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The Saturday night game of the 2017 World Baseball Classic (WBC) Pool D in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, started at 8:40 on March 11, a little under two hours after the end of the 10-inning Venezuela-Italy game.1 Crews had to hustle to let the stadium empty out and then refill, and […]

By the numbers, Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield’s start against the White Sox on June 10, 1996, looks like one of the worst games of his 19-season career. On a foggy night, Wakefield yielded a career-high 16 hits, along with eight runs, as Chicago steamrolled the struggling Red Sox 8-2 before a crowd of […]

As the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Jim Bouton had approached Seattle Pilots pitching coach Sal Maglie and asked why reliever Diego Seguí had been selected to start the first game of their July 18 twin bill instead of him.1 Bouton wasn’t satisfied with Maglie’s answer, but after Seguí won his start […]

The events of August 2 in baseball history are quite varied. In 1921 a Chicago jury arrived at a not-guilty verdict in the trial of the Black Sox, accused of participating in a fix of the 1919 World Series.1 In 1979 New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson perished in an airplane crash in Canton, Ohio.2 […]

South Bend Blue Sox manager Karl Winsch was having none of it. After his team had lost Game One of the 1952 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) championship series in Rockford, Winsch went out and measured the distance of the recently-shortened right-field fence at Beyer Stadium.1 Sure enough, it was 21½ feet short of […]

It was looking like a sad Monday for Red Sox fans at Fenway Park. The 1946 pennant winners played a daytime doubleheader, making up a game postponed by rain the previous day. They were hosting the 1945 world champion Detroit Tigers, who had finished second in 1946. The first game was a heartbreaker of a […]

The St. Louis Cardinals’ dismal start to the 1921 season – one win in their first 10 games – seemed to augur yet another disappointing campaign for Branch Rickey’s team. The Cardinals’ losing record wasn’t that unusual, since they had been mostly a second-division club throughout their history. The franchise had never been in serious […]

They made an odd couple on Opening Day 1923 at Braves Field – a scowling, upright Midwesterner who had sat behind a federal judge’s bench, and a beaming, roguish Boston Irishman who had stood before one. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the Midwesterner, had a cold personality and a reputation for probity. Since taking office in […]

The New York Mets finished the 2006 season with a 97-65 record, tied with their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, for the best record in baseball. Now they were set to face the Los Angeles Dodgers, who entered the postseason as the National League wild-card team. The Dodgers finished the season tied with the San Diego […]

Urban “Red” Faber, one of the last pitchers to legally throw a spitball, persevered through illness and injury, a world war, and the Black Sox Scandal to win a place in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The right-hander played his entire 20-year major-league career with the White Sox, one of the league’s strongest teams […]

Few players in baseball history have jumped directly to the major leagues without ever playing a game in the minors. Many of these were the Bonus Babies in the years before the amateur draft was established in 1965. Before that, Hall of Famers Bob Feller, Frankie Frisch, Mel Ott, and George Sisler went directly from […]

During right-hander Lerrin LaGrow’s final year in the majors, he quipped “Hillerich & Bradsby” when asked to identify his toughest opposing hitter.1 By naming the company that manufactures Louisville Sluggers, he perhaps inadvertently referenced the moment for which he’s arguably most remembered – being the target of Bert Campaneris’s thrown bat during the 1972 AL […]

The baseball fortunes of hard-throwing right-hander Frank Pfeffer turned on a single event: an offseason trade in the winter of 1905. The transaction dispatched Pfeffer from a Chicago Cubs club poised on the brink of National League domination to the sad-sack Boston Beaneaters, arguably the worst NL team of the Deadball Era. Worse yet for […]

Ralph Theodore Joseph Branca was a New York guy. He was born on January 6, 1926, in Mount Vernon, just outside New York City, as the fifteenth of seventeen children. His middle name was a celebration of the first President Roosevelt, who also hailed from the Empire State.1 His elementary and high school years were […]

Tommy Moore was drafted as an outfielder but made it to the majors as a pitcher. He appeared with four teams in parts of four seasons from 1972 through 1977, posting a won-lost record of 2-4 and an ERA of 5.40 in 42 games, largely in relief. “He would have been a great candidate for […]

America has always had great duos. In entertainment it was Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, George Burns and Gracie Allen. In baseball it was the great Chicago White Sox tag team of Jerry Staley and Turk Lown. Together they formed the best one-two punch out of the bullpen in 1959 for manager Al Lopez. […]

“One of the best and most underrated players I have ever seen.” — Joe Morgan, Hall of Famer “A Puerto Rican legend whose brilliance equals that of the stars.” — Honduran sportswriter Greg Moraga   Growing up in Houston in the 1970s and ’80s, every kid idolized Astros left fielder José Cruz. They dreamed of […]

Prior to his untimely death in July 1918, Dr. Joseph Creamer did much good in his life, being especially revered for his longtime free medical care of East Side Manhattan indigents. But Creamer’s virtues were interred with him. To the extent that he is remembered at all today, it is for a single, regrettable act […]

“This game is tough to play,” said 11-year major-league infielder Doug Flynn in an interview with the author.1 Progressing through the Cincinnati Reds’ system in the early 1970s, Flynn was a utilityman on the Reds championship teams in 1975 and 1976 before being traded to the New York Mets in 1977. A Gold Glove winner […]

Was the Federal League of 1914 and 1915 a major league? If you answer “yes” to this question, Art Queisser was a major-league umpire, by virtue of having worked a four-game FL series between the St. Louis Terriers and Kansas City Packers from September 2 through 4, 1914. Queisser’s stint as an umpire capped his […]

“You automatically go all out, regardless of pain or what.”1 This was the guiding principle of New York Yankees pitcher Bill Stafford’s baseball career. Never had his philosophy been more tested than on the afternoon of October 7, 1962. After a screaming liner off the bat of San Francisco Giants outfielder Felipe Alou smashed into […]

Ray Chapman is remembered as the only player to have died as the result of being hit by a pitch during a major-league baseball game. Chapman’s death in 1920 did not, however, make him the first major-league alumnus to suffer such a mortal injury. Infielder John Dodge, who played 97 games in the majors in […]

For more than 50 years, Mike Shannon has been a fixture in the Cardinals’ organization. He played for his hometown team and was a member of three pennant-winning teams and two World Series champions. He became a hometown hero with a game-tying home run at Busch Stadium that helped win the first game of the […]

Twenty-two people attended the April 22, 2013, monthly roundtable of the Bob Broeg St. Louis SABR Chapter. The meeting was held at the regular location, The Original Crusoe’s in South St. Louis. Jim Rygelski gave a presentation on “Significant Things About the 1928 Cardinals.” It wasn’t a day-by-day recounting of the season but a listing […]