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The unassisted triple plays — seven in regular play and one in a world series — are so well publicized that we will not dwell on them in this brief summary. The assisted triple play, while not so fantastic, is still a spectacular event. Since 1901, when the American and National Leagues began operating simultaneously, […]

Introduction and Context The 1950 winter meetings were held in St. Petersburg, Florida, from December 3 to December 13. It was the third time in history that the Sunshine State played host to the winter meetings – they were in Jacksonville in 1941, while Miami was the site in 1947. At first, it was expected […]

Johnny Ritchey broke the Pacific Coast League’s color barrier with the San Diego Padres in 1948. (COURTESY OF BILL SWANK)   On March 30, 2005, the Padres unveiled a bust of Johnny Ritchey at the recently opened Petco Park, two years after his death. On February 21, 2017, Ritchey was inducted into the Breitbard Hall […]

My first exposure to International League baseball came in Baltimore in 1944 when I was only 7 years old. It was a pennant year for Baltimore. And my dad (early in the season) took me out to old Oriole Park to see the beloved Birds. The hated Syracuse Chiefs provided the opposition in this my […]

A true Ottawa baseball legend, Frank Shaughnessy’s impact on the Senators is undeniable. (Courtesy of Honora Shaughnessy)   In a multisport career that spanned more than half a century, he was a player, a coach, a manager, an owner, and an executive. And with four pennants in four years at the helm of the Canadian […]

Roomie – that’s Monte Irvin. He and I room together when the ball club’s on the road. Many’s the time I’ve hollered for him to get me out of what I’m in. Like the time we were posing for the team picture and a guy came up to me and said “Willie, I’m Jumble from […]

The 13-year-old third baseman from Colorado, who identified his race as Hispanic American, didn’t look far from home when he named his favorite player, who also happened to be his favorite athlete and his hero: Colorado Rockies’ Carlos Gonzalez. A 14-year-old Minnesotan, who proclaimed his primary position on his select baseball squad as third base, […]

When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem during a 2016 preseason game to protest police violence against black people in America, all hell broke loose. Voices of praise and condemnation rained down. Passion often trumped reason. The “conversation” remains heated, while complicated criminal justice problems remain unsolved. Is […]

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. There are ways of recognizing the best pitched games of starting hurlers — the record books list the no-hit games and in a special category even the perfect games where no […]

It looks like a misprint on the page. In the league stats for the 1952 Class-D Georgia-Florida League, under home runs, for Cordele it says “1.” Not 101, not 51, not even 21. Just 1. It isn’t a misprint. The Cordele Athletics, a farm team of the Philadelphia A’s, hit exactly one home run in […]

Adrian C. Anson, who rose to national prominence as captain of the Chicago White Stockings, was the first of what is now a long list of baseball players who succumbed to the lure of the footlights. Anson made his theatrical debut in 1895 in a production called A Runaway Colt. Arguably the most famous baseball […]

Seventy-three home runs in a single season would have been considered absurd only a few years ago, yet Barry Bonds accomplished this astounding feat in 2001. Bonds’ record-breaking season, eclipsing the mark of 70 set by Mark McGwire only four years earlier raises the question of which ballplayers truly own the greatest single-season home run performances […]

The Ball It all started with a baseball. My wife Marilee’s otherwise wonderful family are not big baseball fans. With the exception of my father-in-law Robert Belliveau’s golf club and ball design expertise (he was an innovative design engineer with Spalding), sports are not typically the topic of conversation at family gatherings. Marilee’s late grandmother […]

It is highly unlikely that the Philadelphia Phillies would have won the 1950 National League Pennant without reliever Jim Konstanty, who was so dominant that he was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player. And so it is worthwhile to consider whether Konstanty would have won the MVP and had the year he had without […]

Babe Ruth famously stumbled on it. Outfielders regularly cursed it. Fans sat on it. And Houston Astros executive Tal Smith mimicked it. That compilation is only part of the legacy of the Crosley Field terrace, the infamous slope that extended from the left-field wall toward the infield. The terrace also extended into center and right […]

A Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews baseball card from Topps. (Courtesy of Topps)   Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews shared a baseball card in the 1959 Topps set. The horizontal card, with a green-and-yellow background, showed the sluggers admiring their bats under the words FENCE BUSTERS. That they were. Aaron and Mathews combined for a […]

According to the official averages reported in the November 28, 1912, issue of The Sporting News, Heinie Zimmerman won the 1912 National League batting championship with a .372 average and the home run title with 14.1 Five weeks later, The Sporting News reported that—according to the research of baseball writer Ernie Lanigan—Zimmerman also had the […]

  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 war for the pennant The 1897 Beaneaters opened spring training in Macon, Georgia, with optimism that may have been out of proportion to their 74-47 fourth-place finish, 17 games behind the champion Baltimore Orioles, a year earlier. The core of the team was familiar: Tommy Tucker, Bobby Lowe, Herman Long, and Jimmy Collins across […]

Introduction The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (minor leagues) and the National and American Leagues held their annual winter meetings one week apart in December 1929. Though there were different points of contention for both the minors and majors, some issues were relevant to all the organizations and leagues. The draft, the signing of […]

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 […]

Introduction The annual baseball winter meetings of 1928 took place in three cities. The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (the minors) went north for its 27th annual convention, filling the King Edward Hotel in Toronto from December 5 to 7. The chief topic of conversation was a continuation of 1927’s primary sticking point, the […]

Leo Durocher, who is said to have said “nice guys finish last”—also the title of his autobiography—plausibly could have asked, “who said cheaters never prosper?” I refer, of course, to the revelation by Joshua Prager—first in a 2001 Wall Street Journal article and then his book, The Echoing Green—that in 1951 the New York Giants […]