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This excerpt is from the recent SABR book, Yankee Stadium 1923-2008: America’s First Modern Ballpark, and also appears at www.grassrootsbaseball.org. Between 1923 and 2008, Yankee Stadium hosted 6,746 American League and related professional baseball games, including 161 postseason games and four All-Star Games. More than 200 Negro League games have also taken place there. […]
The Saint John Royals, Maritime Black Champions 1920. (New Brunswick Museum) Although the origins of Black baseball in the Maritimes remain obscure, it is likely that the game was being played informally as early as the 1870s. Operating independently, but often in association with the African Baptist and Episcopal churches, black teams like the […]
George H. Lawson (1864–1927), promoter of various baseball leagues, including the United States League, which drew attention for his announcement that he would sign African American players. After a modest launch in spring 1910, the league was disbanded in May, a few weeks into the season. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS) Few men appear to have […]
Nate Colbert set a single-season RBI record in 1972; hardly anyone noticed. Even today – ten years after the fact – few fans and fewer record books are aware of the big right-handed slugger’s accomplishment. In fact, if it hadn’t been for his performance on August 1 of that year – the best single day […]
This article was selected as the winner of the 2017 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. So, turn the key with me and enter Room 509 of the [Hotel Carlos], the most famous place in Chicago that you barely knew existed. — (Kankakee, Illinois) Daily Journal and (Ottawa, Illinois) Daily Times, April 10, 2010 1 The 1932 […]
All of us are familiar with stories such as the following appearing in newspaper sports sections at the end of a season: Fans of our beloved Beasts are bitterly disappointed in the showing of- the team in the season just concluded. The expected neck-and-neck pennant struggle with the Toads failed to materialize, the Toads romping […]
Click here to download your free e-book edition or save 50% on the paperback of From Rube to Robinson: SABR’s Best Articles on Black Baseball, edited by John Graf (SABR, 2021) It almost goes without saying, that were it not for the Negro Leagues, modern professional baseball would be in a much different place. […]
Do clutch hitters exist? More precisely, are there any batters whose performance in critical game situations consistently exceeds expectations, as established both by that batter’s performance in less critical situations and also by the relative performance of average batters in critical game situations? Thirty years ago one of us published a first investigation of clutch […]
Sandy Koufax posted a career-low 1.73 ERA and struck out 317 batters in his final season with the Dodgers in 1966. (SABR-Rucker Archive) The fact that Sandy Koufax had arthritis in his left elbow was well known for the final two years of his career. He woke up after a spring-training game in 1965 […]
Amidst the current upsurge of social activism among professional athletes, it is worth recalling the enormous contribution of Jim Bouton, one of the most politically outspoken sports figures in American history. Among professional team sports, baseball may be the most conservative and tradition-bound, but throughout its history, rebels and mavericks have emerged to challenge the […]
“I Must Go Dear and Talk to Father” She had just finished saying goodbye to some luncheon guests and was walking past her husband’s study. She realized something was terribly wrong. His secretaries were scrambling, and two phones were in use. She overheard the phone conversations, and knew there had been an attack. She returned […]
Bobby Witt Jr. of the Kansas City Royals (Trading Card Database) Tom Verducci wrote the following in 2023: “From 2015 to 2022, the (infield) shift helped take 2,065 groundball hits out of the game. … Batters saw hit probability on grounders reduced by the shift, so they tried to hit over defensive alignments.”1 Some […]
In 1912, Chicago was under consideration by two upstart baseball leagues. On February 12, John T. Powers’s Columbian League awarded a franchise to Chicago (along with Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Milwaukee, and St. Louis), but the venture failed to materialize due to a lack of money. On April 3, an official announcement was […]
“The greatest pitcher I have ever seen,” whispered John McGraw as he shoved his way through a jostling home bound crowd after watching “Cannonball” Jackman strike out eighteen batters in nine innings. That whisper spread from ear to ear and finally developed into a roar, for certainly the famed former New York Giants pilot should […]
For better or worse, leisure and tourism have become big business. In the second half of the twentieth century, the modern concept of spare time evolved greatly. As people became more mobile, they demanded more places to go and things to see. Ballparks that were once shoehorned into old neighborhoods like Flatbush were abandoned in […]
George H. “Foghorn” Bradley, seated at left, with the Grafton Baseball Club in 1875. Touch three out of four, George. You’ll never hit a bigger triple in your life. (Courtesy of John Thorn) Mike Timlin scurried toward the first-base line, scooped up Otis Nixon’s bunt, and tossed to a waiting Joe Carter at first […]
Note: The following is excerpted from “Lost (and Found) Baseball,” first published in 2011 in “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game.”1It was reprinted the following year online in Our Game.2 Special thanks to John Thorn and Gary Mitchem. A gloomy fact of film history is that more than half the movies made […]
The researchers at Protoball — the de facto authorities on baseball’s ancestral and descendant games — unsurprisingly categorize the popular recreational sport of kickball as a baseball derivative.1 But how did kickball originate? In On the Origins of Sports: The Early History and Original Rules of Everybody’s Favorite Games, authors Gary Belsky and Neil Fine […]
Handedness historically has been of importance to how the game of baseball is played. For example, professional baseball has long alternated players at the same position of varying handedness in order to gain a competitive advantage. That advantage—the platoon effect—is in play when batters hit better when facing pitchers who throw with the opposite hand […]
This article was originally published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 29 (2000). Imagine if a young major-league pitcher, like Andy Pettitte of the Yankees, decided, for whatever reason, to become an outfielder in the year 2001. And imagine if he hit over .300 for the next five years, culminating in 2005 by winning […]
One baseball executive said Willie Mays’ glove was “where triples go to die.” (SABR-Rucker Archive) One of the game’s greatest players of all time was also one of the greatest defensive players of all time. Willie Mays set a standard of excellence for outfielders that is virtually unmatched. As Dodgers executive Fresco Thompson said, […]
What with Bill Veeck Jr.’s gregarious nature, numerous achievements, and well-known career as “a champion of the little guy” (to quote from his Hall of Fame plaque), it is not surprising that writers have penned quite a few profiles of the flamboyant baseball executive. On the other hand, regrettably little ink has been spilled in […]
Dazzling Debuts: First At-Bat Home Runs Edited by Giselle Stancic, Bill Nowlin, and Jacob Pomrenke Associate editors: Len Levin and Carl Riechers Publication Date: October 31, 2024 ISBN (ebook): 978-1-960819-30-7, $9.99 ISBN (paperback): 978-1-960819-31-4, $24.95 8.5″ x 11″, 167 pages Every baseball player experiences a series of firsts when they step onto the field: the […]
¡Arriba! The Heroic Life of Roberto Clemente Edited by Bill Nowlin and Glen Sparks Associate Editors: Len Levin and Carl Riechers Publication Date: September 27, 2022 ISBN (English ebook): 978-1-970159-87-5, $9.99 ISBN (English paperback): 978-1-970159-88-2, $34.95 8.5″ x 11″, 338 pages The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary year of Roberto Clemente’s final year in […]