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Twelve managers have won more games than Bill McKechnie. None has won more respect. Deacon Bill McKechnie was the first to lead three different teams to the World Series and the first to win championships with two different teams. In 25 seasons as a manager, between 1915 and 1946, he earned respect as a baseball […]

In the days before players routinely wore gloves, the ability of a catcher to handle a fast pitcher or one with big curves was valued far more than his hitting. Bart Cantz was such a man. During three seasons in the majors (1888-90), Cantz finished with a batting average of just .157 with five extra-base […]

Born in Barre, Vermont, of an immigrant father who worked in the granite industry. Died in Barre, Vermont, 70 years later. Hearing those bare facts, you might think Walt Lanfranconi’s story is that of the quintessential Vermonter, living his life out in obscurity in the town where he was born and raised. Walt Lanfranconi answers […]

The Cincinnati general manager had seen enough. Sitting at home on April 24, 1960, Gabe Paul watched on TV as his club’s reliever coughed up a lead in the first game of a doubleheader in Philadelphia. Worse was the manner in which it was done: an eighth-inning grand slam to light-hitting Phillies catcher Jimmie Coker. […]

Nineteen forty-five was the happiest year in American history. The end of World War II brought millions of Johnnies and Joans marching home. Families were reunited. The high barely lasted past Christmas. Nineteen forty-six brought inflation, store shelves bare of many basic consumer goods, and a severe housing shortage. The result was an unprecedented epidemic […]

Perhaps the greatest example of the old baseball cliché “good field, no hit,” Raymond Francis Oyler was the regular shortstop for two late-1960s Detroit Tigers teams, including the world champion 1968 squad, as well as the original Seattle Pilots the following season. Ray compiled a sub-”Mendoza line” .175 career batting average—the lowest of any player […]

“If we had one game to win, we wanted Leon to pitch.” — Monte Irvin   So much of Leon Day’s story is caught up in his last years and his long wait for the Hall of Fame call. For Day, who spent a lifetime exceeding at his professional calling, punching his card at every […]

Thomas Turner, a Chicago American Giants first baseman, heard with mixed emotions the news about Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. He appreciated this momentous breakthrough, but he did not allow the report to draw his attention away from the game underway that day in the […]

Steve Barr pitched parts of 24 games in the major leagues. Though he was unable to carve out a longer career, he was nonetheless able to achieve more at this game than most of the rest of us. Born in St. Louis on September 8, 1951, Barr, a left-handed pitcher, was signed fresh out of Carson […]

 Clarence Waldo Blethen was an “eternal busher” who spent 19 years pitching in the minor leagues, well into his 40s but never higher than Class A baseball, highlighted by two very brief stints in the majors – five games for the 1923 Boston Red Sox and two appearances for Brooklyn in 1929. He was a […]

It is largely forgotten that Larry Jansen was the winning pitcher when Bobby Thomson hit his “Shot Heard Round the World” to dramatically win the 1951 pennant in the Polo Grounds. Indeed, without Jansen, it is highly unlikely that the Giants would have even been in the playoff against the Brooklyn Dodgers. With 23 victories […]

In 1972 Hank Morgenweck achieved a long-held dream—a full-time umpiring job in the major leagues. Four seasons later, in bitter and disputed circumstances, he lost it. An experienced minor-league ump with a National League playoff game on his résumé, Morgenweck was named to the American League’s umpiring staff in spring 1972. But his contract was […]

George Weiss presided over the greatest sustained run of excellence in baseball history. Under Weiss’s leadership, from 1948 through 1960, the New York Yankees won ten pennants and seven World Series. After a slip to third place in 1959 Weiss retooled his squad and returned to the top the following season. For this accomplishment The […]

“[He] is what every boy wants to become and every mother dreams their daughter will bring home,” gushed sportswriter Phil Musick. “Tall, blond, handsome. Bright, articulate and personable. … He is Everyman’s vision of himself if he had been a little stronger, taller, handsomer, luckier, whatever.”1 Add to that list big-league pitcher and surgeon, too. […]

Over the course of three decades in the early 20th century, Robert Joseph Connery was a major-league scout and minor-league player, manager, and owner. He was the closest friend of Hall of Fame manager Miller Huggins, and was Huggins’s scout with both the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees. Best known as the […]

Max Nichols knelt in an on-deck circle beside Jackie Robinson, had his picture taken with Pee Wee Reese, and watched Satchel Paige throw strikes over a matchbook — and all that by the age of 15. As a sportswriter he would meet hundreds of players, write thousands of columns about them, cast the worst vote […]

“He was a beautiful person. Yes he was. Cool Papa Bell. He was a lovable person. And still is. And always has been. I love him. My goodness, that’s one beautiful man.” – Dave Barnhill (hard-throwing ace pitcher and all-star of the New York Cubans)1 “He had time for everybody. Never hurried. Signed autographs, talked […]

Infielder Syd O’Brien was one of three brothers, all of whom signed to play baseball for the Boston Red Sox. Syd was the first to sign, and the only one of the three to make it to the big leagues. His mother helped land three men on the moon. Syd was born in Compton, California, […]

Decades before Michael Jordan stepped away from the National Basketball Association to play minor league baseball, another former first-round draft pick made a similar decision. Dick Ricketts was a two-sport athlete in high school and college, excelling at baseball and basketball. Taken number one overall in the 1955 NBA draft, Ricketts spent three seasons in […]

Several themes were evident for All-Star games played in the 1960s. First was the National League’s crushing superiority during the midsummer classics. Of the 13 games played (two games were played from 1960 through 1962) the National League took 11; the American League won only once (the second game in 1962 was a tie). Toward […]

The East-West All-Star Game was the highlight of the Negro Leagues’ season, bigger even than the Negro World Series. Begun in 1933 at the Chicago White Sox’ Comiskey Park, in the same year as the All-Star Game in the then-segregated White major leagues, the Black game regularly outdrew its counterpart during World War II, when […]

Mel Ott began the 1946 season, the 21st of his career with the New York Giants, with 510 lifetime home runs, more than anyone else in National League history. He had led or tied for the NL lead in home runs six times, most recently in 1942, and hit 20 or more home runs 15 […]

On the morning of July 15, 1887, the New York Herald boldly titled one of its front-page stories, “THE COLOR LINE.” The story under the headline, from New Orleans, involved a claim by former Union Army “negro soldiers” that they were being denied admission into the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic, […]

Here are the full SABR Defensive Index™ rankings, through games of August 17, 2014. The SABR Defensive Index draws on and aggregates two types of existing defensive metrics: those derived from batted ball location-based data and those collected from play-by-play accounts. The three metrics representing batted ball data include Defensive Runs Saved from Baseball Info […]