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Columbia University’s Society for Baseball Research group includes the following contributors: Anthony Montes, Anthony Argenziano, Brian O’Sullivan, Charles Orlinsky, Drew Posner, Matthew Chagares, Anna Flieder, Bennett Bookstein, Jack Chernow, and Teddy Brodsky.   The shift has been a part of baseball for as long as the sport has existed. From a crisp “give me two […]

John McGraw, seen with Philadelphia Phillies manager Pat Moran, led the New York Giants to a record-setting 26-game winning streak in 1916. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, BAIN COLLECTION)   On a dreary Friday afternoon, September 29, 1916, 43-year-old John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, stood in the third base coaching box at the Polo […]

Ed Barrow (SABR-Rucker Archive)   The Toronto franchise of the International League was one of the strongest and had one of the longest tenures—from 1895 (when the league was called the Eastern League) until 1967. Ed Barrow had a lengthy, esteemed career as a baseball executive that ultimately landed him in the National Baseball Hall […]

Shigeo Nagashima of the Yomiuri Giants and Boog Powell. (Robert Fitts Collection)   Matsutaro Shoriki spent four decades dreaming of an international World Series matching the champion team of American baseball and that of the Japanese. He created Japan’s greatest team, sponsored by his newspaper and known over the years as either the Tokyo or […]

An Ottawa Lynx pitcher delivers a pitch during a Triple-A game. (SeregaI / Dreamstime.com)   The freshly minted Ottawa Lynx were to make their debut March 20, 1993 in a preseason game against the Albuquerque Dukes in Dodgertown. The mixture of prospects and borderline major leaguers who made up the new Triple-A International League affiliate […]

Telephone card souvenir from the 1986 Super Major Series (Robert Fitts Collection)   Opposing thoughts can complement one another and fill our lives with elegant contradictions. In ancient Chinese philosophy, this theory was known as yinyang. In Japan, the word is inyo. Although frequently associated with Eastern thought, inyo is a universal part of the […]

Here is supporting evidence for the correction of errors in the official RBI record of Lou Gehrig.

A quick perusal of the performance of the Boston Braves during the war years of 1942-45 might lead one to conclude that the team’s destiny suffered few, if any, ill effects from the loss of ballplayers to military service.  The Tribe had been mired in the National League’s second division since 1935 and finished in […]

Baseball is thankfully free of artificial boundaries of time which confine other sports. This freedom helps to shape the unique magical charm that is an evening at the ballpark. Fans never know whether it will be a two-hour squeaker or whether they may be enchanted until past sunrise by the first-ever wild 12-hour 46-inning slugfest. […]

Eddie Mathews, the only man to play for the Braves in Boston, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, burst into stardom in 1953, the team’s first season in Milwaukee, when he belted 47 home runs at the age of 21. He hit 370 homers before his 30th birthday, and many believed that if anyone could top Babe Ruth […]

American popular culture has always had affection for the medical profession. Television images of Gunsmoke’s Doc Adams, Star Trek‘s testy “Bones” McCoy and the almost god-like Marcus Welby, have made these characters cultural icons. Media images often conflict with reality, doctors as miracle workers or good guys have an instinctive appeal. Fact often surpasses fiction […]

One of only 21 Montanans to make it to the major leagues, Herbert Eugene Plews was born in Helena on Flag Day, June 14, 1928, the only child of Herbert and Marie Plews. Father and son had different middle names. Had things worked out otherwise, he might well have been born in Australia. His grandfather […]

A baseball player fighting during a game isn’t that unusual. A player fighting twice in less than a year is probably a little rarer. Fighting twice in less than a year with your own teammates – during a game – may be unprecedented. But that’s exactly what happened to St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Ted Cather. […]

One might say that Jim Boyle went into the family business – recruited by no less than Hall-of-Fame manager John McGraw himself1 – but ultimately he chose his own path after being the first Boyle to attend college. Jim Boyle followed his uncles Jack Boyle and Eddie Boyle as a catcher into the major leagues. […]

The numbers for Nippy Jones in the 1957 World Series don’t look like much: three games, three plate appearances, two at-bats, no runs, no hits, one hit-by-pitch. But the “shoe-polish incident” in the tenth inning of Game Four, when Jones was able to confirm that a pitch from Tommy Byrne had struck his foot by […]

In a 1973 SABR survey, Birdie Tebbetts narrowly missed being chosen Vermont’s greatest baseball player, finishing second to Larry Gardner by a mere handful of votes. In almost every respect, Tebbetts was a solid candidate: a lifetime .270 hitter, Birdie amassed exactly 1,000 hits in a career that spanned 17 years, three of which were […]

The Boston Braves played 2,811 regular-season home games at Braves Field between 1915 and 1952, winning 1,378 of them. The very last of those wins, recorded in the first game of a Sunday doubleheader in September 1952, appears in retrospect to rank among the tightest and most exciting wins ever seen by Boston’s National League […]

Fifty games into their 1967 season the Houston Astros were on another trip to the bottom of the National League standings. At 19-31 and 14½ games out of first place, they were on track for a won-lost record even worse than the previous year’s 72-90. But an early June trip by the Astros to St. […]

You’ve heard it before. A batter steps up to the plate in a pressure situation, humbly claims that his solitary goal is to get a bat on the ball, keep the inning alive, and hopefully give his team a chance to win. The prospect of something heroic is just gravy, perhaps even sheer luck. Just […]

“BLASTED!” yelled the box score. “Senators Drub Tigers Again, 16-6,” lamented the sports page headline of the Detroit Free Press on September 3, 1954.1 Obviously, the Detroit scribes were miffed that the Tigers were soundly beaten by the Senators the day before, and to make matters worse, were swept in a three-game series in September, […]