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One baseball executive said Willie Mays’ glove was “where triples go to die.” (SABR-Rucker Archive)   One of the game’s greatest players of all time was also one of the greatest defensive players of all time. Willie Mays set a standard of excellence for outfielders that is virtually unmatched. As Dodgers executive Fresco Thompson said, […]

What we have in this special edition of the Baseball Research Journal are four snapshots of events and personalities from the wide world of “baseball-and-the-law”: Roger Abrams on arbitration and the 1975 Andy Messersmith reserve-clause case; Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court’s 1922 decision in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League of Professional […]

He spent 20 years as a professional umpire, baseball’s loneliest profession, passing judgment on the performances of the game’s great athletes and egos. Many people have pursued this particular job, but Emmett Ashford had the added burden of breaking racial barriers throughout his career, as a black man whose job required maintaining authority over white […]

A list of hit sequences for players who completed a cycle during the 1920-2017 period.This is the online appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s “‘When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It’: Who Took the Cycle or Quasi-Cycle?”   Click here to scroll down for Table A-2: Sequences for Players Who Completed a Quasi-Cycle […]

At approximately 3:15 p.m on Monday, October 8, 1956, Babe Pinelli’s right arm shot upward ending Game 5 of the World Series. Pinelli did more than punch out Brooklyn Dodgers pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell to conclude a 2-0 New York Yankees victory; his called third strike completed Don Larsen’s perfect game, the first in World Series […]

November 26, 1958 cover of Shukan Baseball depicting Stan Musial and Shigeo Nagashima (Robert Fitts Collection)   Game Seven of the 1958 Japan Series featured a winner-take-all finish to a classic contest between two storied franchises. In the bottom of the ninth, with a six-run lead, 21-year-old Kazuhisa Inao stared down at Shigeo Nagashima, ready […]

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. Introduction In his December 29, 2005 internet blog, John Thorn, the noted baseball author and SABR member, mentioned that the shotgun that killed Ty Cobb’s father in 1905 had been part […]

This article was originally published in “St. Louis’s Favorite Sport,” the 1992 SABR convention journal.   There was a time in baseball history when exhibition games meant something. There was a time when rival teams met each other on the field of play, and even though the exhibition contests did not figure in the regular […]

The St. Louis Cardinals were the most successful major-league team during America’s involvement in World War II. Manager Billy Southworth led the Redbirds to three consecutive pennants and two World Series championships from 1942 through 1944, and to a second-place finish in 1945. Although they benefited from a remarkable level of continuity, especially among their […]

Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners. (Photo by Dave Wilkie)   Since baseball’s introduction to Japan in 1872, the Japanese game has evolved from being primarily an amateur sport with large fan bases for high-school and collegiate competitions to its teams being ranked tops in the world.1 Throughout the last 150 years, there have been […]

John McGraw, seen with Philadelphia Phillies manager Pat Moran, led the New York Giants to a record-setting 26-game winning streak in 1916. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, BAIN COLLECTION)   On a dreary Friday afternoon, September 29, 1916, 43-year-old John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, stood in the third base coaching box at the Polo […]

Few individuals saw more Astros history that Alan Ashby. An Astro for 20 of their first 50 seasons, he spent eleven on the Astrodome carpet, coordinating one of the more challenging pitching staffs of his time. After one year as their bullpen coach Ashby moved to the broadcast booth for another eight, culminating with Houston’s […]

After a 90-loss, ninth-place season in 1966, the Boston Red Sox entered spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, with a new manager and a new outlook.Spring training 1967 was quite different from spring training 1966 for the Boston Red Sox. We can remember 1966 as the year when Earl Wilson was turned away from the […]

He was forever young on his baseball card—6-foot-2, with a square jaw, and a passing resemblance to Mickey Mantle. He was 24, and I was in the third grade. It was the summer of 1963. I never minded that he set a record for strikeouts in a single season that year, which is how many […]

Toronto hosted the 1979 winter meetings at the Sheraton Centre, marking the fourth time the winter meetings were held outside the United States (Montreal in 1930 and 1936 and Mexico City in 1967).1 The owners’ discussions, both formal and informal, focused on the game’s economics and the coming labor negotiations with the players — only […]

This article presents those little known but important men who helped to launch so many players from the sandlots of Los Angeles to baseball stardom.  Southern California has long been fertile ground for major-league talent. Walter Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Bob Lemon, Duke Snider, Don Drysdale, George Brett, Tony Gwynn, and Ozzie Smith all began their […]

Sandy Koufax shared his baseball insight on the NBC Game of the Week after retiring from the Dodgers. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   When Sandy Koufax retired on November 18, 1966, many people were surprised. Not Buzzie Bavasi–the Dodgers pitcher had told him over the phone the day before. Others within the organization probably had at least […]

San Francisco Giants Hall of Famer Willie Mays influenced the lives of two other Giants, Bobby and Barry Bonds, both of whom who had significant careers of their own. He was Bobby’s teammate with the Giants, while taking on the role of godfather for Barry as a youngster. When Barry later became a Giant, Mays continued […]

Although the last decade of the Steroid Era was associated with an increase in the number of players sustaining productive MLB careers beyond age 32 — including Barry Bonds, who set a single-season record with 73 home runs in 2001 at age 36 — it is not clear that PEDs were actually responsible for this […]

As the 1867 baseball season drew to a close, the sport was meeting and exceeding the goals that were anticipated by players and journalists alike. The anticipation that the “game of nines” would become the pastime of the United States had been predicted, and even perhaps prematurely proclaimed, for close to a decade. Now, with […]

Although Al Kaline obviously deserved the many accolades he received as an exceptional athlete with admirable personal characteristics, misconceptions have long existed regarding the severity of challenges he faced in his youth and during his 22-year professional baseball career. This article will address a litany of circumstances that he encountered and explain how he overcame […]

All baseball fans are familiar, if not from the movie, then from the grainy newsreel footage, with Lou Gehrig’s legendary speech at Yankee Stadium home plate on July 4, 1939. Yet that was not the first nor the last time a speech would have a dramatic impact at The House that Ruth Built. Baseball, football, […]