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A group of boys hung over their dorm’s balcony railing, hardly believing that their hero was playing catch in the courtyard below with some of their schoolmates. The tall, rangy man throwing the ball to some of the older students was barely in his twenties, moving with the strong but casual grace common to athletes.1 […]

Fred Girard Haney touched all the bases in a 65-year baseball career that led him from athletic stardom in high school to the general manager’s office of the Los Angeles Angels.

Before the first game of the 1911 World Series, legendary managers John McGraw (left) of the New York Giants and Connie Mack (right) of the Philadelphia Athletics are pictured shaking hands. Also shown are the pitching aces of the two teams, Hall of Famers Christy Mathewson (left) of the Giants and Charles Albert Bender (right) […]

  With Connie Mack’s election as president of the Athletics in January 1937, the Mack family now controlled all of the senior leadership positions in the club’s front office. From left: Earle, Connie, and Roy Mack in 1937. (Courtesy of Robert D. Warrington)   The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1954. In […]

1946 In 1946, 22 major leaguers—11 of whom were under contract to either the New York Giants or the Brooklyn Dodgers—bolted to Mexico in search of greener (baseball) fields.1 This article looks at the fate and fortunes of eight members from the 1945 New York Giants who left their New York counterparts to suit up […]

  The 2014 Little League World Series left baseball fans everywhere awestruck. With her 70-mph fastball, a 13-year-old girl by the name of Mo’ne Davis pitched a complete-game shutout to lead her team, the Taney Dragons, to a 4-0 victory. In doing so, she was the first girl ever to pitch a winning game in […]

By 1951 the Browns were decidedly moribund. They had been last in the American League in attendance every year since 1946 and the usual question one asked before the start of the season was whether they might finish in seventh or eighth place. Underfinanced, Charles and William DeWitt wanted out of what they saw as […]

  Doug Glanville in his new baseball memoir notes that many players, “rewarded with huge contracts because of their offensive prowess, . . . have developed a kind of attention deficit disorder when it comes to defense. . . . If you put up tremendous offensive numbers year after year, the game will cut you […]

On May 7, 1929, the American League announced it had abolished the “League Award,” the most valuable player honor that it had awarded annually since 1922, ostensibly because “it tended to create ill-feeling among the players.”1 The National League followed suit on June 8, eliminating its League Award, which had been given annually since 1924, […]

Although the arrival of Major League Baseball in Southern California is usually dated to 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, big league clubs had roots in the area going back several decades. The Chicago Cubs began training in L.A. in the spring of 1903, and the White Sox played an exhibition game […]

Beginning in 1947 and ending in 1965, Major League Baseball instituted what became known as the “Bonus Rule.” Major league owners, many slow to react to changes in the landscape of the game, were coming to the realization that in order to build a winning team, it was necessary to build a strong farm system. […]

Current defensive statistics are far less meaningful than batting or fielding  statistics,  mostly because  the  correct  information  is  not  collected. Statistics that do exist tend either to be not revealing or incredibly complex. I propose the collection of a single new piece of information that I think might change popular understandings of defense and allow […]

This paper examines competitive balance in the free agent era by comparing the old reserve clause system versus the modern collectively bargained system. Baseball’s reserve system began modestly on September 29, 1879, when the National League owners introduced a new rule that would eventually be incorporated into every player contract and would allow each franchise […]

This article was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s February 2024 newsletter.   Walter East is hardly the sole Deadball Era career minor leaguer to have led an interesting and eventful life. But more than a century later, he may well be the only one to have his own Wikipedia page. Regrettably for East, the […]

Amidst the current upsurge of social activism among professional athletes, it is worth recalling the enormous contribution of Jim Bouton, one of the most politically outspoken sports figures in American history. Among professional team sports, baseball may be the most conservative and tradition-bound, but throughout its history, rebels and mavericks have emerged to challenge the […]

South Florida is notoriously hot in the summer, but conditions heated up another notch in 1952 when the Miami Sun Sox and the Miami Beach Flamingos fought it out in one of the great pennant races of minor league baseball. The 1952 dash for the pennant involved two colorful managers: the contentious Johnny “Pepper” Martin […]

Michael Kelley played only briefly in one major league season. Despite this lack of major league success he was a highly respected minor league player and manager. However, he found himself in extremely hot water with Organized Baseball for three years, starting in 1905. From being a part of a sham sale of the St. […]

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 […]