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As November rolled into December 1923, Organized Baseball found itself with much on its plate, including a National League owner who had been indicted for perjury by a federal grand jury in the E.M. Fuller & Company bankruptcy case,1 and a Pacific Coast League president who had been ousted by a controversial majority vote but […]

When the 1941 major-league baseball season ended, the Chicago White Sox were in a familiar spot: for the third straight year and the fifth time in six seasons, the White Sox had finished in the American League’s first division under manager Jimmy Dykes. While the team’s first pennant since 1919 still seemed a long way […]

AT 4:09 A.M. on Easter morning, April 19, 1981, just 51 minutes before sunrise, a hardy group of 17 freezing souls huddled in the 28-degree pre-dawn chill of McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, R.I. They had just seen their beloved PawSox close out the thirty-second inning of a 2-2 tie against the Rochester Red Wings. When […]

Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) in Arlington, Virginia, is the most famous burial ground in the United States, if not the world. It is a standard item on tourists’ must-see lists when visiting the Washington, D.C. area on vacation as it is the final resting place for presidents, generals, and Supreme Court justices. In addition, there […]

This is (roughly) the tenth anniversary of the transfer of a unique and valuable baseball property. On September 6, 2000, Major League Baseball and Morgan, Lewis and Bockius LLP (a very big and very prominent Philadelphia-based international law firm)1 issued a joint press release announcing “that the law firm has transferred its domain name—mlb.com—to Major […]

In the baseball fantasy Field of Dreams, the spirits of various diamond greats come to play ball on a field rising magically out of Midwestern corn stalks. “Ty Cobb wanted to play,” chuckles Shoeless Joe Jackson. “But no one could stand the son-of-a-bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it.” In […]

If a modern fan could be transported back to a baseball game in 1908, to the strains of the new tune “Take Me out to the Ball Game,” he or she would feel right at home. The rules, the two major leagues, and many of the teams were similar then to what they are today. […]

You will not find Joe E. Brown’s name in a major league box score. But in his way, he is as much a part of baseball lore as the Gas House Gang, the Whiz Kids, and the House That Ruth Built. Joe E. Brown was a movie star: a wide-mouthed co­ median whose face was […]

In reading accounts of the 1903 World Series, I so often came across the team name “Boston Pilgrims” that I accepted this on faith as one of the names by which the team was known. I even used it myself, presenting it as fact (see page 1 of Tales from the Red Sox Dugout). I […]

BACKGROUND: The 2010 SABR convention publication, The National Pastime: Baseball in the Peach State, included an article entitled “That Was Quick” describing a professional baseball game that lasted a mere 32 minutes. Based on information in “The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball”1 and a Google-based search for any quicker game (as unlikely as that seemed), […]

In the spring of 2017, Quinnipiac University put out a poll that led the media to proclaim that New York was (back to being?) a “National League city” because, although the poll showed the Yankees holding a 48-43% preference among fans upstate, in the city the poll swung 45-43% in favor of the Mets.1At about […]

World’s All Nations, 1912, barnstorming club sponsored by the Hopkins Brothers sporting goods company of Des Moines, Iowa. John Donaldson, pitcher (front, third from right), was known as “The World’s Greatest Colored Pitcher” throughout his 30-plus years on the mound. After his playing career Donaldson was hired as the first Black scout in the major […]

Stars of Soul of the Game, Mykelti Williamson (l.), Blair Underwood (c.), and Delroy Lindo (r.) at an event honoring the film at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. (Courtesy of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum)   Soul of the Game premiered on April 20, 1996, on the Home Box Office (HBO) cable network. The docudrama […]

Whitey Witt batted .301 as a Yankee, from 1922-1925. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   It was long before the days when the elegant voice of Bob Sheppard introduced the starting lineup at Yankee Stadium. However, if there was a public-address announcer at the Bronx ballpark on the day it opened on April 18, […]

By 1942 World War II was already impacting the Philadelphia Phillies’ spring training activities as they prepared for the regular season in the soft sands of Miami Beach, Florida. Air corps stunts were observed above Flamingo Park; the players inspected fighters and bombers at a nearby base; and manager Hans Lobert, who had run the […]

Happy Felton, an all-around entertainer of a long-gone era, aggressively and successfully marketed his skills as a dance-band leader, musician, master of ceremonies, actor, comedian, and radio-stage-vaudeville performer for two decades beginning in the late 1920s. Then he won fame in television’s infancy as the creator and host of Happy Felton’s Knothole (or, Knot-Hole) Gang—a […]

Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams are not the only films to feature the “Black Sox.” Major League Baseball’s historian, John Thorn, posted this on Facebook in December 2014: “I did not know that as early as October 1920 a film about the Black Sox Scandal was in circulation.” Indeed, an ad in the […]

During the first years of the twentieth century many of the most celebrated—and marketable— major leaguers supplemented their incomes by headlining in vaudeville or touring in legitimate plays during the off-season. A few even appeared in motion pictures: a new medium that was revolutionizing the way in which Americans passed their leisure hours. And so, […]

Ebbets Field has been gone for nearly half a cen­tury, but the place still has a remarkable grip on our consciousness. Two recent books have been devoted to the lovable old ballpark in Flatbush. Yet even these in-depth works don’t shine much light on what happened after the Dodgers left Brooklyn. They touch briefly on some […]

Who deserves to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and who does not? The Hall of Fame electors wrestle with this question every year. The selection process for players causes controversy on an annual basis, but the institution, since its inception, has also grappled with the issue of recognition for non-playing contributors. Some […]

Gladys Goodding was more than just an artiste whose musical stylings entertained the Ebbets Field faithful from the early 1940s on. This cheerful, occasionally mischievous woman was a baseball pioneer. Hers was the first organ permanently situated in a big-league ballpark and she predated Eddie Layton, Jane Jarvis, Wilbur Snapp, and other ballyard organists. Her […]

For baseball fans who are no longer young, it is easy to conjure up the once-common image of a man behind home plate with a radar gun pointed at the pitcher. But as technology has advanced, the once cutting-edge radar gun has been replaced by new and better equipment. Today, advanced systems, such as TrackMan […]

    Baseball rules were amended in 1891 to allow for substitute batters for other than emergency conditions. That was 86 years ago; yet, from a recordkeeping standpoint, there are still many gaps regarding the performance of pinch hitters on a seasonal and a career basis. What pinch hitter had the most doubles, triples, or […]

This article was selected as a winner of the 2023 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. Harry Saisho, promoter of the 1921 Sherman Indians tour. (Courtesy of Jesse Loving, Ars Longa Art Cards)   In the late nineteenth century as the American frontier closed, the myth of the Wild West began. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, dime […]