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It is well known that a manager may formally protest a game only if he claims an umpire has made a decision contrary to the rules. Dissatisfaction with a specific call (safe/out, ball/strike, fair/foul) is not grounds for a protest. However, sometimes things get a little murky. Take, for example, the game of July 20, […]

  Ross Barnes was the first principal leadoff batter (PLB) for the Chicago National League club. A PLB is defined as the player who is a team’s game-starting leadoff batter for the most games in a given season, and Barnes was at the top of the lineup for all 66 games Chicago played in the […]

This article was originally published in “St. Louis’s Favorite Sport,” the 1992 SABR convention journal.   When Miller Huggins found he couldn’t own the Cardinals—or at least a good hunk of them—he opted for a job for which he had been recommended by Ban Johnson, the founder of the American League, and endorsed by J. […]

Some History Baseball is a superstitious sport. Players skip over foul lines on the way to the dugout, refuse to change their socks during a hitting streak, and avoid talking to a pitcher while he is hurling a no-hitter. Some superstitions have as their subject not only an individual player but an entire team. For […]

CY YOUNG’S STRING OF HITLESS INNINGS Several SABR researchers shuddered last season when Dennis Eckersley of the Indians was building his string of hitless innings dangerously close to the 1904 record established by Cy Young. It wasn’t that they disliked Eckersley, who had pitched near perfect ball over a period of 10 days. It was […]

Minor-League Winter Meeting The 1949 Winter Meetings saw several firsts for the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues: the first time a meeting was held in Baltimore, the first time a player draft was held during a meeting, and the first time an incumbent Association president missed a meeting. The meeting itself was held at […]

Scores of professional ballplayers have made their way from the big leagues to the big screen. A few, including Chuck Connors, Bob Uecker, and John Beradino (who played for the Browns, Indians, and Pirates as Johnny Berardino), became successful actors or media personalities. Some, notably Babe Ruth, appeared in movies as themselves, or as thinly […]

Baseball has been traditionally divided into the three major aspects of hitting, pitching, and fielding. While there are abundant quantitative measures for hitting, far fewer for pitching, fielding ability has but one, the fielding average. Unfortunately, this dominant statistic is a poor measure of fielding skill. It is computed by dividing the fielder’s total of […]

Jackie Robinson slides to home plate in an attempt to avoid the tag during a game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers game at Ebbets Field on May 13, 1956. Catcher is Ray Katt. Batter is Clem Labine. It was one of the times he didn’t make it. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME […]

In 1969, the New York Mets became the first 1960s-era expansion team to win a World Series. En route to that championship, after overcoming a 9½ game mid-August Chicago Cubs lead, Gil Hodges managed his “Miracle Mets” to the National League East title over Leo Durocher’s Cubs. In Chicago, that season has been called the […]

This is the online appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s “Howie Fox: Baltimore’s Unique Oriole.” Click on a link below to scroll down to that section: [A-1] Where the 1953 Baltimore Orioles Played in 1954 — The Men Who Participated in the 1953 Playoffs [A-2] Where the 1953 Baltimore Orioles Played in 1954 — The Men Who […]

Carlos Bernier was 26 years old when he broke the Pittsburgh Pirates’ color line on April 22, 1953, nearly one year before Curt Roberts played his first game with the Pirates.1 The controversial and temperamental outfielder was one of two Bucs, with Lino Donoso, a Cuban pitcher, who encouraged Roberto Clemente to refrain from emotional […]

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 […]

This appendix accompanies Bryan Soderholm-Difatte’s article “The 1914 Stallings Platoon” in the Fall 2014 Baseball Research Journal. Methodology for Determining Starting Line-Up Platoons A position “platoon” is defined as two (or sometimes three) players being used in the starting line-up at the same position by their manager on a regular basis depending primarily on whether […]

On July 8, 1949, the New York Giants became the fourth major-league team to put a black player on the field when Hank Thompson started at second base and Monte Irvin pinch-hit in the eighth inning of a 4-3 loss to the Brooklyn Dodgers. All of the five black players who would play in the […]

The Chicago Cubs finished 1941 in sixth place in the National League with a 70-84 record. Their offensive attack was led by Stan Hack, who hit .317 with a .417 on-base percentage; Bill Nicholson, who contributed 26 homers and 98 runs batted in; and Babe Dahlgren, who added 16 homers in 99 games. The staff […]

Connie Mack’s wartime Athletics were coming off a 1941 season in which they finished dead last in the American League, with a record of 64-90, a slight improvement over 1940’s 54-100 mark.  They were six games behind the seventh-place Washington Senators, and the season’s attendance was just 528,894. The A’s had declined rapidly after Mack […]

Baseball fans have always enjoyed picking mythical “dream teams,” ranging from the serious to the whimsical. My work with the SABR Collegiate Baseball Committee got me involved in a project to select numerous new dream teams. The ultimate objective was to determine which college can field the strongest all-time alumni squad. In an attempt to […]

Johnny Sain and Warren Spahn, the subjects of Gerald V. Hern’s poem. (Courtesy of Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection)   One of baseball’s most enduring quotes had its genesis in a short poem written by Gerald V. Hern, sports editor of the Boston Post. His verse forever linked Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain as […]

R—O—L—A—I—D—S. The answer in the classic ad: “How do you spell relief?” TRIPLE PLAY!!! The answer to the question, “What’s the perfect remedy for a relief pitcher sum moned into a diamond game with nobody out and two (or three) runners on base?” Take for instance May 30, 1967, at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. In […]

The 1959 Chicago White Sox won the American League pennant despite a league-average offense. Under manager Al Lopez, the “Go-Go” Sox combined speed, fielding, and—especially—pitching to shatter the New York Yankees’ four-year run of AL championships. The 1959 pitching staff was anchored by starters Early Wynn (age 39), Billy Pierce (32), and Dick Donovan (31). […]

As outfielder for the New York Giants in the 1950s, Donald Frederick Mueller played in some of the most memorable games of the era. Now approach­ing his 80th birthday, he reflected on a career of some 50 years ago. Born in the St. Louis suburb of Mount Pleasant (now Creve Coeur), the young Mueller learned […]

Who was William Holbert? No, not the founder of the National League.  That was William A. Hulbert. We are talking about William H. Holbert, a National League catcher from 1876 to 1888. His claim to fame is that he is the only major league player to go to bat 2,000 times in his career without […]

In Eight Men Out, author Eliot Asinof wrote about the 1919 Chicago White Sox: “Many players of less status got almost twice as much on other teams. … (Charles Comiskey’s) ballplayers were the best and were paid as poorly as the worst.” This passage sums up the entire foundation of Asinof’s thesis: Low salaries and […]