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Even though Minneapolis had been home to a professional club for most of the previous 20 years, it would not be until 1896 that it won its first pennant. The closest any club had been to a flag was in the 1890 Western Association, when Minneapolis finished a game back of Kansas City. After not […]

How does a man of modest background become a billionaire Hollywood player? For Thomas Tull, his status as a Tinseltown powerhouse is the result of a combination of fortuity, hard work, and relentless drive. It is the byproduct of his forming his own film company and producing or executive-producing such box-office blockbusters as The Dark […]

The 1977 major-league baseball season witnessed two new teams — the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays — join the American League. George Foster hit 52 home runs for Cincinnati. The Twins’ Rod Carew flirted with hitting .400 and Yankees outfielder Reggie Jackson’s bat returned the World Series championship to New York City. The 1977 […]

Introduction and Context Some of the best players in baseball traded places at the 1933 winter meetings. The meetings opened amid optimism, with a feeling that baseball was recovering from the Depression and could “be expected to gain steadily” as it moved forward.1 During 1933, all 14 minor leagues that began the season completed it; […]

A top Texas high school, semipro, and college pitcher, Pete Donohue excelled with the Cincinnati Reds for several years before his effectiveness fell off, possibly due to overuse. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Pete Donohue pitched 100 years ago and his career is worth exploring, as he was one of the mainstays of the Cincinnati Reds pitching […]

It is common to hear batters and pitchers comment on the value of being able to “make adjustments” during a game. For example, pitchers speak of “setting a batter up” by a certain sequence of pitches, which may take several at-bats to accomplish. Similarly, batters often remark that they “look for” a certain type of […]

The 2011 season marks Billy Blitzer’s 29th consecutive year scouting for the Cubs, a rarity in these days of rapid turnover when too many owners and team managements are looking for quick fixes and think the development process can be miraculously speeded up. The Reds’ Gene Bennett probably holds the modern record for scouting longevity, […]

Al Kermisch, who joined SABR in 1971, was a baseball researcher for over 60 years. His paper, “Walter Johnson: King of the 1-0 Hurlers,” appeared in the first SABR Baseball Research Journal in 1972, and in 1975 he debuted “From a Researcher’s Notebook”: seven small stories covering 4½ pages. This became a regular feature and […]

May 1, 1951: Minnie Minoso debuts for Sox and homers in first at-bat On April 30, 1951, the Cleveland Indians, Philadelphia Athletics, and Chicago White Sox orchestrated a trade. Philadelphia sent Lou Brissie to Cleveland, which in turn shipped Sam Zoldak and Ray Murray to Philadelphia and Orestes “Minnie” Minoso to Chicago. The Athletics also […]

How much control, if any, does a pitcher have over whether a batted ball in play falls in for a hit? What if something that had traditionally been regarded as the pitcher’s responsibility was simply the residue of luck? Asking himself these questions,1 Voros McCracken, a paralegal who participated in a Rotisserie league in his […]

He was forever young on his baseball card—6-foot-2, with a square jaw, and a passing resemblance to Mickey Mantle. He was 24, and I was in the third grade. It was the summer of 1963. I never minded that he set a record for strikeouts in a single season that year, which is how many […]

Five former Yankees players and staff shared their thoughts on working in the renovated Yankee Stadium. I chose them because of the wide-ranging and different perspectives they had working and playing in the Stadium during their careers in baseball. Some of these players and staff were on teams that won the World Series and others […]

The idea that there are batters whose hits are more noteworthy for their timeliness than for their quality is probably as old as the game itself. Efforts to measure “clutch-hitting” systematically include the RBI, one of the three most universal batting statistics, and more recently, the “game-winning hit”. It is my own belief that clutch […]

In October 1999, as part of the merging of the National League and American League into Major League Baseball, the decision was made to create a unified approach to look after the health and wellness of major-league umpires. Under the auspices of the Office of the Commissioner, Sandy Alderson and Ralph Nelson reached out to […]

U.S. All-Star outfield from the 1962 game have their bats locked and loaded. The players are (L–R) Tony Conigliaro, Ron Swoboda, and James Huenemeier. Conigliaro and Swoboda starred for the Red Sox and Mets, respectively. Huenemeier signed with the White Sox, but never got beyond Class A. (HARRY RANSOM CENTER/JOURNAL-AMERICAN ARCHIVES)   Set against the […]

One of the key elements of drama for a baseball miracle is that the team in question should walk out on stage for the first time as if nothing has changed, as if nothing ever will change. So the 1969 Mets lost to the brand-new Montreal Expos with their star pitcher on the mound on […]

In 2010, the Twins’ Justin Morneau sustained a concussion in a play at second base that abruptly truncated his season before the All-Star break. At that stage, he was hitting .345 with a 1.055 OPS. He had just played in his 81st game—exactly half a season. Interestingly, in Morneau’s American League MVP season, four years […]

One of America’s oldest commercialized sports spectaculars, major league baseball has adjusted repeatedly and dramatically to significant ideological and technological changes. Indeed, so cumulative have been these forces of change that each passing decade of baseball history reveals profound changes in the game’s social organization and in the behavior of the players. Thus, to scrutinize […]

1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars (Rob Fitts Collection)   Eddie Lopat was a fine, soft-tossing southpaw during a 12-year baseball career with the Chicago White Sox and most famously the New York Yankees. Called the Junkman because of his assortment of off-speed pitches, Lopat was also something of a baseball entrepreneur. He not only ran a […]

Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig formed the most feared batting twosome in the history of baseball. Batting third and fourth, they served as the heart of the great Yankee teams that won three World Series between 1927 and 1933. Despite their heroics, Ruth and Gehrig played a different type of baseball, led decidedly different lives, […]

This article was originally published in “Unions to Royals: The Story of Professional Baseball in Kansas City,” the 1996 SABR convention journal.   In the wake of the Black Sox Scandal, baseball ownership searched for new leadership to salvage the game’s rapidly sinking reputation. When Chicagoan Albert Lasker proposed a new three- member commission, to […]