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Notwithstanding his ultimate status as one of the greatest hitters in major-league history, Stan Musial’s early visions of a big-league career rested on his strong left arm. As he tried to persuade his father to allow him to sign with the St. Louis Cardinals, the young southpaw dreamed of translating the success he had enjoyed […]

“Kill him! Kill the umpire!’ shouted someone on the stand; And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.”   Even people not interested in the national pastime are familiar with that homicidal exhortation from Ernest Thayer’s 1888 poem, “Casey at the Bat.” While murderous rhetoric has never become a reality, […]

“Bad trades are a part of baseball; I mean who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas for gosh sakes.” — Annie Savoy, Bull Durham   Outside of the 1919 sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, baseball trades do not often occupy a persistent niche in pop culture. As the Bull Durham quotation indicates, […]

Hilda Chester and her famous cowbell (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   The New York Yankees have their Bleacher Creatures. The crosstown Mets had Karl “Sign Man of Shea” Ehrhardt, while “Megaphone Lolly” Hopkins was the super-fan of the Boston Red Sox and Braves. Cleveland Indians, Chicago Cubs, Detroit Tigers, and Baltimore Orioles rooters […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. Twelve managers have won more games than Bill McKechnie. None has won more respect. Deacon Bill McKechnie was the first to lead three different teams to the World Series and the […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1985.   “It is always wrong to consider that something which begins in a small way cannot rapidly become important.” — Plutarch On June 5, 1942, Doreston Luke Carmen Jr. became the thin end of a very large wedge. That […]

  In recent decades, rules in several professional sports have been revised with a goal of reducing the length of games or matches. Both pro and college football have changed their timekeeping rules repeatedly to shorten games. In hockey, five-minute overtime periods, often followed by shoot-outs, have become routine in non-playoff games. Tie-breakers are played […]

Pittsburgh Pirate Honus Wagner is the greatest shortstop of all time. Baseball guru Bill James ranks Wagner as the second greatest baseball player in history, behind only Babe Ruth. He was a longtime hero in Pittsburgh. So how did the beloved Pirate get routed in the 1925 race for sheriff of Allegheny County? He ran […]

The World Series is the capstone of each baseball season. It ties up the annual package that was the pennant races, crowning an ultimate champion and providing fans with memories and associations that continue to live: the Called Shot, Al Gionfriddo, Bill Mazeroski. The special events of the World Series have a parallel in the […]

By 1942 World War II was already impacting the Philadelphia Phillies’ spring training activities as they prepared for the regular season in the soft sands of Miami Beach, Florida. Air corps stunts were observed above Flamingo Park; the players inspected fighters and bombers at a nearby base; and manager Hans Lobert, who had run the […]

The time was shortly after 7 AM. The place was a stretch of seashore on the Normandy coast of France designated Omaha Beach. The date was June 6, 1944. Less than sixty minutes had passed since H-Hour, when the first wave of men from the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, the only […]

To see anybody in Shelby, NC, on a Saturday afternoon in the 1940s was easy enough: head toward one of the cotton mills that sponsored a baseball club. Folks packed the stands to talk about wars and depressions, family matters, and local politics. But it was baseball that commanded center stage. Sometimes the game even […]

The annual Winter Meetings of the National Association ventured to sunny Miami to hold sessions in the McAllister and Columbus hotels from December 3-5, 1947. Major-league representatives stayed at the McAllister, Columbus, or Martinique hotels.1 The annual joint meetings of the American and National Leagues followed shortly afterward, in frosty New York City, at the […]

The mission of the California Angels in 1973 was to find a way to wrest the American League West Division title from their in-state neighbors to the north, the World Series champion Oakland Athletics. The Angels were counting on improvements engineered by General Manager Harry Dalton after the 1972 season. Now in his second season […]

Historians and scholars of the Big Fix and the Black Sox Scandal often bemoan the endurance of myths about the 1919 World Series and its aftermath.1 Thanks to a complicated interplay between evolving literary representations of the events of 1919-20 and popular films like Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams, mention of “the Black […]

What makes these Detroit Tigers uniform numbers — 2, 5, 6, 16, and 23 — special? Nearly every Tigers fan knows the answer to this question — each of those uniform numbers has been retired, in honor of Charlie Gehringer (2), Hank Greenberg (5), Al Kaline (6), Hal Newhouser (16), and Willie Horton (23). Each of these […]

Aquino Abreu in the uniform of the 1968–69 National Series champion Azucareros ball club, three seasons after his miraculous three-game pitching string. (Author’s Collection)   Aquino Abreu—a diminutive right-handed fastball specialist who labored for a decade and a half during the formative years of the modern-era post-revolution Cuban League—remains entirely unknown to North American and […]

The odds on the Boston Red Sox winning the 1967 American League pennant were 100-1 at the beginning of the season. But when they completed the Impossible Dream, it was “Pandemonium on the field!”The Boston Red Sox embarked on their 1967 season with a five-man rotation that had collectively won only 25 major league games […]

  Chocolatier William Klein Sr. of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, had a problem. The year was 1918. Soldiers were returning from the war in Europe. Klein was looking to expand to a national market for his “Lunch Bar,” a three-cent candy bar that was in direct competition with the chocolate bars produced by Milton Hershey at his […]

The Canadian Military Headquarters team defeated their American opponents before a huge crowd at Wembley Stadium on June 3, 1944. The hero of the day, Ed Smith, is back row, third from the right. (Library and Archives Canada)   Ed Smith was twice a hero during Canada’s Second World War. Smith, working at the Canadian […]