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“St. Louis is one of the greatest baseball towns in the country. It has probably turned out more professional baseball players than any other city. … The youngsters of St. Louis know more about big league baseball than the adult fans of the average city.” – Damon Runyon   August 26, 1914, was an improbable […]

As World War II progressed and the war effort lay greater and greater claim to American resources, every industry tightened up as best it could. One adaptation that baseball made was to schedule spring training nearer the cities that the teams would ultimately have as a home base. The Boston Red Sox, then, instead of […]

Henry Chadwick, baseball’s first historian, tried to capture a game in a chart for his newspaper readers. It was called a box score, and as it evolved over the years, it offered the raw material for the statistically minded to analyze, understand, and appreciate the game. There were dozens who followed, from Ernie Lanigan, longtime […]

Can there be a star quality team without any All­ Stars? Can a team compiled entirely of All-Stars be mediocre? The answer to both questions is a resounding yes, at least theoretically. Kirk Gibson won an MVP Award but was never named to a single All-Star roster during bis entire career. John Denny won the […]

The feat of collecting five or more hits in a single game was rare enough, even for baseball in the nineteenth century, but when one player managed to do it in four separate games during a single season, that was one of the rarest accomplishments in the history of baseball. In fact, it was so […]

Al Kermisch, who joined SABR in 1971, was a baseball researcher for over 60 years. His paper, “Walter Johnson: King of the 1-0 Hurlers,” appeared in the first SABR Baseball Research Journal in 1972, and in 1975 he debuted “From a Researcher’s Notebook”: seven small stories covering 4½ pages. This became a regular feature and […]

Magnates attending the 1899 winter league meetings in New York had a full docket: Contraction of the National League The gathering threat of other circuits aiming to claim major-league status; Various internal headaches, chief of which was mollification of angry and vindictive New York Giants owner Andrew Freedman.1 In the end, the progress achieved on […]

Introduction The 1983 Baseball Winter Meetings were held at the Opryland Hotel, in Nashville, Tennessee, from December 5 to 10. Trades and free-agent signings usually headline the agenda of the annual gathering of executives, managers, scouts, agents, lawyers, accountants, and media personnel. Going into the 1983 meetings, though, there were several unresolved issues, including the […]

“Jarvis fires away…That’s a fly ball, deep to left, back, back…HEY HEY! He did it! Ernie Banks got number 500! The ball tossed to the bullpen…everybody on your feet…this…is IT! WHEEEEEEEE!” — Jack Brickhouse, WGN-TV, May 12, 1970 1   When the curtain rang down on the 1969 season, Ernie Banks was just three home […]

Preemptive Measures by the Senior League Before the 1902 season ended, the National League presidents met to strategize their approach to the burgeoning American League. The year-old AL already had four teams in National League cities (Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, and Chicago) and was threatening a move to the NL stronghold of New York. For […]

A note from the editors of the 2011 TNP.

The foul poles at Dodger Stadium were in foul territory, there were only two drinking fountains (one in each dugout), and no one had installed electrical outlets in the clubhouses.1 Besides fixing those design issues after the 1962 opening season, no real renovations to the ballpark were made until 1975 when new, space-age plastic-colored seats […]

Growing up in New England, it was an article of faith that the 1967 Red Sox won the American League pennant with the help of divine intervention — that it was an “Impossible Dream.” With the passage of time, this depiction has become less satisfying, if for no other reasons than that it gives short […]

In Mark Armour’s SABR biography of Jim Brosnan he observes that Brosnan “wrote the first honest portrayal of the life of a ballplayer,” and that “Fifty years on, Brosnan’s books (The Long Season and The Pennant Race) remain the gold standard for baseball memoirs.” Brosnan allowed fans to gain a degree of understanding about the […]

Umpires, the unsung heroes of baseball, predictably received less than an appropriate share of the publicity generated by the 75th anniversary of the World Series in 1978. Although the men in blue are both essential and conspicuous participants in the National Pastime, they continue to be regarded generally as necessary evils by fans and as […]

I wish that someone had told me when I was 15 years old that Willie Stargell was starting a five-year tear that would transform him from a good home run hitter to one of baseball’s superstars. If they had, I would have taken more mental snapshots of the man who was not yet  “Pops.” While […]

Shifty. That’s a good word for Walter Dilbeck, the huckster who launched the Global Baseball League in 1966. And launched it again in 1968. And crashed it in 1969. The barely believable saga of Dilbeck and his self-styled third major league involves 11 Hall of Famers, a former vice president of the United States, a […]

Collage of Clemente Stamp Materials by Juan López-Bonilla. Background: Uncut panel of 20-cent 1984 United States Clemente stamp. Foreground, from left to right: Poster commemorating the 1984 stamp release, the Puerto Rican newspaper “El Mundo” article from 1982 denoting the design selection, the design sketch for landscape version of stamp, the signature of designer, and […]

Stan Musial doubled, then scored by sliding past catcher Ernie Lombardi on Walker Cooper’s sixth-inning single at Braves Field on September 16, 1942. The Cardinals won, 6-2. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   One of the most celebrated facets of Cardinals historical lore is Stan Musial’s remarkable home/away symmetry of career base hits: 1,815 at home and 1,815 […]

The main subjects considered by the magnates during the National League winter meetings of 1900-1901 were: (1) the ever-increasing threat of competition posed by the fledgling American League; (2) possible recognition of a revived American Association as a counterbalance to the AL, and (3) player contract modifications proposed by the latest incarnation of the players […]

The major-league portion of the 1907 winter meetings were held by both leagues on the same days, Tuesday through Thursday, December 10-12. It was the second year they’d met simultaneously. The National League met in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria while the American League met in Chicago. New York was the home of […]

The white sand beaches and warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico provide a pleasant distraction to the residents and tourists of Pensacola. A sense of optimism swept the Pensacola community in 1939 as the economy took a turn for the better with the ending of the Great Depression. During that summer, another form of […]