Search Results

Entering the 1958 season, only two major-league teams – the Detroit Tigers and the Boston Red Sox – had never employed a Black player. Controversy in each city guaranteed that the first player across the line would play under extra attention and pressure. The Tigers acted first, introducing their first Black player in June.1 The […]

The 1945 Negro League World Series was taking place in a postwar America. Japan had surrendered, World War II was over, and the famous “kiss” of a sailor and nurse in a celebratory Times Square sparkled on the cover of Life magazine. Yet old issues remained. “Jim Crow must go!” African American soldiers demanded, in […]

At the opening of the 1963 major-league season, the Cincinnati Reds projected pitcher Jim Maloney as the team’s number-four starter, behind Bob Purkey, Joey Jay, and Jim O’Toole.1 Purkey and Jay were 20-plus-game winners the previous year, while O’Toole won 16.2 For his part, the 22-year-old Maloney, a 6-foot-2, 190-pound right-hander, had gone 9-7 after […]

The New York Yankees were five-time World Series champions heading into the 1954 season. Nobody would argue, not even Yankees manager Casey Stengel, that New York had the firepower to keep hanging championship banners from the rafters at Yankee Stadium. What was the last team to win a pennant in the American League before the […]

The New York Giants were once again in their familiar position of first place in the National League. John McGraw’s bunch were a dynasty in the early 1920s, winning back-to-back World Series titles against their crosstown rival New York Yankees in 1921 and 1922. In 1923 they saw the Yankees finally have the upper hand […]

Monday, August 10, may well have been the most important day of the entire 1981 baseball season. This was the day that regular season play would resume after a two-month players strike had wiped out more than one-third of the schedule. Furthermore, in Philadelphia that night, Pete Rose would become the all-time National League hits […]

“The locals really were outclassed,” lamented the St. Louis Star about the Cardinals’ twin-bill loss to the Chicago Cubs.1 Following his teammates’ victory in the opener, rookie King Cole “had his speed and his drop broke almost perfectly,” per Chicago’s Inter Ocean, holding the hosts hitless in a game called after seven innings so that […]

Korean pitcher Dae-Sung Koo spent just 140 days in the majors, all with the New York Mets in 2005; this was his finest. The 35-year-old lefty struck out all three batters he faced that afternoon. What made the game memorable, though, was the batting and baserunning of “Mr. Koo” (as he was fondly known in […]

On August 4, 1991, a sellout crowd of 41,0591 packed into Comiskey Park to see the Chicago White Sox host the Baltimore Orioles. Chicago (58-45) had won eight straight games before losing the first two games of this series against Baltimore, and that 8-out-of-10 stretch had enabled them to climb into second place, three games […]

The Dodgers and Pirates broke off what New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young called their “weird affair”1 at just before midnight on June 24, 1950. Brooklyn led, 19-12. A report from the Associated Press boasted, “The crowd of 22,010 was treated to one of the wildest games in Ebbets Field history.”2 And it wasn’t […]

There is nothing quite like one’s first view of a big-league ballpark. From a distance you see the light standards rising high into the sky and as you get closer the rest of the building comes into focus. The car ride that Gordon Tillett took his grandson on in 1962 was to a relatively new […]

Fresco Thompson, the jester in Walter O’Malley’s court, ran baseball’s most productive scouting and player development factory during the 1950s and 1960s. With O’Malley providing the money, Thompson and his scouts providing the players, and vice president Buzzie Bavasi molding the roster, the Dodgers won eight pennants and four World Series between 1952 and 1966, […]

Sherry Smith was a laconic Georgian who narrowly lost a World Series game to the young Bambino, fashioned a long mound career despite missing a season as a doughboy during World War I, and later nabbed small-town scofflaws as efficiently as he had baserunners who’d strayed too far off the first sack. Sherrod Malone Smith […]

One of the most electrifying ballplayers of his generation secured his place in baseball history by following a simple rule: See the ball, hit the ball. Vladimir Guerrero was a force of nature. Watching Guerrero hit from the stands was one of the great pleasures a baseball fan can have on a beautiful summer day. […]

A strong keystone combination is considered essential for a good team. Before there was Whitaker and Trammell, before The Wizard and Tommy Herr, before Tinker and Evers (and Chance), there was Nicholson and Scheibeck. Who, you ask? In 1890, Parson Nicholson and Frank Scheibeck became just the third major league combo to start every game […]

Sim Bullas had a brief professional baseball career in the United States in his early 20s, the peak of which was a 13-game spell with the American Association’s Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884. By the late 1880s, it seemed that Bullas’s prospects for a return to pro ball were limited indeed. But while he did […]

While he was hardly a late-nineteenth-century pitching standout, left-hander Ledell Titcomb’s six-season major-league career was not without accomplishments. As a spot starter, he contributed 14 victories to the National League pennant-winning effort of the New York Giants in 1888. Two seasons later, Titcomb authored a no-hitter for Rochester in its only campaign as a big-league […]

Many baseball fans know about the 1894 Philadelphia Phillies team that featured four outfielders who each batted over .400. In fact, if you look at the Phillies’ lineup on Baseball-Reference, all of the starting eight batted over .300 and the team led the league, hitting .350. The lowest average for a position player with over 100 at […]

No one in the history of major-league baseball had a first appearance like that of hard-throwing left-handed pitcher Pete Richert. In his debut with the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 12, 1962, against the Cincinnati Reds at Dodger Stadium, Richert set a record by striking out the first six batters he faced. With the Dodgers […]

The day the Yankees won Game Two of the 1953 World Series, 17-year-old Frank Leja was in New York signing a contract that made the sports pages across the country. The second-youngest Yankee ever reportedly received a $100,000 bonus.1 But like many mid-1950s “bonus babies,” Leja was a victim of the revised “bonus rule” of […]

Perhaps no other sport offers redemption to a player more often, or more quickly, than baseball. It can be a dangerous motivator for a young ballplayer. This is especially true for one who has been given his first opportunity to play every day. Or for a player who has been lauded for his skill on […]

Zack Wheat remains the Dodgers all-time franchise leader in hits, doubles, triples, and total bases. Though he threw right-handed, Wheat was a natural left-handed hitter who corkscrewed his spikes into the dirt with a wiggle that became his trademark. Unlike most Deadball Era hitters, he held his hands way down by the knob of the […]

To his contemporaries, he was a hard-nosed player, a throwback to earlier days, when players like Ty Cobb played the game as if their lives depended on it. Opponents labeled him “hard-headed” and “red-nosed.” Latinos had their own title for him: El Divino Loco or the Divine Madman. But it was Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster Bob […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2022 as part of SABR’s Baseball and the Supreme Court Project. Trading cards have been produced depicting nearly every conceivable subject and judges are no exception. In 1888 W. Duke, Sons & Co. (at one time the largest manufacturer of cigarettes in the United States) issued a […]