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America loves an underdog. It favors stories of players who weren’t given a chance because they were too small or didn’t have a traditional background, but they pushed and persevered and in the end made the team. Wayne LaMaster’s baseball career isn’t widely remembered today, but it is the classic underdog story of a player […]

Fred C. Newmeyer had “won another” game for his Bay City, Texas, baseball team in July of 1911.1 Through circumstance and personal motivation, Newmeyer would, after four years in professional baseball, begin and maintain a career in the motion-picture industry, rising from film extra to film director. In 1928, having worked with numerous silent film […]

Partway into his 19-year minor-league career, infielder Bud Connolly got the call to come to Boston. For most of three months in mid-1925, he played in 43 games for the Red Sox and acquitted himself well by the standards of the day for a shortstop (a .950 fielding percentage, a .262 batting average with 21 […]

Mace Stanley Brown was on the leading edge of early relief pitching specialists that began to emerge in the game in the 1930s. The right-hander enjoyed a Major League career that spanned eleven years and three teams but, despite an All-Star game appearance in 1938 and service in the U.S. Navy in 1944-1945, he is […]

He was a baseball man in the purest and most complimentary sense of the term, at various times in his professional career playing as a pitcher and an outfielder, along with a few occasions at second base, and finally working as a manager over a 26-year professional span. “He was a good contact hitter, had […]

When fans watched the Montreal Expos in the early 1980s, it was sometimes hard for them to determine if they were at a baseball game or a track meet. Players like Rodney Scott, Andre Dawson, and Jerry White ran roughshod over National League catchers. But no Expos player turned the tools of ignorance into tools […]

In 1928, right-hander Ed Carroll’s six losses did more to win him a major-league berth than the six games he won that same year. He went on to an undefeated rookie year, pitching for a last-place team. Edgar Fleischer Carroll came from Baltimore, where he was born on July 27, 1907, the son of William […]

Ed Moriarty was a .324 hitter, rising star, and fan favorite with the Boston Braves in 1935. Well, in his first eight games, anyway. He then shocked the Boston baseball world by suddenly calling it quits, saying he had a higher calling and was going to enter the priesthood. This player with 34 at-bats was […]

Words cannot contain Mike Burke. A man of boundless courage and matchless charm, by the time he became president of the New York Yankees in 1966, he had already fought the Nazis with the French Resistance, tried to overthrow communist governments for the CIA, served as the model for a movie spy, and run the […]

George Magerkurth was a National League umpire from 1929 to 1947, one of the best of the era. “He had bulldog features and disposition to match,” said sportswriter Arthur Daley. “He had many faults but he was a colorful man of unassailable integrity who made rich contribution to baseball lore and legend.”1 The New York […]

On October 15, 1946, the St. Louis Cardinals won their sixth world championship with a 4-3 victory over the Boston Red Sox. Enos Slaughter led off the bottom of the eighth inning with a single, and with two outs scored from first base on Harry Walker’s double to left-center field. The play, which later became […]

Bobby Maier would have been forgiven for harboring some bitterness toward manager Steve O’Neill and the Detroit Tigers. For most of 1945, the 29-year-old rookie had started at third base for the Tigers, doing a consistent if unspectacular job at the plate while proving perhaps less reliable with the glove. But as Detroit entered the […]

Willie Smith is best remembered for his game-winning pinch-homer on Opening Day for the 1969 Chicago Cubs, but he surely deserves to be recalled for a much more enduring achievement: He was the last major leaguer — and the only African-American player ever — to have pitched and played different positions in the field in […]

A 22-win season in his second year of professional baseball earned righthander Lou Koupal a trial with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1925. The eventual World Champions featured a starting rotation of Lee Meadows, Ray Kremer, Vic Aldridge, Johnny Morrison, and Emil Yde, so the inexperienced Koupal was unable to get consistent work. He later also […]

New York Mets ace Tom Seaver was not having a terrific September in 1972. After averaging nearly eight innings per game through August, “Tom Terrific” had to leave his next three starts after five or six innings due to various minor injuries.1 He was also charged with losses in two of those three starts, putting […]

“It was not a tidy game, but an exciting one,” declared New York Times sports editor Arthur Daley about the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 8-5 victory over the New York Yankees in Game Four to even the World Series at two games each.1 Described by Times sportswriter John Drebinger as a “bruising contest of power hitting,” the […]

The Cleveland Indians were supposed to open the 1939 season on the road against the St. Louis Browns, but that three-game series was postponed after St. Louis was deluged with rain and, in some places, sleet.1 The return to Cleveland promised no better weather, with frigid temperatures and precipitation. In fact, it was a game-day […]

 Two weeks after the Cleveland Indians’ Larry Doby broke the America League’s color barrier on July 5, 1947, Kansas City Monarchs stars Hank Thompson and Willard Brown received a telegram from Bill DeWitt, general manager of the last-place St. Louis Browns. They were told to report to St. Louis for the following night’s game, making […]

It was still relatively early in the season and only 6½ games separated the American League-leading New York Yankees from the sixth-place Cleveland Indians. The 16-10 Tigers and 14-13 Red Sox were in third and fifth place. Managers Red Rolfe of the visitors and Steve O’Neill of the home team announced their starters for the […]

Defending their first World Series championship in 35 years, the Pittsburgh Pirates were in fourth place in the National League in June 1961 when general manager Joe L. Brown restructured their bench with a flurry of transactions. The moves included calling up 29-year-old catcher Don Leppert, whose .386 batting average was leading the Triple-A International […]

Saturday dawned warm and uncharacteristically humid in the Pacific Coast League’s “most notorious bandbox ballpark,”1 where the homestanding Colorado Springs Sky Sox stayed hot with a 4-3 win over the Salt Lake Stingers. Things looked good early for Salt Lake, as the Anaheim Angels’ Triple-A affiliate scored two runs in the top of the first […]

“My club is not going to win the National League pennant,” admitted Brooklyn Robins manager Wilbert Robinson as the 1924 season began. “It is simply going to make every effort to considerably better its [sixth-place] showing of last season.”1 Few batted an eyelash at Robinson’s modest expectations. But the season went far better than predicted […]

The Los Angeles Dodgers had every reason to feel confident as they approached the 2021 National League Championship Series. Not only were they the defending World Series champions (albeit in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season), but they had also amassed an impressive 106-56 regular-season record, second only to their division rivals, the San Francisco Giants (107-55). […]

  Wahconah Park: an outdated barn or a precious relic? A swamp or a hallowed slab? A money pit or a landmark? After well over a century, the dichotomy persists. Baseball players were facing off there before Babe Ruth was born, before “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was written, before architects sketched the […]