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Baseball fans everywhere can picture the scene. In 1945, the Cleveland Buckeyes stood in first place after the first half of the season with fans hoping that the momentum would continue in the second half. Then their leading hitter—Lloyd “Ducky” Davenport who was batting .264—left the team to play in Mexico. Just the fans’ rotten […]

Roger McDowell kept his locker stocked with comedy props, costumes, and fireworks, blew bubbles while he pitched, played the notorious “Second Spitter” on Seinfeld and was known to set teammates’ shoes on fire. But he knew a little about pitching too. McDowell racked up 70 wins and 159 saves pitching almost exclusively in relief over […]

In a city fueled by flash, Wes Parker was anything but. A child of southern California privilege, Parker grew up in Brentwood with a private school education, material needs met, and natural athletic ability in several sports besides baseball. Money, though it bestowed abundant opportunity, did not generate airs, snobbery, or a feeling of entitlement […]

The Brooklyn Dodgers had great teams in the immediate post-war years, teams that would win pennants or fight for them until the last day of the season (and sometimes beyond). No team can be successful, though, without a significant presence behind the plate. In the early part of the 1946 season, the Dodgers were struggling […]

Steady-hitting James Henry “Jim” Delsing, known as a fleet outfielder and a first-class person, lived his baseball dream through almost two decades, the turbulent Forties and the prosperous Fifties. During that time he adjusted to the many highs and lows of a 10-year major league career. A lefthanded batter who threw righthanded, Delsing experienced his […]

Benigno Ayala lives up to his given name, which means “kind” or “friendly.” Following a productive career as a role player, he has bestowed greater gifts on the baseball world, through his work with the Baseball Assistance Team (BAT). Quite a few of his fellow Puerto Rican pros have fallen on hard times since they […]

It was a dreary, overcast day in Brooklyn on April 15, 1954. The visiting Pirates were at Ebbets Field to face the Dodgers. The home team had jumped out to a 7-1 lead courtesy of home runs by Roy Campanella, Jim Gilliam and Jackie Robinson. Tex Ricard, the Dodger PA announcer announced a pitching change […]

Bobby Valentine played in the majors for 10 years. After his playing career, he became one of the most colorful managers in baseball during the last decade of the 20th century. Valentine was always candid and outspoken throughout his managerial career. Robert James Valentine was born on May 13, 1950, in Stamford, Connecticut. His parents […]

Looking at Ken Silvestri’s major-league statistics could leave the impression his baseball career was marginal at best. He played in 102 games in eight seasons spread over 13 years, hit five home runs, and had a .217 batting average. However, by the time he died at 75, in 1992, he had spent more than half […]

John “Fats” Dantonio is representative of many ballplayers whose promotion to the big leagues was facilitated by the exit of major-league players called into military service during World War II. He was an average minor-league player before the war years, 25 years old with only four professional seasons under his belt when he first appeared […]

Babe Ruth was not the first batter Paul Hopkins faced in his major league debut on September 29, 1927, at Yankee Stadium. Pitching for the Washington Senators, Hopkins did serve up Ruth’s 59th home run, which tied a record Ruth set in 1921. Ruth’s second blast of the game was a grand slam on a […]

The young prospect was having a hard time adjusting to the backstop position in the major leagues. Offensively, he was a threat from the beginning of his career.   He was a classic bad-ball hitter who could get wood on the ball no matter where the pitch was: high, low, outside.   He hit them […]

“As a reliever, you’ve got to have amnesia. Not only with the bad days, but with the good days. You may get them out one, two, three today, but you’ve got to forget about it immediately, because that may not happen tomorrow.” — Roberto Hernandez, 20071 “(In the 1989 Instructional League), Roberto (Hernandez) and (pitching […]

A longtime utility infielder who played a dozen years for three National League teams, Mike Mordecai made more appearances for the Montreal Expos than for any other club, but had his most memorable moments with key postseason hits that helped the Atlanta Braves and the Florida Marlins win World Series titles. An Alabama native who […]

Dick Williams’s intense competitiveness and versatility earned him 13 years as a major league utility player. He parlayed those strengths into one of baseball’s most successful managerial careers, though not one of the winningest, and the record suggests that he was probably one of the two finest managerial turnaround artists1 between Joe McCarthy and Lou […]

Eccentric behavior, particularly when it came to fast cars, a disdain for off-season training, and bad luck with injuries limited Fred Carisch to parts of eight major-league seasons as a backup catcher in the early 20th century. However, he remained in the game for more than two decades – indeed, his first and last games […]

For a brief time in the summer of 1961, Ken Hunt was mentioned in the same sentence with Sandy Koufax as the top two young pitchers in the National League. The 1961 Cincinnati Reds were expected to finish no higher than sixth in the eight-team National League.1 However, on the last day of June, Cincinnati […]

Born on October 17, 1859, in Hoagland, Ohio, a small town about 53 miles east of Cincinnati, William Ewing was the uncle of twentieth-century major league pitcher Bob Ewing and the older brother of major league pitcher John Ewing, with whom he formed a formidable battery for two years (1890-91) before John left the game […]

With its long winters and cold, rainy springs, New England has never been a hotbed for scouts hunting baseball talent. There have, however, been ballplayers through the years who have overcome these weather woes to shine brightly enough that they can’t be ignored. Ray Martin was one such prospect — a pitcher so strong he […]

In the early 1970s, lefty pitcher Bob O’Brien made an unlikely and mercurial rise from unheralded draft selection to big-leaguer. His stay in professional baseball was brief, but along the way he became the subject of one of Tommy Lasorda’s greatest motivational stories. Robert Allen O’Brien was born on April 23, 1949, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, […]

Glenn Beckert had a good-but-not-great career for the good-but-not-great Chicago Cubs teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those teams starred a quartet of baseball immortals in Ernie Banks, Ferguson Jenkins, Ron Santo, and Billy Williams. Steadily and sometimes spectacularly manning the keystone sack and batting second, Beckert made four All-Star teams, received MVP […]

The telegram was brash and a bit disrespectful. Simply stated, it read “DEAR MOOSE: TOLD YOU SO. JOE PEP.”1 The New York Yankees needed pitching help—specifically a boost to their rotation—following the 1962 season. They set their sights on Stan Williams, a right-handed twirler for the Los Angeles Dodgers who had won 14, 15, and […]

At the Pirates’ minor-league pitching camp in 1970, Harding Peterson, the team’s minor-league director, told two pitching prospects to abandon their side-arm pitching delivery. Fortunately neither listened, as each would become a Pirate World Series hero, with Bruce Kison starring in 1971 and Kent Tekulve in 1979 with the “We Are Family” champs. During offseason […]

The first regular-season game at Jacobs Field was played on April 4, 1994. Through seven innings the Indians were down 2-0, and it looked as though the storyline would center on Randy Johnson’s dominant pitching performance. The Indians finally got to the lanky southpaw in the bottom of the eighth, when Manny Ramirez doubled to […]