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John Ford Smith, the son of a pioneer Arizona family, was a pioneer himself whose baseball career spanned the pre- and post-integration eras, both in Phoenix and nationally. He is the only1 Negro League player presently known to have been born in Arizona. Smith was born in Phoenix on January 9, 1919. His father, Charles […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (McFarland & Co., Fall 2008). Premise By the late 1930s, and particularly during the years of US involvement in World War II, segregation in sport and society was a topic of increasing public interest. Nationalism had at least […]

Topps commemorated Ryan Zimmerman’s 11th career walk-off with a collectible card in 2018. (THE TOPPS COMPANY)   “The pressure is on him, man. It’s not on me. I’m supposed to get out.” — Ryan Zimmerman1 Baseball games are filled with moments of great theater. What do we expect before the curtain rises? Perhaps a great […]

The objective of the research described in this article is to identify those players who merit recognition as “.300 hitters” even though they did not end up with lifetime .300 batting averages. They are among the former members of the prestigious Career .300 Hitters Club—the Emeritus Members. “At some point in the 1880s,” says John […]

There have been many great teams in the majors over the past century. The 1927 Yankees, the 1906 Cubs, and the 1930-31 Athletics are a few which come to mind. But equally memorable, in their way, are those teams at the other end of the scale who lost almost everything in sight, stumbling through a […]

The highest grossing baseball movie of all time, A League of Their Own, features a 15-second scene where an African-American woman picks up an errant ball and throws it back with such snap that it raises eyebrows.1 The film tells the story of what is now known as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGBPL), […]

Baseball’s 1950s are remembered by different people in different ways: stagnant, brilliant, racist, progressive — it all depends on the perspective of the fan. But one thing is certain and incontrovertible: baseball during the ’50s became a contest of raw power. Sixteen players have hit 500 or more career home runs. Seven of them played […]

William “Judy” Johnson was one of the slickest fielding third basemen in the history of black baseball — or any other baseball. Old-timers who saw him cavort with the old Philadelphia Hilldales or Pittsburgh Crawfords in the 1920s and `30s inevitably link his name with that of Brooks Robinson. Connie Mack, the sweet-natured owner of […]

Sandy Koufax pitched 14 complete games in which he gave up two hits or fewer. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   In the run-up to the 1970 season, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn shared plans to continue minor-league trials with what became the designated hitter, begin another trial with livelier baseballs, and explore “bending” foul lines […]

Atlanta’s baseball history is dominated by names such as Hank Aaron, John Smoltz, Greg Maddux, Dale Murphy, and Chipper Jones. The Braves also dominated their division in the 1990s, but that is only a small part of Atlanta’s long and storied baseball history. Anyone can look up the history of the Braves and their players […]

The Havana Sugar Kings played in the International League between 1954 and 1960. It was a short existence, but a memorable one. The Sugar Kings began with hopes of a major league franchise, experienced a shooting during a home game and a political revolution, won the International League’s Governor’s Cup and the Junior World Series, […]

While Cleveland’s baseball history dates back to the National Association of the 1870s, its important ballpark history essentially involves two locales: League Park and Municipal Stadium. Two versions of the former and one of the latter have sheltered variously named home teams in different leagues Since 1891. Recent developments promise to make a third baseball […]

The 1954 Winter Meetings opened on December 6 at New York’s Hotel Commodore with an agenda filled with issues that had plagued the sport for years. They included the ongoing decline of the minor leagues, the increasing misalignment of major-league franchises with the national population, and player-management conflicts. Owners left the meeting two days later […]

Introduction and Context As World War II seemed to be winding down (even though the Battle of the Bulge in Europe was only days away and the Pacific invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were still in the future), recovery from the war was the watchword at the 43rd annual baseball winter meetings. The nation […]

The Society launched a research project in 1976 to gather information about — what is now a rather rare baseball occurrence — the inside-the-park home run (IPH). Some of the questions raised at the outset of this project v re rather basic in nature. How many inside-the-park homers are being hit at the present time […]

Introduction The 2017 MLB season set records for both home runs (6,105) and strikeouts (40,104). Conventional wisdom would suggest that this is not a coincidence. The argument is that players don’t mind striking out more often if they also hit more home runs. The raw data for these two parameters are easily plotted over time […]

Until the Dodgers and Giants come to their senses and return home to New York, Casey Stengel remains the only figure in history to have worn the uniform of these four New York City teams: the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees, and Mets. The coincidence of this was no small thing to Casey, who died in 1975, […]

It has been over 20 years since Baseball Prospectus developed the statistic “Wins Above Replacement Player” (WARP), and 12 years since Sean Smith’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was first posted on Baseball-Reference.com.1 WAR now is widely recognized as a useful metric for assessing a ballplayer’s overall performance. Several performance-based awards are given to players each […]

The headline in the March 13, 1903, edition of the New York Times read “Baseball Grounds Fixed.” The nonbylined article described an agreement, announced by American League President Ban Johnson, that a plot of rocky land was leased for the construction of a ballpark to be occupied by the newly minted New York American League […]

Cupid Childs was one of the best-hitting major-league second basemen during the late nineteenth century, not to mention a better than average fielder who possessed great range on the diamond. Only four other second basemen in the history of major-league baseball have averaged more total chances per game than Childs. His all-around outstanding play made […]

Once upon a time, A.J. Liebling, consummate Manhattanite and writer for The New Yorker, dubbed Chicago America’s Second City.1 But in relation to New York-centric baseball movies, this AAA-league rating is extremely generous. Across the decades, baseball films with Chicago references have been relatively scarce. For every on-screen image of Wrigley Field, there are scores […]

It’s often said that there are no ties in baseball. If a game is deadlocked after nine innings,1 you keep playing until someone wins.2 That’s the general rule, to be sure, but tie games have occurred in the past, for all sorts of special reasons.3 And the neck tie, the real subject of this essay […]