 1931. The first man to wear #1 was Bill Sweeney. It was his last year in the majors. Sweeney lived out the rest of his life in baseball, twice managing the Pacific Coast League Los Angeles Angels to pennants, in two stints eight years apart […]

With his brothers and sisters, Al Van Camp could almost have fielded two baseball teams. Edward Victor Van Camp, born in Lille, France, in 1871, came to America in 1884. There he met Alice Rose Van DePutte from Altre, Belgium. The two married in Moline, Illinois, in August 1892. And became a quite productive couple; […]

Because he was born on an Indian reservation, Roy Johnson was considered a ward of the government. He and his younger brother Bob Johnson, who joined the Red Sox in 1944, were both born in Pryor, Oklahoma (some 35 miles east of Tulsa) – before Oklahoma became a state. Roy was the eldest of the […]

If you were drafting players in a fantasy baseball league, you would probably rely heavily on statistics to make your decisions. But if you were choosing players for a real team for an actual 154-game season, your choices might be very different. The rigors of travel, game pressures, team chemistry and other intangibles might cause […]

Ponchatoula, Louisiana, in the 1930s was a small town that had suffered a number of lumber mills closing in the previous decade. By the 1930s, it was known primarily as a strawberry farming region. It was into this area that on October 2, 1934, Earl Lawrence Wilson was born. He later changed his name to […]

Ford Garrison “came into the big leagues on a postage stamp and rode to Philadelphia on a waiver list.” He was “a Paul Revere of baseball.”1 So wrote former major-league pitcher Stan Baumgartner, who later became a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The postage stamp was affixed to a letter which Scoops Latimer, sports editor […]

\Baseball aficionados know that trades, sales, and waivers are a part of the game. The general manager of the 1951 Chicago White Sox was Frank Lane, who earned the nickname Trader Lane for his propensity to exchange players. His attitude must have filtered down through the organization because minor-league director John Rigney engineered a trade […]

Ewell Gross was tall for a shortstop in his day (6 feet even), a native and high-school graduate of Mesquite, Texas, who spent almost his entire career in Texas – even the 1924 spring-training season in San Antonio when he first worked out for the Boston Red Sox, the one major-league team for which he […]

What came to be known as the Yankees Dynasty began under the twenty-four-year stewardship of Jacob Ruppert. Known as “Colonel” because of his prior service in the National Guard, Ruppert owned and operated a profitable brewery, served four terms in the United States Congress, and in 1915 purchased half of the New York Yankees. His […]