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The tall, lanky, left-handed pitcher George Mogridge is best remembered today as the answer to a trivia question: Who pitched the first no-hitter in New York Yankees history? Yes, the answer is George Mogridge, on April 24, 1917, against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. During his time in the major leagues from 1911 […]

He was a bundle of contradictions, this imperfect man who pitched a perfect game. Don Larsen disdained training rules and had a mediocre major-league career; yet he pitched the greatest game in World Series history. He married out of a sense of duty; yet he refused to support his wife and baby daughter. He kept […]

Baseball has yet to take firm hold in the island of Jamaica, even though it is surrounded by other nations with a strong tradition in the sport. As the 2018 season ended, four men of Jamaican birth have made it to the majors, all of whom learned the game in the United States. The first […]

In the spring of 1973 Dick Ruthven achieved a rare baseball feat. He became just the fifth pitcher since the abolition of the final bonus rule in 1962 to leap straight from college baseball into the major leagues. Stardom was predicted. He drew comparisons to Tom Seaver. Ruthven became an All-Star and earned a World […]

In the long and successful history of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball club, few people have been more important than Sam Breadon, who owned the team for 27 years and presided over nine league pennants and six World Series titles. Much of the club’s success has been attributed to Branch Rickey, the team’s genius general […]

Mel McGaha’s life was part Frank Merriwell, part Greek tragedy. Like Merriwell, the fictional athlete popularized in dime novels, McGaha (pronounced mŭ-GAY-hay) was a clean-cut, handsome figure who excelled in multiple sports as a collegian. A University of Arkansas graduate, he was a basketballer drafted by the New York Knickerbockers, a two-way football player signed […]

Dick Gyselman made it to the major leagues for 82 games with the Boston Braves in 1933-34, but his greatest achievement, arguably, is a mark he set in the lower circuits–his 2,500 games played at third base is the all-time minor league record. In a professional career that totaled nineteen seasons, the six-foot, two-inch Gyselman […]

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 […]

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on September 28, 1949, Mario Miguel Guerrero Abud played over eight years as a shortstop and second baseman for four different teams. He was the younger brother of Epy Guerrero (born 1942), who is regarded as one of the greatest scouts in major-league baseball history and was responsible for […]

Though he played ten years in the majors, when people look back at Ossie Vitt’s career, they tend to remember the player mutiny against him by the team called the “Cleveland Crybabies” when he was manager of the Indians in 1940. He managed the Indians from 1938 through 1940, and 18 seasons in the minor […]

The 1914 season was the fourth in a row in which a team with Josh Devore in the outfield went to the World Series. The speedy Devore was a great leadoff man for the Giants championship teams of 1911 and 1912, and played with the pennant winners of 1913 before being traded. He joined the […]

During Hank Peters’ 12 seasons (1976-1987) as the Baltimore Orioles’ general manager, his teams won at least 90 games six times. Twice he was named The Sporting News’ Executive of the Year – following Baltimore’s 1979 American League pennant and 1983 World Series championship. But Peters accomplished much more over his 45 years in professional […]

With a major-league career that comprised only 39 games, Herbert Harrison Hunter still managed to play in baseball’s four biggest markets: New York, Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis. After 1920, in which he played in four games for the Boston Red Sox, Hunter became a baseball tour impresario of sorts, leading a group of major […]

Statistics can tell you a lot about a baseball player. In the case of George Kelly, they don’t say nearly enough. The first baseman for the New York Giants when they dominated the National League in the early 1920s, he was a clutch hitter par excellence and an astonishing defensive player. A quick-wristed slasher who […]

Gonzalo Márquez, one of the earlier Venezuelans in the majors, never played a full year in “The Show.” From 1972 through 1974, he got into just 76 regular-season games with Oakland and the Chicago Cubs. Márquez’s primary position was first base, and he was a good fielder — but he lacked power. Across his entire […]

Joe Cunningham was a left-handed first baseman and converted outfielder who played parts of 12 major-league seasons with the Cardinals (1954, 1956-61), Chicago White Sox (1962-64), and Washington Senators (1964-66). In his All-Star season of 1959, he hit .345 to finish second for the batting title. Known for his excellent batting eye, Cunningham’s lifetime on-base […]

New York Yankees scout Joe Devine approached a young, struggling outfielder toiling in the lower minors with the following advice: “Frank, the closest you’ll ever come to center field in Yankee Stadium is in a postcard. But I think you could make the major leagues as a manager.”1 The right-handed-hitting youngster, who’d unsuccessfully tried switch-hitting […]

Southpaw Paul Minner overcame serious injuries to his wrist and neck to transform himself from a hard thrower to a soft-tossing junkballer relying on location and control, and fashion a 10-year career in the big leagues (1946, 1948-1956). Traded by the Brooklyn Dodgers to the Chicago Cubs before the 1950 season, Minner averaged 10 wins […]

A nimble catcher before becoming one of the finest defensive third basemen of his era, Lave Cross spent most of his long career with four Philadelphia franchises.1 First came stints with the American Association’s Athletics and Players’ League’s Quakers, before a half-dozen seasons with the talented but underachieving mid-1890s National League Phillies. His fortunes then […]

Maybe you can visualize the scene from your own living room: “I’ll take ‘Hall of Fame’ for $400, Alex.” Alex says, “I was an outfielder on a World Series winning team, coached in the Rose Bowl, coached back-to-back championship teams in the NFL and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.” The contestants […]

For Jim Kern, the 1979 season was unlike any other he had experienced in the major leagues. Not only had he established himself as one of the top relief pitchers in baseball, but he was finally on a contending team. After years in Cleveland, where the organization’s perennial mantra was “wait until next year,” Kern […]

Hall of Fame catcher Rick Ferrell (1905-1995) caught in the American League for eighteen years (1929-45,’47) during two of America’s most challenging periods: the Great Depression and World War II. Playing for the St. Louis Browns, Boston Red Sox, and Washington Senators, his skill as a durable knuckleball catcher with a laser-accurate arm for picking […]

This article was originally published in “From Shibe Park to Connie Mack Stadium: Great Games in Philadelphia’s Lost Ballpark” (SABR, 2022), edited by Gregory H. Wolf. Black ballplayers first set foot on the field at Shibe Park at the end of the 1919 season when the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City, New Jersey faced off […]

“Cupcake,” a euphemism for a should-be-easy-to-beat opponent, entered the sports lexicon in the 1970s.1 Forty-some years earlier, the New York Yankees would’ve agreed it applied to their September 23, 1932, opponent: the cellar-dwelling, 63 games back2 Boston Red Sox. The hapless 1899 Cleveland Spiders were the last major-league team to face an opponent 60 or […]