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In Game Four of the 1932 World Series — the last major league game of his 14-year career — he struck out Babe Ruth two consecutive times. A decade earlier, he won 35 games in one (very long) minor league season. Later a tobacco farmer and the best player to ever hail from Wendell, North […]

Which New York Yankees player had the highest batting average in 1964? Mickey Mantle hit .303 and Elston Howard .313 – but nobody topped Elvio Jiménez’s .333 mark. “Look it up,” he said.1 Despite batting .309 over 13 seasons in the minors, however, Jiménez appeared in just one major-league game, going 2-for-6. Following a 17-year […]

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 […]

Suggest today to Costen Shockley that judging by the newspaper headlines of 50 years ago he must have been quite a high-school baseball player, and he replies with a prideful chuckle that conveys barely a trace of conceit, “Yeah, I was pretty good.” Indeed he must have been. After dominating on the baseball diamond for […]

A slick fielder in the days before gloves, Ed Somerville was the top defensive second basemen in the inaugural season of the National League of 1876. A year later his death in Canada marked the first passing of a National League ballplayer. Edward G. Somerville was born in Philadelphia on March 1, 1853, as the […]

Amiable but tough-minded, Frank Miller was a World War I-era pitcher who valued his own worth. At the height of his career, the hard-throwing right-hander sat out two full seasons when the Pittsburgh Pirates would not accede to his salary demands. Even a visit to the pitcher’s dairy farm in Michigan by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain […]

Earl Robinson was a two-sport star at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1950s, leading the Golden Bears to the College World Series and finishing his basketball career among the school’s all-time leading scorers. After becoming the first African American to receive a bonus contract, he spent parts of four seasons between 1958 and […]

George Caster was a “gay and delightful fellow who went laughing through the summers, doing what was asked of him as well as he could.”1 He was the ace and backbone of the Philadelphia Athletics pitching staff in 1937 and 1938 despite losing 19 and 20 games respectively in the two seasons. He tossed 513 […]

Frank Thomas played during an era when team owners looked upon their players as chattels. By their standards, Frank Joseph Thomas was considered a rebel. Much of his career was spent bickering with management over his worth to them. In his early career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Thomas’s adversary in such battles was the man […]

Second-generation big-leaguer David Segui1 debuted in 1990 and batted .291 over all or parts of 15 seasons. A switch-hitter with moderate power, he started and ended his career with the Baltimore Orioles around stints with six other teams. Segui was briefly the majors’ all-time fielding percentage leader among first basemen with at least 1,000 appearances […]

When you ask people to name Blue Jays starting pitchers of the 1980s and ’90s, they might answer with Jack Morris, Dave Stieb, Roger Clemens, and David Cone. Big arms accompanied by prominent personalities, pitchers who threw hard and had secondary wipeout pitches. Pitchers who were expressive on the mound, often showed emotion and, in […]

At the end of the 1972 season, rookie pitcher Steve Lawson’s stat line looked very promising. The Texas Rangers’ left-hander pitched 16 innings in 13 games, struck out 13, and had an ERA of 2.81. Not bad for a 21-year-old on a last-place team. Unfortunately, fate didn’t smile on Lawson and those numbers would remain […]

“A little more experience is all you need.”1 So wrote Brooklyn Dodgers manager Wilbert Robinson to Oscar Roettger of the Double-A St. Paul Saints (American Association) before the 1927 season. It didn’t quite happen — Roettger played in five games for Uncle Robbie’s squad and 37 games in the major leagues over four seasons. A substantial minor-league […]

Tucked in the northwest corner of Rhode Island, just 10 miles from both Massachusetts and Connecticut, is the village of Chepachet, where Phillips Steere Paine was born on June 8, 1930. When Paine was a teenager in the 1940s Chepachet didn’t have a high school, so each school day Paine traveled five miles north to […]

Going into 2005, the Florida Marlins began with high expectations, both internally and in the national media. Team President David Samson boldly predicted a franchise-record 93 wins, and one national magazine pegged the Marlins to win the World Series.1 Optimism was not unwarranted, as the core of the 2003 World Series champion Marlins team remained […]

In 2007, the Washington Nationals and Florida Marlins could only be considered “contenders” in the sense that they were contending for last and next-to-last place in the NL East Division. However, those few hardy fans among the original 19,278 who remained to the end of this game were treated to a memorable ending. Rookie Matt […]

Even though they were making their first postseason appearance in more than a decade, the New York Mets were ready for the pressure of Game One of their National League Division Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Four must-win games over the previous four days had prepared them for the postseason. “Since we’ve been through it […]

Stretched out across a seat near the rear of his minor-league team’s bus, Woody Crowson hoped to relax on the ride back home after he watched his Greensboro Patriots teammates drop a tough Class C Carolina League game to the last-place Martinsville Athletics on August 13, 1947. It had been over two years since Crowson […]

“The Expos exploded in startling fashion,” wrote Ian MacDonald in the Montreal Gazette.1 Trailing 5-1, the Montreal Expos put together the greatest two-inning outburst in teamhistory, scoring 15 runs and sending 21 batters to the plate in the seventh and eighth innings to crush the Cincinnati Reds, 16-6. “I’ve never been in a game where […]

There were plenty of storylines at the onset of the 2016 American League Division series between Cleveland and Boston. John Farrell led the Red Sox to their third world championship of the twenty-first century in 2013, his first season at the helm of the Red Sox. But since then, the Red Sox had finished in […]

The warning signs about Lou Gehrig had been accumulating all spring of 1939: The New York Yankees’ venerable iron man suddenly wasn’t what he used to be. Gehrig wasn’t necessarily ancient. He was still just 35 years old — past retirement age for ordinary ballplayers, but still comfortably within career range for all-time greats, and […]

Hall of Fame talent sometimes takes time to develop. Consider the case of Larry Walker: Before he was a homer-mashing offensive force with the Montreal Expos, Colorado Rockies, and St. Louis Cardinals, he was an 18-year-old rookie who hit .223 in 62 games with the 1985 Utica Blue Sox of the short-season Class A New […]

On a clear, 71-degree October night in the hills above downtown Los Angeles, the Atlanta Braves, one loss from postseason elimination but also one win from forcing a winner-take-all game on their home field, lined up to face the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game Four of the 2013 National League Division Series. The Dodgers’ manager, […]

“His beautiful swing never varies,” raved Chicago Cubs beat reporter Edgar Munzel about Billy Williams. “[It’s] a marvel of repetitive action. And it doesn’t matter who the pitcher [is].1 In the midst of a torrid streak in 1972, the most productive season of Williams’s Hall of Fame career, the Whistler, Alabama, native’s extra-inning walk-off home […]