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This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).   Hitting has been on the rise in ba8eball the past decade or so, and there is talk that today’s ball, the Rawlings Rabbit, has more spring than any hare of seasons past. This is shortsighted history. Let me […]

Shorty Fuller (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   What is a catch? A player grasps the ball. At some instant the catch is completed. If the player drops the ball before this instant, a catch has not occurred. If he drops the ball after this instant, this does not change the fact of the […]

The 1927 New York Yankees, featuring Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, et al., are generally considered the greatest team ever to play the game. This superb club won the American League pennant by 19 games, then went on to crush the Pittsburgh Pirates in four straight games. Across the Harlem River that year, John McGraw’s Giants […]

Josh Gibson was the best player never to play in the major leagues. Perhaps. Such is fodder for debate among baseball historians, scholars, and armchair managers. At 35 years old, Gibson passed away from a brain tumor three months before Jackie Robinson broke the color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers. But Gibson’s life was more […]

Harry Passon, the Jewish owner of a sporting goods store, played a strategic role in promoting both black and white semi-pro baseball in Philadelphia. (Courtesy of the Passon Family)   Semi-professional baseball, black and white, flourished in Philadelphia in the first half of the twentieth century. Harry Passon (1897–1954), a Jewish owner of Philadelphia’s leading […]

This article was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s August 2024 newsletter.   Standing less than five-feet tall, Deadball Era arbiter Barney Bricelin was the game’s smallest umpire. That diminutive stature, however, garnered him little sympathy or respect from players, baseball fans, or the sporting press. Bricelin’s umpiring tenure was punctuated by assaults upon […]

National League president Warren Giles was in San Diego for Opening Day, April 8, 1969, and here joins Buzzie Bavasi holding an aerial photograph of the Padres’ new ballpark, San Diego Stadium. (Courtesy of Tom Larwin)   San Diego’s quest for major-league baseball began in the mid- to late 1950s, around the time Los Angeles […]

Minor-league baseball in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is virtually synonymous with Texas League professional baseball in the region. The small parts not connected to the Texas League are the rise and fall of black baseball in the area and the brief sojourns of the Fort Worth and Dallas teams in other leagues. (The Metroplex is […]

At SABR’s 2006 convention one speaker analyzed the commissioners of baseball and rated Judge Landis the best of all. In the question-and-answer session that followed, a member of the audience challenged the speaker: “How can you stand here in the year 2006 and praise Landis, who was so instrumental in keeping blacks out of Major […]

By 1951 the Browns were decidedly moribund. They had been last in the American League in attendance every year since 1946 and the usual question one asked before the start of the season was whether they might finish in seventh or eighth place. Underfinanced, Charles and William DeWitt wanted out of what they saw as […]

This article was honored with a SABR Analytics Conference Research Award in 2016.   In 1976, for the first time in thirty-three seasons, total stolen bases exceeded total home runs in Major League Baseball.1 A consistent turn towards more frequent basestealing had already become evident on the field, as teams collectively stole over 1,000 more […]

This article was originally published in “St. Louis’s Favorite Sport,” the 1992 SABR convention journal.   Sixty years ago there were no millionaire ballplayers in St. Louis. No night baseball, no artificial turf, no exploding scoreboards, no plane travel, no West Coast baseball teams, no television, no helmets, no batting gloves, no blacks in the […]

As baseball’s powers-that-be prepared for the 1920 season, the national pastime was in complete turmoil behind the scenes. The American League was in the midst of a civil war over a series of controversial decisions made by its founder and president, Ban Johnson. There were steady rumors that the recent World Series between the Chicago […]

Red Smith wrote of Willard Mullin, the cartoonist: “There is no estimating how many sports columns were inspired by his sketches.” Likewise, it would be difficult to overestimate the influence of sports cartoonists on our memory of baseball from the 1940s and 1950s. The cartoonists created many of the best-remembered images from that era of […]

The Hollywood Stars baseball club, which was a member of the Pacific Coast League from 1926 to 1935 and again from 1938 to 1957, was “a fun deal” that gave me “the best years of my life,” according to Robert H. Cobb, its last president. The club was truly a civic venture which was both […]

Sabermetrician and founder of STATS, Inc. Richard “Dick” Cramer wrote the article “Average Batting Skill Through Major League History,” in which he demonstrated that the average major-league batter has gotten better over time.1 This article hopes to chart a parallel improvement of the average batting statistics over the course of baseball history. This is a […]

Appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s research on Babe Ruth’s RBI record.

Jackie Robinson playing in a spring training game vs. Havana Cubans. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)   Separated by fewer than three miles, the Hotel Los Angeles near la Habana Vieja (Old Havana) and the Hotel Nacional in the city’s Vedado district were worlds apart. Sitting on a bluff overlooking El Malecón, Havana’s famed coastal roadway, the Nacional […]

You think umpires take too much abuse from players? Late last century they often had to fight their way off the field. Here’s a sampling of epithets and brawlgames.   UMPIRING IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY was often perilous. Virulent and sometimes violent abuse from players, fans, owners, and reporters was common. Although baseball fans […]

The East All-Stars for the 1953 Longhorn League All-Star game played July 25 In Midland, Texas. Front row from left, John Malgarini of San Angelo, Roger Dalla Betta of Midland, Scooter Hughes of Midland, John Tayoan of San Angelo, and Barney Batson of Odessa. Second row from left, Joe Riney of Big Spring, Art Bowland […]

With its temperate Pacific Coast climate and rich baseball tradition, San Diego has long been a spawning ground for major-league talent, sending some 121 of her sons to the bigs. The second, and by far the greatest, of these San Diegans was Ted Williams, whose march to Cooperstown began with the 1939 Boston Red Sox. […]

When a group of major-league baseball all-stars traveled to Japan in November 1979 for a series of games, it represented a shift, of sorts. Since the end of World War II, most baseball tours of Japan had been by single teams. A US all-star team had not played in Japan since the Eddie Lopat All-Stars […]