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After college Bill Essick had to choose between life as a musician and one in baseball.  He chose baseball and left his native Illinois to begin his minor-league pitching career in Salt Lake City.  After a brief promotion to the major leagues and roughly a dozen years as a successful minor-league manager, Essick joined the […]

As a big leaguer, Ed Charles was perhaps the most accomplished player in the brief history of the ill-fated Kansas City Athletics, and he achieved fame as a baseball poet, reciting his poetry on television a few times per year and mailing verse to young fans with requested autographs. But he is best remembered today […]

In retirement, Ted Wills lived at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a planned community on the outskirts of Clovis, California, near Fresno in the central park of the state. His house overlooked seasonal wetlands protected by the Department of Reclamation, a setting that suggested a lifelong love of hunting and fishing. Wills’s cheerful […]

Jim Gosger was a hustling, hard-working ballplayer for 13 professional seasons, years that took him all over the baseball map, and to the majors for parts of 10 seasons with five different teams. He played a good center field but never really established himself as a good enough hitter to stay in a lineup long. […]

Clarence Bruce belongs to the majority of Negro League players who toiled in relative obscurity and whose stories can never be told in their entirety. Though the Negro Leagues became a subject for research in the late 1980s, the focus tended to be on the superstars who already had gained belated induction into National Baseball […]

A consistent and sometimes spectacular player, Bob Elliott was the biggest everyday offensive threat on the 1948 Boston Braves. He led that pennant-winning team in games played, home runs, and runs batted in. He was very selective at the plate, striking out just 57 times while leading the National League with 131 bases on balls. […]

Jackie Robinson was the trailblazer who integrated major-league baseball in the 20th century. However, many other pioneering players were the first to integrate particular states or teams, and their proper acknowledgement took much longer. Bill Greason, a right-hander who began his baseball career with the Nashville Black Vols in 1947, is a case in point. […]

“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!” — Vin Scully, October 15, 19881 Alejandro Peña appeared in three World Series during his 15-season major-league career, but his first appearance was the kind of thing that you can only dream about. He was called in from the Los Angeles Dodgers bullpen […]

From Babe Ruth in 1920, through Reggie Jackson in 1977, and down to Alex Rodriguez in 2004, when the New York Yankees announce a player transaction it usually involves a big-name player coming to New York, with large amounts of money going elsewhere. But it was quite the reverse on July 27, 1945, when the […]

From 1902 through 1911, Walter Schlichter owned the Philadelphia Giants, the finest African American team of the era. Schlichter was white, the Philadelphia Item’s sporting editor, and had previously managed boxers, not ballplayers. Yet with Sol White he formed a persevering, successful partnership. Competition, alignment with more powerful forces, an ill-advised secondary baseball venture, and finally a break […]

While only one major-league pitcher has lost 20 games in a single season during the twenty-first century, the now dubiously recognized feat did not carry the same stigma a century ago. In fact, during the 1901-1910 decade, 12 different pitchers for Boston’s National League entry produced 18 seasons of 20 or more losses. Among them […]

Recalled from the minor leagues near midseason by the Cincinnati Reds in both 1974 and 1975, Tom Carroll was a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher who began his career by winning his first four decisions as a starter in 1974. With the Big Red Machine cruising in 1975, Carroll’s four wins helped stabilize the staff when their […]

A sturdy right-handed pitcher from Puerto Rico, Eduardo Rodríguez Reyes is not to be confused with Venezuelan lefty Eduardo Rodriguez Hernández. Rodríguez Reyes spent seven years in the major leagues (1973-79) and compiled a 42-36 record with a 3.89 ERA. His sterling yet limited batting line (one plate appearance, one triple) carries historical relevance: it […]

Catcher Johnny Riddle had one of the more unusual careers in major-league history. His big-league career spanned 19 years, from his debut with the Chicago White Sox in 1930 until his final game with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1948. He played for five major-league teams, but he also spent long stretches of time in the minors, the […]

Joe Hietpas caught the last half-inning of the season’s finale for the New York Mets in 2004. That was his entire major-league experience. He never came to the plate in The Show, an oddity for a position player. “At the time, you don’t look at it as your one missed opportunity for an at-bat. It’s […]

Brooklyn-born Mike Fiore was signed by the New York Mets on July 2, 1962, while he was still a 17-year-old student at Lafayette High School. He’d been the unanimous choice for all-city first baseman in the 1962 season, batting .476 with nine home runs. In three years of high school baseball, he had struck out […]

The casual fan of the game might know Ron Swoboda for “The Catch“ in the 1969 World Series, or for his home run heroics in a game against Hall of Famer Steve Carlton, or for Casey Stengel’s early summation: “He will be great, super, even wonderful. Now if he can only learn to catch a […]

Right after the Shibe Park public address system announced, “Now batting for the Philadelphia Phillies, number 14, Del Ennis, left field,” either Gene Kelly or later Byrum Saam — both of whom did radio play-by-play for the Phillies — would say, “It’s Ding Dong Del” or “Here comes Ennis the Menace.” The radio listener could […]

“Big Bill” Brennan was a large man, weighing 235 pounds and standing 6-foot-2½. He had a loud voice and could be heard all over the ball field. Brennan’s voice served him well not only as an umpire, but also as a football coach at the University of Tennessee Medical College. Brennan was born on October […]

Here are the full SABR Defensive Index™ rankings, through games of August 3, 2014. The SABR Defensive Index draws on and aggregates two types of existing defensive metrics: those derived from batted ball location-based data and those collected from play-by-play accounts. The three metrics representing batted ball data include Defensive Runs Saved from Baseball Info […]

When the visiting Texas Rangers lost a rain-shortened and much-delayed game to the Boston Red Sox on July 15, 1973, they might have had the Detroit Tigers to blame – even though the Detroit team was nowhere near Fenway Park.1 The officially cited reason for playing the Sunday afternoon game in sloppy conditions, after a […]

Exciting, well-played baseball action was in limited supply for fans of the expansion Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres in 1969. The two newcomers to the National League posted identical 52-110 records in their first seasons, finishing a combined 89 games out of first place. Late in the season, though, teams of Expos and Padres […]

Seated at a table in a lower box seat among 33,535 fans at Ebbets Field,1 Red Barber was ready to make history. Television was one of the exhibits at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, so NBC wanted the opportunity to broadcast a baseball game. A reader might wonder why the Brooklyn Dodgers? […]

Bobby Bonds was not expected to break into the majors in 1968,1 but the 22-year-old was hard to ignore by late June – he was tearing up the Pacific Coast League with the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate in Phoenix. Through 60 games, Bonds was leading the PCL in three categories with a .370 batting […]