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He grew up in the Henry Clay Village area of Wilmington, Delaware, on Brandywine Creek, near the Experimental Station of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours Company, manufacturer of dynamite, gunpowder, and other explosives. The products blew up occasionally, so the area may not have been a pleasant residential community. As a youngster he ran […]

Like a lot of young players who first came to professional baseball in the very early 1940s, catcher Len Okrie may have wondered if he’d ever truly have the opportunity to play, given the Second World War. He came from a baseball family. His father, Frank Okrie, was a left-handed pitcher who appeared in 21 […]

In the autumn of 1956, slightly more than three years after his minor league debut helped break the color barrier in the Piedmont League, Charlie Peete’s life seemed full of promise. He had won the American Association batting crown for the just-completed season, hitting .350 for Omaha. Beyond that, his parent club, the St. Louis […]

John Schuerholz spent 26 seasons as a big-league GM, winning 16 division titles, six pennants, and two World Series. In Kansas City he oversaw that franchise’s first World Series. After moving to Atlanta, he took over a team that had lost more than 90 games four consecutive years and won the next 14 division titles […]

Dick Stuart was fun – as long as you didn’t have to be on the field with him. He ran the bases head down and looking anywhere except at the third-base coach or the outfield or a teammate who might be able to tell him something, often sending his team out of the inning. As […]

One of the more colorful aspects of baseball history is the wide, imaginative variety of nicknames assigned to the players by their teammates and the media. Some of the sobriquets lend an air of strength and might to the recipients that their birth names might otherwise not. Edwin Snider might not have struck fear in […]

“If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I’d still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better. He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw and […]

It’s a common tale. A major-league prospect falters after being celebrated as a highly significant addition to the team. So goes the story of Albert LaVerne “Bunny” Fabrique, who played in 27 games for the Brooklyn Robins in 1916-1917 and enjoyed a reported, though improbable, familial lineage to King Louis XVI.1 In 1917 spring training […]

Editor’s note: This article was selected as a winner of the 2012 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award.   In the early 1880s prosperous tobacco merchant John B. Day re-established the national pastime in New York – operating teams in both major-league circuits with great success. In 1884 Day’s New York Metropolitans were American Association pennant winners […]

Steve Balboni played for the New York Yankees and the Kansas City Royals before he bookended brief stints with the Seattle Mariners and the Texas Rangers around a second tour with the Yankees. He owns four World Series rings, one as a player with the Royals and three as an advance scout with the San […]

Branch Rickey was “a man of strange complexities, not to mention downright contradictions,” wrote the New York Times’ John Drebinger. The great decision to break baseball’s policy of excluding blacks, for which he is justly praised, has, in recent decades, tended to overwhelm the highly negative image he had earned before that decision. He went […]

“One day you’re skipping school to watch the Giants play in the ’62 Series against the Yankees. … (Two years later), you’re pitching against Mickey Mantle.” — Wally Bunker1 The youngest athlete to garner Most Valuable Player consideration, in 1964 Wally Bunker tied the American League record for most wins by a rookie. Through 2015 […]

With a good Irish name like Paddy and a commonplace surname like Smith, it turns out that this major leaguer’s father was Italian. Paddy’s father, Angelo Amato, and his brother, Dominic Amato, moved to the United States from Monte San Giacomo near Salerno, Italy. They married the Houlihan sisters from Kingston, New York, whose parents […]

David LeFevre, who once tried to buy the Cleveland Indians, said it: “I want to stand next to Gabe Paul when they drop the atomic bomb.”1 Because Paul was a survivor. In his first 20 years as a major league general manager, he never won a pennant and only once came close. Then he sold […]

“You can’t win ’em all.” It’s said with a shrug, a human acknowledgement that nobody goes undefeated, that nobody is perfect, that even if you do everything possible sometimes you will lose. The origin of this phrase could be Connie Mack after the 1916 Philadelphia A’s went 36-117. But it could also be from Cliff […]

“Pitching is called 70 per cent of baseball.”1 The Pittsburgh Pirates knocked 20 hits off 70 percent of the Brooklyn pitching staff, beating the Dodgers in an old-fashioned slugfest, 16-11, before 20,196 fans during a Sunday afternoon tilt at Ebbets Field. Ralph Kiner carried his team to victory, hitting for the and driving in eight […]

Gene Baker was not, as is sometimes reported, the first Black manager in minor-league baseball. But it was still a significant step forward when the 36-year-old took the reins of the Batavia (New York) Pirates of the Class D New York-Penn League on the night of June 19, 1961. There’s no firm record of a […]

The Homestead Grays were a dynasty in Negro League baseball in the 1940s. They had won back-to-back world championships in 1943-1944 and seven Negro National League pennants in eight years. Their roster was full of a who’s who of Negro League stars, several of whom would one day be recognized for their greatness in the […]

Bunker Hill Day, commemorating the Revolutionary War battle, arrived in Boston on Monday, June 18, 1894. For those in search of sporting entertainment as the calendar crept toward the first day of summer, two National League contenders would play a morning-afternoon doubleheader at the Congress Street Grounds. The host Boston Beaneaters, winners of the previous […]

“He’s been hotter than the weather, and in the Midwest, that’s torrid.” Les Biederman of the Pittsburgh Press, discussing Ernie Banks who during the final four games of a five-game series between the Cubs and Pirates went 11-for-19 with five home runs and 13 RBIs.1 Ernie Banks, in his second full season with the Chicago […]

In the first week of August 1974, Americans could be forgiven for watching the events of the day unfold through their fingers. The Watergate scandal was at the top of the news, and many wondered how long President Richard Nixon would remain in office. On Monday, August 5, a bomb exploded in a public locker […]

As May turned to June the Pittsburgh Pirates found themselves sitting in an unremarkable fourth place in the National League East. Their current five-game win streak had improved their record to 23-21 but as recently as May 20 they had a losing record and had been as far as nine games behind the division-leading Montreal […]

The race to lead the league in triples is not one that gets a lot of attention from the media. For Lance Johnson, who had led the American League in triples for four straight years (1991-1994), the desire to win the title again was real. In the strike-shortened season of 1995, however, Johnson found himself […]

In the summer of 1951, the New York Giants under manager Leo Durocher began to employ an elaborate sign-stealing scheme. The Giants needed to overcome a 13.5-game deficit to the Brooklyn Dodgers to set up a historic playoff. The question is not whether the Giants stole signs, but what effect the sign-stealing had on the […]