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A playoff souvenir from the Ottawa Nationals. (City of Ottawa Archives, MG-946-1-1)   The Second World War ended, sparking a boom in affiliated minor-league baseball across Canada and the United States. In 1945, there were 12 leagues with 86 teams. The 1946 season began with 43 leagues and 316 teams. On December 9, 1945, a […]

After two years of unlawful contract signings and other roster-jumping shenanigans that produced end­less lawsuits, baseball’s Great Tampering War settled down as the 1903 NL campaign began on Thursday, April 16, in Cincinnati and St. Louis. Though person­al disgust and distrust may not have subsided between all franchise owners, a signed truce between the long­ […]

When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem during a 2016 preseason game to protest police violence against black people in America, all hell broke loose. Voices of praise and condemnation rained down. Passion often trumped reason. The “conversation” remains heated, while complicated criminal justice problems remain unsolved. Is […]

Editor’s note: All statistics published below are through the 1979 season. When the Phillies defeated the Cubs 23-22 in 10 innings on May 17, 1979 in the “friendly confines” of Wrigley Field in Chicago, it prompted research as to the other unusually high scoring games in the annals of baseball. The classic irony is that […]

Babe Ruth strikes a batting pose at Fenway Park in the early 1930s. (Leslie Jones photo, courtesy of the Boston Public Library.)   Even among Jazz Age giants like Al Jolson and Jack Dempsey, it was Babe Ruth who was the King of Swing. “I swing as hard as I can, and I try to […]

This article presents those little known but important men who helped to launch so many players from the sandlots of Los Angeles to baseball stardom.  Southern California has long been fertile ground for major-league talent. Walter Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Bob Lemon, Duke Snider, Don Drysdale, George Brett, Tony Gwynn, and Ozzie Smith all began their […]

Minor-League Winter Meeting The 1949 Winter Meetings saw several firsts for the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues: the first time a meeting was held in Baltimore, the first time a player draft was held during a meeting, and the first time an incumbent Association president missed a meeting. The meeting itself was held at […]

Speculating on ultimately unanswerable questions remains one of most fascinating aspects for those of us who study baseball history. For example, how might many of the all-time records differ if Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, and all of the other great Negro League stars had been eligible to play in white Organized Ball? How […]

DAN SWEENEY WAS A SMALL MAJOR LEAGUE PLAYER Trying to determine who was the smallest player in major league history is a difficult task. In the old days statis­tics on the height of major league players were usual­ly inaccurate. Of course, Eddie Gaedel, the 3 foot, 7 inch midget who was used in one game […]

Here is the appendix for Pete Palmer’s article “Stolen Bases and Caught Stealing by Catchers” in the Spring 2014 Baseball Research Journal.

The run is the most fundamental and the most important statistic in baseball. Regrettably, clerical (e.g., transcription) errors have been made in the process of crediting the runs scored by the individual players in MLB’s official records.[fn]Two possible sources for errors can enter the official records. The first possible source for errors in the official […]

The year 2000 was not just the beginning of a new century for humanity but also marked a new era in Major League Baseball’s relationship with Japan as the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs opened the season in Tokyo. US major-league squads had been touring Japan since 1908 but the 2000 Opening Day Series […]

There is no question that, when a hitter takes stock of his prize possessions, the eyes have it. In the early twentieth century, the great ones such as Cobb, Hornsby, and Lajoie refrained from reading newspapers or books. They even stayed away from movie houses, believing they were protecting their vision. One time shortly after […]

Introduction and Context The 1939 baseball winter meetings were held in Cincinnati, with the major and minor leagues meeting together for the first time since 1923. But meeting together provided little impetus for agreement. The minor leagues approved several measures to govern major-minor affiliations, but when the American and National Leagues split on whether to […]

Introduction and context The 1988 Winter Meetings were held at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, from Sunday, December 4, until Wednesday, December 7. These meetings came at the tail end of the collusion cases, as teams were beginning to open their wallets and spend money again, and a lot of teams were looking […]

Introduction At the 1904 winter meetings, power was the common theme, as the National League, American League, and minor leagues continued to fight for their positions within Organized Baseball. Topics receiving ample attention and dissension included the reserve clause, the foul-strike rule, the length of the schedule, postseason play, syndicate ownership, and unpopular ownership.  Most […]

The turbulence in the business of baseball reached its height in 1890. The players, through their Brotherhood association and chafing under the owners’ efforts to exert more control over them, assembled the financial backing to form their own league, the aptly-named Players’ League. The magnates of the National League and the American Association — particularly […]

The time was shortly after 7 AM. The place was a stretch of seashore on the Normandy coast of France designated Omaha Beach. The date was June 6, 1944. Less than sixty minutes had passed since H-Hour, when the first wave of men from the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, the only […]

Ray Scarborough holds the first modern assigned win in baseball history, April 18, 1950.   A recurring question among SABR members in recent years involves the first modern win: when was the first win awarded to a starting pitcher incorporating a league-mandated rule requiring the five-inning minimum standard? On the SABR-L email list, historian David […]

Baseball’s last .400 hitter was probably the sport’s best pure hitter ever. Over 60 years have passed since 1941, and no one has duplicated “Teddy Ballgame’s” feat of hitting .406. Great hitters such as Rod Carew, George Brett, Tony Gwynn, and Todd Helton have carried .400-plus averages far into the season but died in the […]

After the 1970 season, two brothers, Eldon and Harlan Mills, unveiled a new approach to baseball statistics: Player Win Averages. Eldon was a retired Air Force colonel and an expert in computer programming and data processing, while Harlan was a professor and mathematics consultant to IBM. What they did was develop a model for calculating […]

Gary Ward with the Big 8 conference championship trophy in 1995, the 15th of 16 consecutive league championships. (Oklahoma State Athletics)   Founded in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1890, Oklahoma A&M College (OAMC) became Oklahoma State University (OSU) in 1957. The school fielded its first baseball team in 1909 and from then through the 1977 season, […]

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), […]

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, […]