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Going into the last day of the 1946 baseball season, Brooklyn and St. Louis were tied for the National League lead with identical 96-57 records. When each team lost on that day, the Dodgers to the Braves and the Cardinals to the Cubs, it became necessary for the teams to engage in the first-ever playoff […]
Tom Lasorda is lucky Dodgers fans were willing to give him a second chance. Lasorda built a Hall of Fame career as manager of the Dodgers from 1976 to ’96, but his first stint with the franchise came as a minor leaguer in 1949. By the mid-’50s, he was a young pitcher trying to break […]
Jackie Robinson’s debut at Braves Field was originally scheduled for April 22, 1947. But the Dodgers’ three-game series in Boston was a total washout because of rain. Robinson’s first game was in the opener of a Memorial Day doubleheader on May 30. Before both scheduled series, Robinson wasn’t the biggest story in the local news. […]
Two weeks after the Cleveland Indians’ Larry Doby broke the America League’s color barrier on July 5, 1947, Kansas City Monarchs stars Hank Thompson and Willard Brown received a telegram from Bill DeWitt, general manager of the last-place St. Louis Browns. They were told to report to St. Louis for the following night’s game, making […]
On a hot and sweltering Sunday afternoon, the New York Giants played the St. Louis Cardinals in the second game of a doubleheader after blowing an 11-0 fourth-inning lead in the first game and losing 14-12 as the Cardinals orchestrated an improbable comeback. Would the Giants be able to rebound after such a defeat? That […]
Jackie Robinson‘s major-league debut was more than just the first step in righting an historical wrong. It was a crucial event in the history of the American civil rights movement, the importance of which went far beyond the insular world of baseball. The Dodgers signed Robinson to a major-league contract just five days before the […]
The 1953 Dodgers enjoyed so much success against the St. Louis Cardinals that it has stood the test of time. It was impressive dominance by a great team against a pretty good team that struggled mightily at Ebbets Field. The Ladies Day game between the Dodgers and Cardinals on September 1 was the last of […]
A County Stadium crowd of 34,146 sat through two rain delays and then a 12-inning game that took 3 hours and 20 minutes, but when it was all over, the Milwaukee Braves had beaten the St. Louis Cardinals in a thriller, 3-2. The Milwaukee Journal reported, “It took them until after midnight to do it, […]
When Sal Maglie reached the major leagues on August 9, 1945, he was a 28-year-old rookie dismissed as “a nobody, another dreary journeyman pitcher coughed up by the minors in the final days of wartime baseball.”1 Manager Mel Ott used him for a mere two-thirds of the fourth inning that day and 4⅓ innings in […]
It was Tuesday night, June 15, 1948, and 24,124 Boston Braves fans packed the Wigwam hoping to see their team take over first place. They were not disappointed: Johnny Sain pitched a six-hitter and the Braves beat the Chicago Cubs, 6-3. Once again the Braves showed that they were very successful when playing under the […]
Tribe fever was at an all-time high as the Cleveland Indians’ train pulled into Terminal Tower from Boston. It was the first World Series the locals were able to see in person since 1920. Their opponent, the Boston Braves, had a similar history. Their last trip to the Series was in 1914. Both teams won […]
A crowd of 69,865 packed Yankee Stadium for the second game of the 1947 World Series. The New York Yankees had won Game One with five runs on only four hits. The Brooklyn Dodgers aimed to even the Series when the two teams took the field on a chilly October afternoon. Allie Reynolds was given […]
On May 5, 1943, the Chicago Tribune was chock-full of news. For a cost of 3 cents, one could absorb 48 pages from the Trib, self-described as the “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” With the United States nearing its 17th month as a combatant in World War II, the bulk of the front page centered on military […]
A person who coaches in major-league baseball but never plays or manages at that level, is a shadowy figure in an otherwise statistic-rich sport. He or she1 compiles no wins, losses, runs, hits, errors, or any other numerical record that they ever reached the majors. There’s only one tracked statistic that a coach in this […]
The Brooklyn Dodgers had their backs to the wall. After coming back from a two-game deficit in the World Series, they lost the fifth game to the New York Yankees at Ebbets Field. Now they were back at Yankee Stadium and needed to win to keep the Series alive. After Spec Shea’s four-hit complete game […]
President John F. Kennedy was said to have correctly answered a trivia question that had been floating around for years: Who is the only man to ever hit a home run off Sandy Koufax and catch a pass from Y.A. Tittle? The guess was always Alvin Dark. “It’s not quite accurate, however,” Dark always said. […]
Right-handed pitcher Eddie Stack was a collegiate and semipro standout who never played a minor league game but underachieved as a mid-Deadball Era major leaguer. Stack had ample size, a strong arm, and first-rate intellect. His debut in the big leagues in May 1910 was spectacular: a three-hit shutout of a Chicago Cubs team headed […]
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson estimates that the slowest pitch that could reach home plate on the fly would travel around 30 miles per hour.1 Stu Miller didn’t defy the laws of physics, but he challenged the equation that says Velocity = Success. “He’s got three speeds of pitches – slow, slower and reverse,” the sportswriter […]
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, […]
Dick Schofield spent 19 years in the big leagues working for seven teams as a versatile utility player. Born on January 7, 1935, in Springfield, Illinois, to John and Florence Schofield, John Richard “Dick” Schofield was the second in a succession of four generations of professional baseball players. His father, John “Ducky” Schofield, played ten […]
Otis Allen Davis, a slim six-footer who could run well when he came to the big leagues in 1946, only got one chance to show his stuff. On April 22, 1946, with the Brooklyn Dodgers trailing the Boston Braves in the bottom of the ninth inning, 4-2, acting manager Chuck Dressen used Davis as a […]
San Francisco Bay Area native Tim Cullen signed with the A’s during spring training in 1972, returning to the region where he had been a two-sport star in high school and helped Santa Clara University become the nation’s top-ranked college baseball team. He did not play in the 1972 World Series and retired after the […]
For Cubs fans of the 1940s and 1950s, Bobby Sturgeon will always be linked with two other shortstops who broke into the majors during the spring of 1940 — 10-time All-Star Pee Wee Reese of the Dodgers and seven-time All-Star Marty Marion of the Cardinals. As the story goes, Cubs manager Gabby Hartnett was pushing […]
In the summer of 1951, the New York Giants under manager Leo Durocher began to employ an elaborate sign-stealing scheme. The Giants needed to overcome a 13.5-game deficit to the Brooklyn Dodgers to set up a historic playoff. The question is not whether the Giants stole signs, but what effect the sign-stealing had on the […]