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My first exposure to International League baseball came in Baltimore in 1944 when I was only 7 years old. It was a pennant year for Baltimore. And my dad (early in the season) took me out to old Oriole Park to see the beloved Birds. The hated Syracuse Chiefs provided the opposition in this my […]

A true Ottawa baseball legend, Frank Shaughnessy’s impact on the Senators is undeniable. (Courtesy of Honora Shaughnessy)   In a multisport career that spanned more than half a century, he was a player, a coach, a manager, an owner, and an executive. And with four pennants in four years at the helm of the Canadian […]

Roomie – that’s Monte Irvin. He and I room together when the ball club’s on the road. Many’s the time I’ve hollered for him to get me out of what I’m in. Like the time we were posing for the team picture and a guy came up to me and said “Willie, I’m Jumble from […]

The 13-year-old third baseman from Colorado, who identified his race as Hispanic American, didn’t look far from home when he named his favorite player, who also happened to be his favorite athlete and his hero: Colorado Rockies’ Carlos Gonzalez. A 14-year-old Minnesotan, who proclaimed his primary position on his select baseball squad as third base, […]

When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem during a 2016 preseason game to protest police violence against black people in America, all hell broke loose. Voices of praise and condemnation rained down. Passion often trumped reason. The “conversation” remains heated, while complicated criminal justice problems remain unsolved. Is […]

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. There are ways of recognizing the best pitched games of starting hurlers — the record books list the no-hit games and in a special category even the perfect games where no […]

It looks like a misprint on the page. In the league stats for the 1952 Class-D Georgia-Florida League, under home runs, for Cordele it says “1.” Not 101, not 51, not even 21. Just 1. It isn’t a misprint. The Cordele Athletics, a farm team of the Philadelphia A’s, hit exactly one home run in […]

Seventy-three home runs in a single season would have been considered absurd only a few years ago, yet Barry Bonds accomplished this astounding feat in 2001. Bonds’ record-breaking season, eclipsing the mark of 70 set by Mark McGwire only four years earlier raises the question of which ballplayers truly own the greatest single-season home run performances […]

Adrian C. Anson, who rose to national prominence as captain of the Chicago White Stockings, was the first of what is now a long list of baseball players who succumbed to the lure of the footlights. Anson made his theatrical debut in 1895 in a production called A Runaway Colt. Arguably the most famous baseball […]

The Ball It all started with a baseball. My wife Marilee’s otherwise wonderful family are not big baseball fans. With the exception of my father-in-law Robert Belliveau’s golf club and ball design expertise (he was an innovative design engineer with Spalding), sports are not typically the topic of conversation at family gatherings. Marilee’s late grandmother […]

It is highly unlikely that the Philadelphia Phillies would have won the 1950 National League Pennant without reliever Jim Konstanty, who was so dominant that he was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player. And so it is worthwhile to consider whether Konstanty would have won the MVP and had the year he had without […]

The war for the pennant The 1897 Beaneaters opened spring training in Macon, Georgia, with optimism that may have been out of proportion to their 74-47 fourth-place finish, 17 games behind the champion Baltimore Orioles, a year earlier. The core of the team was familiar: Tommy Tucker, Bobby Lowe, Herman Long, and Jimmy Collins across […]

Babe Ruth famously stumbled on it. Outfielders regularly cursed it. Fans sat on it. And Houston Astros executive Tal Smith mimicked it. That compilation is only part of the legacy of the Crosley Field terrace, the infamous slope that extended from the left-field wall toward the infield. The terrace also extended into center and right […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1985.   “It is always wrong to consider that something which begins in a small way cannot rapidly become important.” — Plutarch On June 5, 1942, Doreston Luke Carmen Jr. became the thin end of a very large wedge. That […]

Introduction The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (minor leagues) and the National and American Leagues held their annual winter meetings one week apart in December 1929. Though there were different points of contention for both the minors and majors, some issues were relevant to all the organizations and leagues. The draft, the signing of […]

According to the official averages reported in the November 28, 1912, issue of The Sporting News, Heinie Zimmerman won the 1912 National League batting championship with a .372 average and the home run title with 14.1 Five weeks later, The Sporting News reported that—according to the research of baseball writer Ernie Lanigan—Zimmerman also had the […]

  Chocolatier William Klein Sr. of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, had a problem. The year was 1918. Soldiers were returning from the war in Europe. Klein was looking to expand to a national market for his “Lunch Bar,” a three-cent candy bar that was in direct competition with the chocolate bars produced by Milton Hershey at his […]

The problem of measuring batting skill is as old as baseball itself. The earliest statisticians were content to count the hits and runs scored by each batter, but the unfairness of this simple method to the stars of weak teams soon prompted invention of the batting average. Since then statistics have proliferated to the point […]

Fort Hood’s Student Regiment Team, from the September 23, 1943 issue of The Hood Panther. (Courtesy of tankdestroyer.net)    When searching “Camp Hood Baseball,” three words come up often: Jackie, Robinson, and court-martial. Numerous articles have been written about Robinson’s time at Camp Hood—many about his August 1944 court-martial after refusing to move to the […]

Leo Durocher, who is said to have said “nice guys finish last”—also the title of his autobiography—plausibly could have asked, “who said cheaters never prosper?” I refer, of course, to the revelation by Joshua Prager—first in a 2001 Wall Street Journal article and then his book, The Echoing Green—that in 1951 the New York Giants […]

Introduction The annual baseball winter meetings of 1928 took place in three cities. The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (the minors) went north for its 27th annual convention, filling the King Edward Hotel in Toronto from December 5 to 7. The chief topic of conversation was a continuation of 1927’s primary sticking point, the […]

Background The 1971 baseball Winter Meetings took place in Phoenix, Arizona, from Saturday, November 27, through Friday, December 3. As was the custom, the National Association meetings took up the first few days, while the major-league meetings got going on Wednesday. Rule 5 Draft In the annual major-league draft, the big-league clubs claimed 13 players […]

And there used to be a ballpark Where the field was warm and green And the people played their crazy game With a joy I’d never seen And the air was such a wonder From the hot dogs and the beer Yes, there used to be a ballpark, right here.1   Yes, there used to […]

INTRODUCTION Pitchers are a breed apart. On average, they are taller and heavier than most players; contrary to their fielding brethren, they do not play every day; even the most resilient of relievers have to sit out half of their team’s games or risk burning out their arms, and most starters will work only every […]