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On the last day of the 1955 regular season, 18-year-old Roger Marquis played one inning in right field and batted once for the seventh-place Baltimore Orioles. That was his only major league appearance, and he was out of professional baseball altogether by age 21. Roger Julian Marquis was born on April 5, 1937, in Holyoke, […]

A three-time All-Star with the Milwaukee Brewers, Dan Plesac was a left-handed pitcher with a mid-90s fastball and a biting slider who became one of the game’s dominant closers during the late 1980s. In addition to the time spent with the Brewers, Plesac’s 18-year major-league career included stints with the Chicago Cubs, Pittsburgh Pirates, Toronto […]

Jug Thesenga was sick through the entire flight from Kansas to New York City. This boy from South Dakota was on his way to Yankee Stadium to start for the Washington Senators the next day. That was September 1, 1944, and the Senators were desperate for pitching during those World War II years. Scouts plucked […]

Relentless desire and unshakable determination define Carmen Hill’s 17 years in Organized Baseball. In 1915, the 19-year-old bespectacled hurler jumped from a Class B league to debut with the Pittsburgh Pirates, becoming the just the second major-league pitcher to wear glasses on the diamond in more than a quarter-century. For 12 years, Hill endured a […]

Personal problems rooted in a car accident stopped Dinny McNamara from fulfilling what might have been a legendary Boston sporting career. Still, before his troubles intervened, McNamara became a multisport high-school and college star, an outfielder with the 1927 and ’28 Boston Braves, and head football coach at Boston College – all before his 30th […]

Elmo Plaskett had only two cups of coffee in the major leagues, but those brief stints barely hint at the full picture of a talented hitter who was devoted to baseball all his life. Plaskett, who died in November 1998 at the age of 60, remains a hero in the Virgin Islands. The city of […]

At age 17 he signed his first professional baseball contract. Several years later he helped the Cincinnati Reds win two National League pennants. For a while, Jim McGlothlin was one of the best pitchers in baseball. However, a series of injuries and a debilitating illness brought his career to a premature close. At the age […]

Donald Wayne Hankins, a tall, lanky right-hander who suffered a broken elbow as a teenager, enjoyed an 11-year professional baseball career — including ten seasons in the minors — during the 1920s. Hankins finished with a lifetime minor league record of 75-87. But during the four seasons he hurled in the Double-A (the highest classification […]

President John F. Kennedy was said to have correctly answered a trivia question that had been floating around for years: Who is the only man to ever hit a home run off Sandy Koufax and catch a pass from Y.A. Tittle? The guess was always Alvin Dark. “It’s not quite accurate, however,” Dark always said. […]

From 2001 through 2013, Brian Roberts was a solid fan favorite with the Baltimore Orioles. He earned that status as one of baseball’s premier second basemen and leadoff hitters. Known as B-Rob to fans and players, the two-time All-Star led the American League in doubles twice, with 50 in 2004 and 56 in 2009. At […]

Ron Jackson was a tall, impressive slugger who debuted in the major leagues the day he was signed. The 6-foot-6¾-inch, 225-pound right-handed hitter held the interest of a number of ballclubs because of the gaudy numbers he put up in the minor leagues, but he never truly stuck in major league ball. Ronald Harris Jackson was […]

Lee Fohl managed 11 seasons in the major leagues in his own unobtrusive manner. “Fohl is unusually quiet. He never seeks the limelight and is inconspicuous in all his acts,” a sportswriter said of him.1 His greatest strength was developing talent. He took the job in Cleveland in 1915 and meticulously built a contending squad. […]

Whenever the subject of best baseball names comes up, Scipio Spinks is sure to be on the short list. A classic wild flamethrower, Spinks was breaking through to success in 1972. If he hadn’t torn up his knee in a collision with Johnny Bench, he would have more to show than a career record of […]

During the period from 1991 through 1997, Chuck Knoblauch was the best second baseman in the American League, accumulating 38 Wins Above Replacement1 (WAR), significantly more than Hall of Famer and runner-up Roberto Alomar (31). Moreover, from 1995 through 1997, he was one of the top players in the AL regardless of position, tying another […]

Paul Lindblad wasn’t one of the Oakland A’s most celebrated stars or eccentric personalities, but he was a valuable part of a formidable bullpen that contributed to the team’s string of five consecutive division championships and three consecutive World Series titles. Though somewhat overlooked in the annals of Athletics history, Lindblad was without question an […]

With a flattened nose and the grim jaw of a heavyweight boxer, Steve O’Neill looked like someone born to be a catcher, and for much of his 17-year major-league career he was arguably the best all-around backstop in the game. An extremely smart man, O’Neill did all the things a good catcher is supposed to […]

It was strawberry fields forever where Kenny Rogers grew up, on a 15-acre strawberry farm in Dover, Florida, in the heart of Hillsborough County, just a bit west of Plant City, home of the annual state Strawberry Festival. Plant City was also where the Cincinnati Reds held spring training for many years, so Rogers grew […]

In the summer of 1904, the Zanesville, Ohio, baseball team had a game scheduled with a team in neighboring New Concord. “When the time arrived for the boys to take the bus, there was one player missing, so the bat boy had to be used in right field to complete the team. As luck would […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 18, in 1998. For additional commentary about this story, read “The Veracity of Veeck,” by Robert D. Warrington and Norman Macht in the Fall 2013 Baseball Research Journal and Warren Corbett’s SABR biography of Bill Veeck.   Baseball is a game in […]

With the weather turning crisp in October of 1916, sports fans across North America were looking forward to the World Series. There had been great pennant races in both leagues, and the upcoming battle between Brooklyn and the Boston Red Sox looked like a good one. Though Toronto was still more than sixty years away […]

Willie Mays is arguably the greatest baseball player of all time.1 He was the quintessential five-tool player. He could hit for power (660 career home runs), hit for average (.301 career batting average), run quickly (338 stolen bases), play great defense (“The Catch” in the 1954 World Series), and had a tremendous arm. He was […]

It would have been fitting if Rod Serling had gone to a baseball game in Geneva, New York, on August 22, 1961, and found himself trapped in some kind of twist ending – hit in the head by a foul ball, perhaps, to wake up alone in a deserted ballpark. After all, the danger of […]

John Franco, described over the years as having a “wise-guy smile” and “look[ing] more like the owner of a pizza joint than a pro athlete,” typically didn’t appear until the later rounds. Aside from a fourth-and-fifth-inning relief mission as a Cincinnati Reds rookie in 1984, the son of a sanitation worker from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, had […]

On April 12, 1955, the former Philadelphia Athletics, having moved that winter to Kansas City, opened their first season at Municipal Stadium: A’s 6, Tigers 2, before a standing-room crowd of 32,147. Flanked by franchise progenitor Connie Mack, former President Harry Truman tossed the team’s first ball in Missouri’s first American League (AL) opener since […]