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“YOU CAN’T MAKE IT!” Bob Humphreys once wrote that in large letters on the wristband of his baseball glove. The words summarized an early 1963 evaluation of his pitching skills by a major-league team.1 Although the glove subsequently wore out in 1963 winter ball,2 Humphreys continued to use those words as a motivator to fashion […]

Russ Snyder inked his first professional baseball contract with the New York Yankees in August 1952, just three months after graduating from high school.1 The next summer he was the top hitter in the minors – compared at the plate, on the bases, and in the outfield to Mickey Mantle,2 possibly a cross-pollination of Ted […]

Howard Johnson was a solid major-league player for several years. He was probably best known for a combination of power and speed that made him the darling of fantasy baseball owners as that variant of the national pastime took off in the 1980s. He was a member of two World Series championship teams, the 1984 […]

A right-handed pitcher with a side-arm, almost underhanded delivery, Earl Caldwell, born on April 9, 1907 in Sparks, Texas, spent most of his lengthy professional baseball career in the minor leagues, winning 323 games, beginning with Temple/Mexia of the Texas Association in 1926 and ending with Harlingen of the Big State League in 1954. Caldwell […]

Pepper pot. Bulldog. Firebrand. Scrapper. Solly Hemus answered to all those descriptions in 11 years as a major-league player and 2½ as a manager. Also: racist. Two future stars he disdained and disrespected, Bob Gibson and Curt Flood, branded him a bigot. “Hemus acted as if I smelled bad,” Flood wrote.1 “Solly was a hell-bent-for-leather, […]

Could one imagine a better prospect than young left-hander Billy Hoeft? As an American Legion and Oshkosh (Wisconsin) High School pitcher, he reeled off a string of 34 consecutive victories in 1948 and 1949 before losing the last game of the season, 2-1, on an unearned run.1 The string included three no-hit games. His Legion […]

It may have been happenstance that made Ron Blomberg own a piece of history as baseball’s first designated hitter. After he overcame anti-Semitism in his hometown of Atlanta to become the number one overall pick by the New York Yankees in the free agent draft in 1967, his dream of playing in New York City, […]

It looked, at first glance, like a mistake. The Associated Press’s obituary for Ron Plaza, which ran in newspapers across the US in April 2012, noted that the Oakland Athletics’ roving minor-league instructor was entering his 61st season in professional baseball, but listed his age as only 77.1 There was no error. The prodigious infielder […]

Soft-spoken Richard Atley Donald once threw 95-mile-per-hour fastballs for the 1939 New York Yankees, the first major league team to win four straight World Series.  He won 12 straight games for them, to set an American League mark for rookies. Atley was a star pitcher for the 1937 Newark Bears, considered by many to be […]

With his thunderous left-handed home-run stroke, the self-converted catcher Carl “Swish” Sawatski established a reputation as one of the most feared sluggers in Organized Baseball by leading four different leagues in round-trippers in his first five years as a professional (1945 to 1949). Despite his slugging potential, Sawatski bounced around in four different organizations struggling […]

In a 1987 Sports Illustrated article on teammate Eric Davis, Cincinnati Reds outfielder Dave Parker said, “Eric is blessed with world-class speed, great leaping ability, the body to play until he was 42, tremendous bat speed and power, and a throwing arm you wouldn’t believe.”1 Parker was right on all counts but one; Davis suffered […]

Fred Cook pitched in the major leagues but not under his real name, and fought in World War I but not for the country of his birth. Such was the life of this enigma, who is known to the major league record books as “Fred Winchell” and was ultimately buried in an unmarked grave. The […]

“No matter how great you were once upon a time – the years go by, and men forget,” wrote W. A. Phelon in Baseball Magazine in 1915. “Ross Barnes, forty years ago, was as great as [Ty] Cobb or [Honus] Wagner ever dared to be. Had scores been kept then as now, he would have […]

A classical pianist who played at Carnegie Hall by 16, a World Series champion baseball player with one of the major league’s glamour franchises by 23, and an actor sharing screen time with Tallulah Bankhead and Zsa Zsa Gabor on a top-rated television series before he turned 30, Al “The Bull” Ferrara has had enough […]

“He was the greatest manager I ever played for, perhaps the greatest manager who ever lived, and that includes managers in the big leagues. I’ve never played for a guy who could get more out of every ballplayer than he could. He knew how to communicate with everybody and to treat every player as an […]

Born in Bellows Falls, Vermont, on December 26, 1947, Carlton Fisk embodies traditional New England values like pride, ruggedness, and individuality. Those virtues were what the late Boston Red Sox public relations director Dick Bresciani was trying to capture in 1997 when he wrote that Fisk was a “native of Vermont” on his original plaque […]

On April 20, 1970, at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, a new pitching role was initiated for Dave Giusti. That Monday night, Dennis Menke of the Houston Astros stepped into the batter’s box to face Dock Ellis of the Pirates. Within a few moments, Menke smashed a line drive through the pitching box. Unfortunately, Ellis’ right hand got in […]

There were two major-league ballplayers named Joe Harris, and both played for Boston’s American League team. They had very different records. One had two middle names – the pitcher named  Joseph Lionel White Harris, who pitched only for Boston (1905-07) and racked up the astonishing record of 3-30, despite a 3.35 earned-run average. This biography […]

Ron Luciano was a football All-American, baseball umpire, TV broadcaster, and best-selling author. He barged through the world like a gnu amid a herd of Shetland ponies, entertaining many, offending a few, and hiding behind a cheerful and outrageous persona until life somehow proved unbearable. Everyone knew him, but nobody did. He was born June […]

In 1970 Billy Conigliaro played all three outfield positions for the Boston Red Sox, the majority of them in left field. His brother and teammate Tony played right field almost exclusively. Together they hit 54 home runs (Tony hitting 36 and Billy half as many — 18), the combined total setting a major-league record for […]

Negro league fans called him “the black Lou Gehrig,” putting Buck Leonard in pretty lofty company. It didn’t hurt Buck that he followed Josh Gibson, “the black Babe Ruth,” in the Homestead Grays’ lineup. Was Buck Leonard the equal of Gehrig as a first baseman and hitter? He probably was a better first baseman than the […]

Passon Field has been renamed Pollock Field and is still in use by West Philadelphia High School sports teams. (Courtesy of Lynn Alpert)   The first half of the twentieth century featured the proliferation of amateur and professional sports teams, including baseball, softball, football, basketball, soccer, and hockey. Baseball, Black and White, was far and […]

Federal League Park in Indianapolis, looking in from the right-field fence. (Indianapolis News, January 27, 1917)   Specifically constructed in 1914 to serve as the home field for the Indianapolis Hoosiers, Federal League Park was a state-of-the-art steel and concrete stadium with a seating capacity in excess of 20,000. Only three years later, the handsome […]

Columbia University went through six baseball coaches in eight years from 1906 through 1913. But in 1914, former big league pitcher Andy Coakley joined the program, handling pitchers and catchers. He became the Lions’ head coach in 1915 and remained in that job for 37 years, stepping down after the 1951 season. Coakley shaped the […]