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The first of back-to-back NFL Championships for Baltimore Colts coach Weeb Ewbank (center, suit) and players (left to right) Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, and John Unitas came at Yankee Stadium in 1958. (Courtesy of the Babe Ruth Museum.)   As the crowd of 64,185 streamed into Yankee Stadium for the 2:00 kickoff on the afternoon […]

The Houston Astrodome was the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned major-league ballpark. It was formally unveiled in an exhibition game that pitted the Houston Astros against the American League champion New York Yankees on April 9, 1965. Unlike previous sports venues, the Astrodome was built to be a massive all-purpose, climate-controlled facility that would serve as […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Although this quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, at least one Twain researcher claims […]

A crowd heads toward Braves Field. The ticket and administration building (shown at left) still stands and today serves as the headquarters for the Boston University police. Note the trolley tracks in the foreground, indicating the path of transit vehicles exiting from within the ballpark itself. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   The best stories […]

The morning of October 4, 1905, broke as had many other early autumn days over the prior four decades: with baseball teams locked in the throes of a pennant race. This season it was Charles Comiskey’s White Stockings of Chicago pitted against Connie Mack’s Athletics of Philadelphia in the nascent American League, and unlike some […]

Editor’s Note: On this page, Parts One and Two, which were published separately in the Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 issues of the Baseball Research Journal, are combined into one article as the author intended. Sandy Koufax (SABR-Rucker Archive)   American Jews have long had a love affair with baseball. They have played baseball since […]

When Pete Rose hustled down to first base after rapping out base hit No. 4,192 on September 11, 1985, neither he nor the adoring crowd at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium knew that their hero had already passed Ty Cobb’s revised total of 4,189 career hits. Many baseball records are erroneously regarded as sacrosanct: these historic numbers […]

  Mother’s Day, 1972. Willie Mays had just smacked his 647th home run. For the 35,505 fans braving the rain at Shea Stadium on Mother’s Day in 1972, it signaled that, for a brief moment, the aging Mays could still delight fans. The 5-4 victory for the home team over the San Francisco Giants was […]

Had Michael Brantley stayed healthy, the 2022 World Series could have avoided becoming the first Fall Classic since 1950 to have no African American players. As it was, the Astros outfielder and lone African American on either team’s roster suffered a season-ending shoulder injury that kept him out of postseason play.1 The only other African […]

In 2022, the Lords of Baseball decreed that the full infield shift, which had become commonplace in baseball, would be banned. Since the 2023 season, all four infielders must be within the outer boundary of the dirt, with two on each side of second base and no switching sides. After a violation, the wronged team […]

This article was honored as a 2023 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award winner.   The names of Jenny Fulle, Amy Dickinson, Elizabeth Osder, and Janine Cinseruli are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the existing literature regarding the integration of female ballplayers into Little League Baseball. These four girls were pioneers on the ground in the first […]

This article discusses Roger Maris’s 1961 season from a new perspective. This is not a comparison of each home run hit by Maris in 1961 with those hit by Babe Ruth in 1927, but rather proposes a method to compare the Maris performance with the Ruth performance on a near-equivalent basis. Though there exists the […]

“Now it’s even. It’s neck and neck. We’ll start from here and see who’s boss.” — Reggie Jackson1 There have been two players in Chicago White Sox history that led the American League in home runs. Only two over the first 123 seasons of baseball on the south side of Chicago. The second of those […]

Major League Baseball implemented a package of rule changes for the 2023 season designed to address complaints that the game had become tedious to watch.1 Those complaints centered on pace of play and lack of action, with fans and media noting fewer balls in play and stolen bases and more strikeouts and home runs.2 Some […]

From the mid-1970s until the Angels won the World Series in 2002, frequent stories of an Angels “curse” or “jinx” appeared in the local and national media. Typically blamed on a rumor that Anaheim Stadium was built on a Native American burial ground, the curse persists to the present day despite the fact that several […]

When James “Deacon” White died on July 7, 1939, the obituary in The Sporting News said that his end had been hastened by disappointment at not being named to the Hall of Fame along with such contemporaries as A. G. Spalding, Cap Anson, Charles Comiskey, Buck Ewing, Hoss Radbourn, and Candy Cummings. He had not […]

Jim Spencer had 36 major-league home runs at Yankee Stadium during his 15-year career, the first coming on August 6, 1969. However, his first Yankee Stadium homer came on August 12, 1963, in a tune-up game for the annual Hearst Sandlot Classic. Spencer was on the United States All-Stars, who defeated the Eastern Pennsylvania All-Stars, […]

In 2001, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants had arguably the greatest individual season in the history of major league baseball. He set the record for home runs in a season with 73. He hit for the highest slugging percentage ever at .863, breaking Babe Ruth’s 1920 mark of.847. He knocked in 137 runs, good […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume III (1988).   This past February, the city of Chicago finally yielded to massive pressure from the Commissioner’s office and the Tribune company and decided to put lights in Wrigley Field. The City Council tried to mask the significance of the move by […]

Doug Glanville in his new baseball memoir notes that many players, “rewarded with huge contracts because of their offensive prowess, . . . have developed a kind of attention deficit disorder when it comes to defense. . . . If you put up tremendous offensive numbers year after year, the game will cut you a […]

Evaluating a player’s talent, ability, and contributions to his team is an important task of analyzing the game of baseball. In recent years, the prevalent metric for player evaluation has been Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which distills the evaluation into a single number that can be compared directly with that of other players. WAR measures […]

Frank Shaughnessy (middle, second row) guided the 1913 Ottawa Senators to their second straight Canadian League title, nosing out the London Tecumsehs by a single game. First baseman “Cozy” Dolan (top row, third from left) led the Senators with a .358 batting average. (Alfred Pittaway of Pittaway & Jarvis Photographers, Ottawa)   For Frank Shaughnessy, […]

Long-haired, skinny, and proficient in throwing the curve, eighteen-year-old John Montgomery Ward first tasted life in the National League when he joined the Providence club as a pitcher in the summer of 1878. Starting his duties on a hot July morning, he finished that autumn with a 22-13 record—not bad, considering he pitched only half […]

If you had asked fans prior to the 1969 baseball season which scenario was more likely—man landing on the moon or the New York Mets wining the world championship—they would probably have been hard-pressed to choose, both being equally improbable. Casey Stengel, original Mets manager and overseer of the ugliest launching of a franchise in […]