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A Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews baseball card from Topps. (Courtesy of Topps)   Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews shared a baseball card in the 1959 Topps set. The horizontal card, with a green-and-yellow background, showed the sluggers admiring their bats under the words FENCE BUSTERS. That they were. Aaron and Mathews combined for a […]

He was neither a physician nor a trainer, but John O. “Bonesetter’ Reese was probably the best known treater of injured ballplayers in the first three decades of the twentieth century. He built a practice in which he saw athletes, enter­tainers, and statesmen, but also the mill workers of his adopted Youngstown, Ohio. He beat […]

Eddie Waitkus, the Fightin’ Phillies first-sacker, is best remembered not for his 182 hits and .284 average on the 1950 National League pennant-winners and not for any other on-field accomplishment. Instead, his name is inexorably linked to the plight and fate of the central character in an all-time classic baseball novel. One might imagine that […]

Is Henry Aaron a greater player than Willie Mays? Was Joe DiMaggio better than Ted Williams? Those were just two of the tough decisions members of the Society for American Baseball Research were asked to make in a survey of the greatest baseball players born in the different states. Aaron and Mays were matched because […]

1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars (Rob Fitts Collection)   Eddie Lopat was a fine, soft-tossing southpaw during a 12-year baseball career with the Chicago White Sox and most famously the New York Yankees. Called the Junkman because of his assortment of off-speed pitches, Lopat was also something of a baseball entrepreneur. He not only ran a […]

COLLABORATOR’S NOTE: Between his big-league broadcasting debut with the 1953 St. Louis Browns and his current work as the radio voice of the Houston Astros, Milo Hamilton worked for the St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, and Pittsburgh Pirates. He came to Atlanta with the Braves in 1966 and stayed for ten seasons. […]

John Drebinger once wrote of Eddie Brannick, “He has legions of friends, remembers the birthdays of many of then, yet once couldn’t recall the date of his own. A gourmet of rare taste, he knows how and where to dine and will order a meal of excellence only to touch scarcely any of it because […]

The Society launched a research project in 1976 to gather information about — what is now a rather rare baseball occurrence — the inside-the-park home run (IPH). Some of the questions raised at the outset of this project v re rather basic in nature. How many inside-the-park homers are being hit at the present time […]

Freddie Fitzsimmons of the New York Giants gives a pitching clinic for the All-Japan team. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Giants)   On the morning of June 29, 1953, readers of the Globe Gazette in Mason City, Iowa, were greeted by a headline on page 13: “New York Giants Invited to Tour Japan This Fall.”1 […]

Stan Musial stands with three of his National League teammates in the 1949 All-Star Game at Ebbets Field. Also pictured are Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, and Raph Kiner. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Tensions were high when Jack Roosevelt Robinson took the field on April 15, 1947; the integration of major-league baseball had arrived. For many of […]

Mickey Mantle and Henry Aaron met in the 1957 World Series, won by the Braves in seven games. Aaron hit .393 with three homers and seven RBIs. Mantle batted .263 with one homer and two RBIs. Photograph from 1958 spring training at St. Petersburg. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   In a career that spanned 23 major-league seasons […]

New Cathedral Cemetery in southwest Baltimore is of some interest to baseball historians because it is the final resting place for six prominent baseball personages. Baseball greats are enshrined at Cooperstown, N.Y., but they do not live there, or die there, or are buried there. Their memorial stones are scattered throughout the nation. Therefore, it […]

Henry Aaron and Tommie Aaron crossing bats at Bradenton, Florida on March 1, 1962. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   “Relationships between brothers can be complex things,” concluded the award-winning author Tom Stanton, right after commenting about Hank Aaron and his far less famous Braves teammate, his brother Tommie. Stanton was mainly expressing empathy for Tommie having to […]

Editor’s Note: This article, written by Jim Reeves, was originally published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.   Politicians called it modern-day highway robbery. The nation’s capitol mourned as if it had lost a president. Fans wept openly at old RFK Stadium and threatened to lynch Bob Short on the spot. In North Texas, specifically the […]

Lucky in having supportive minor-league managers who recognized his talents and boosted his confidence, Henry Aaron struggled to attain the same sort of rapport with his managers in Milwaukee and Atlanta, too many of whom failed to respect his humanity due to his skin color and his stardom by moving or threatening to move this […]

Brandon Bailey takes immense pride in his Native American heritage. A Chickasaw citizen, he has ancestors who walked the Trail of Tears and attended Indian boarding schools. “My Chickasaw identity is part of who I am every day,” he said. Bailey, pitching coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers Class-A affiliate in Rancho Cucamonga, California, pitched […]

Introduction and History I have taught or co-taught sabermetrics in the mathematics department at the United States Military Academy several times. We covered all the metrics but what always interested me most was the direction student projects took to solve or analyze various issues in baseball. In one of these courses, for example, the group […]

In 1974, the Oakland Athletics signed track star Herb Washington as a “designated runner,” despite his having had very little baseball experience. Keeping on the roster a player whose only purpose was to run was a new idea, but there have been many other real baseball players whose main purpose it was to pinch-run. The […]

Asked what it was like to face Sandy Koufax, Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks said, “It was frightenin’.” (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Sandy Koufax faced 512 different batters during his Hall of Fame career, from Dick Groat (145 plate appearances, or PA), to Vinegar Bend Mizell (one PA, along with 63 other batters). Along the […]

In 2018, a country auction in Maine handling the estate of major leaguer Harry Lord put a photograph up for bid they touted as the “First Ever All-Star Game.”1 The 1910 photo pictured an American League team of Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, Big Ed Walsh, and ten others including Lord, the former Red […]

“Although he never hit more than 47 home runs in a season…” was a common refrain in the eulogies that marked Henry Aaron’s passing on January 22, 2021. Intended as a nod to Aaron’s workmanlike virtue, the suggestion that his peak fell short of the more spectacular feats of other sluggers set up the inevitable […]

Author’s note: I met Joe Wood in the early 1980s after I called and said I’d like to interview him. His daughter invited me over. Joe and I spent a lot of time together, often watching Red Sox games on television and comparing players from different eras. All this was before a taped interview, which […]

One could pen a book or perhaps even an encyclopedia on the manner in which baseball and television have merged across the decades. Such a volume not only would explore the manner in which ballgames have been broadcast on TV both locally and nationally and the celebrated sportscasters who announce them. It would feature everything […]