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Detroit Tigers right-hander Lynwood Thomas “Schoolboy” Rowe “gave one of the most courageous exhibitions of pitching ever seen in World Series,” wrote H.G. Salsinger of the Detroit News.”1 After the Tigers’ demoralizing 8-3 loss to Dizzy Dean and the St. Louis Cardinals in Game One of the 1934 fall classic at Navin Field in the […]

On August 29, 1948, before a season record crowd of 33,826 at Sportsman’s Park, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the St. Louis Cardinals played in a “furiously fought doubleheader”1 that had postseason implications. In the first game, Brooklyn second baseman Jackie Robinson hit for the cycle,2 leading the Dodgers to a victory over the St. Louis […]

On September 5, 1943, about 500 fans attending a minor-league game at Bradner Field in Olean, New York, rose to their feet in silent, somber tribute to a local hero. John Moller, formerly a star pitcher and outfielder with the Olean Oilers of the Class D Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York (PONY) League, had been killed in action […]

On April 28, 1986, the Biddeford (Maine) Journal-Tribune declared that that night’s scheduled exhibition between the Cleveland Indians and their Triple-A farm team, the Maine Guides, would be “the first time ever that a major league team has played in the state.”1 It wasn’t, but the sportswriter might be excused for not knowing that. America’s […]

Chicago’s Comiskey Park, built in the heyday of the first wave of steel and concrete ballparks and opened in 1910, hosted its share of iconic baseball moments. A World Series championship in 1917 was followed by the infamous Black Sox Scandal two years later. It was the site of the first All-Star Game in 1933 […]

To tell the story of Robin Roberts’s 286th and final major-league victory is to tell a tale of a fading star passing the baton to a future star and of two old friends in the twilight of their careers patching together one more winning effort. The rising star was Ferguson Jenkins. The old friends were […]

An outstanding three-sport high school athlete from Lima, Ohio, Bill Sharp earned a football scholarship from powerhouse Ohio State before entering professional baseball. With the Chicago White Sox and Milwaukee Brewers, Sharp was a spray-hitting swinger and a skilled defensive outfielder for parts of four major-league seasons (1973-1976) before knee problems ended his career. William […]

Hot Doggers!Four homers in a row we got,A new league mark, last word in swat.The Yankees never saw the dayOr night when they could slug that way. That was the ditty written by James E. Doyle in the August 1, 1963 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Four Cleveland batters hit consecutive home runs in […]

White Sox manager, Ozzie Guillén once said of A.J. Pierzynski: “If you play against him, you hate him. If you play with him, you hate him a little less.”1 Pierzynski was a fierce competitor with a strong desire to win. This desire at times could rub teammates the wrong way and many times would get […]

An American League umpire for seven years in the 1960s, Al Salerno’s abrupt 1968 dismissal set off a legal firestorm and led to decades of personal struggles. In fact, Salerno never got over what happened to him, and to the very end of his life he remained angry and bitter over the game he had […]

Right-handed-hitting outfielder Ken Hunt and one-time major-league single-season home-run leader Roger Maris1 were boyhood friends while growing up in Grand Forks, North Dakota. After the Maris family moved to nearby Fargo, the two all-around athletes were high-school sports rivals. During Hunt’s senior year in football, his team lost one game, a 7-6 setback to Fargo […]

Hawaii has been sending more and more men to the majors in recent years. Through the end of the 2021 season, 48 men born in the Aloha State had made it to The Show; 25 of them arrived from 2000 onward. Yet only one player out of the whole group, which dates back to 1914, […]

In his long and accomplished baseball career, San Francisco Bay Area native Emil “Lefty” Mailho managed over 2,500 hits, yet all but one — a pinch single in a 1936 contest — came in the minor leagues. One writer described Mailho as “arguably the best .056 lifetime hitter the majors (have) ever seen.”1 Mailho, who […]

“Betty Caywood is a tall, beautiful blonde with big blue eyes,” the Boston Globe’s Gloria Negri wrote, “and because of her baseball may never be the same again.”1 Caywood was the first female announcer to be hired by a major league team. She had qualifications for the job: an experienced television performer, poised, personable, and […]

Craig Cacek (pronounced Cass-ek) played in seven games for the Houston Astros in 1977. From June 18 to July 10 he was in the major leagues for the only time.1 He had one hit, one RBI, and one walk in 21 plate appearances, a .050 batting average. The Astros’ trade of Cliff Johnson to the […]

Babe Ruth greets a Civil War veteran under the approving gaze of his mentor in life and baseball, Brother Matthias. (Erin Casey)   Shortly before he died, baseball superstar Babe Ruth publicly credited a man who was born on Cape Breton Island with making him the ballplayer and man he had become. He did it […]

Across the decades, baseball players from the celebrated to the obscure have traded in their spikes for movie or TV scripts. Some — Chuck Connors, Bob Uecker, and Greg Goossen come to mind — enjoyed careers in the entertainment industry as, respectively, the star of TV’s The Rifleman, a sometime film and TV actor and […]

In one sense, Julius Solters began his life in darkness and ended it in darkness as well. He was born of Hungarian immigrant parents and at a very early age worked leading mules in a coal mine near his native Pittsburgh. He ended it without ever seeing his youngest son, Stevie, who had been born […]

One night at Toots Shor’s restaurant, Edward Bennett Williams was asked what he wanted to do when he grew up — an odd question for a man in his mid-30s who’d already gained a reputation as a distinguished trial lawyer. “I want to own a ball club and be president,” said Williams,1 who as a […]

Grant Johnson, baseball historian Gary Ashwill argues, “was the best everyday player in Black baseball from 1895 to 1909.”1 After slugging his way to a legend with a hometown Findlay, Ohio, club in 1894, “Home Run” Johnson’s career mapped the finest Black teams of the era. He starred at shortstop for the Page Fence Giants, […]

First baseman Billy Jo Robidoux tore up the Texas League in 1985. At age 21, he was in his fourth year of pro baseball, playing for the Double-A El Paso Diablos in the Milwaukee Brewers system. He led the league in batting average (.342), base hits (176), runs batted in (132), and runs scored (111).1 […]

Breaking barriers her entire life, Mary Pratt, an outstanding athlete from Eastern Massachusetts, pitched in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1943 to 1947. After her professional baseball career, Pratt went on to become an educator, coach, and a strong advocate for the advancement of women in sports. Pratt was born on November 30, […]

Silas Kenneth Johnson, who pitched for four National League teams over 17 seasons, was born in Danway, in north-central Illinois, on October 5, 1906, the second of four sons of Norwegian-Americans Nels and Tillie Johnson. The family soon moved to the nearby town of Marseilles, where they operated a 460-acre farm. Nels had been a […]

Right-handed knuckleball pitcher Al Papai earned many more accolades serving four years in the United States Army during World War II than he did in four years of appearances in major-league baseball. He was one of the 11 children of Illinois coal miner Victor Papai and his wife, Mary, the former Marie Pongracz. Both were […]