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Today’s ballplayers and their union would be aghast, but Great Depression-era club owners responded to the new economic reality with doubleheaders – lots of them. On Wednesday, September 17, 1930, the Boston Braves were playing their 30th twin bill of the season and sixth in an extended Wigwam stand that had begun on September 1. […]

Jim Leyland spent more than two decades in professional baseball as a minor-league catcher and manager and major-league third-base coach before getting his first big-league managing job with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1986. In the third game of a career that spanned 22 seasons and resulted in his 2024 selection for the National Baseball Hall […]

The World Series had come down to the winner-take-all game for the 33rd time.1 The two teams had alternated wins throughout the series. Now 67,204 fans filled Pro Player Stadium to see who would take home the championship trophy. Cleveland had not won a World Series title since 1948, falling short against the New York […]

To Boston Red Sox management, it must have seemed like an ordinary Tuesday in August 1909. The Detroit Tigers were in town to play five games over three days, including two makeup games from earlier in the season. It was ladies day, so perhaps a few additional fans might cross the turnstiles at the Huntington […]

The New York Yankees on November 4, 2001, were one game from winning their fourth consecutive World Series and their fifth in six years.1 With New York City still shaken by the events of September 11, the Yankees had fought their way through the postseason, providing their city and fans some relief from the devastation. […]

In 2003 the Boston Red Sox were in the postseason for the first time since 1999. Back then, the New York Yankees had eliminated them in the American League Championship Series, but Red Sox fans were hoping that this time would be different. The ’03 Red Sox, who finished six games behind the Yankees with […]

Pitcher Vicente Romo won well over 400 games as a professional player from 1961 through 1986.1 Just 32 of those wins came in the majors, where he played during eight seasons (1968-74; 1982) for five teams. Yet many experts in his homeland consider this man the finest right-handed pitcher that Mexico has ever produced — […]

“(Curt) Motton has been Baltimore’s best pinch-hitter ever since I’ve been managing this club. He was an automatic choice in this spot.” — Orioles manager Earl Weaver after Motton’s game-tying double helped Baltimore come from behind to beat Oakland’s Vida Blue in the 1971 American League Championship Series1   Curt Motton grew up in the […]

In various ways, the life of right-handed pitcher George Pechiney typified the existence of the late-nineteenth-century journeyman player. Pechiney’s abilities were modest, and his major-league career was a relatively brief one, abbreviated by abuse of alcohol. Once his playing days were over, Pechiney returned to the arduous everyday working life from which he had sprung, […]

Coming from the dirt fields of Puerto Rico to the heights of the major leagues, Pudge Rodríguez had a long and storied career as perhaps the greatest all-round catcher ever. Revered by Texas Rangers fans for his decade in Arlington, he led the Florida Marlins to a World Series title and was instrumental in re-energizing […]

Shortstop Jackie Hernandez glided behind second base, smoothly picked up Merv Rettenmund’s ground ball and with one easy motion flipped it across the diamond to first baseman Bob Robertson for the final out of the 1971 World Series. “[The] catcher is running toward the camera at full speed, his upraised arms spread wide. His body […]

Eight major-leaguers died while serving in World War I.1 The third of these casualties, Eddie Grant, had the longest playing career and is also well remembered because he received a plaque in center field at the Polo Grounds. The shortest career on this list belonged to Alexander Thomson Burr, a pitcher who played just one […]

A teammate of Allie Reynolds in their college days, James G. “Jimmy” Cleghorn was a full-blood Indian pitcher. He was born on December 18, 1916, on the Otoe/Missouria tribal reservation at Red Rock, Oklahoma. Cleghorn was three-quarters Otoe and one-quarter Sac & Fox, descending from his full-blood Otoe father, Grant Cleghorn, and his Otoe/Sac & […]

Remembered mostly for his more famous older brother Ed, Jim Delahanty was a fine player in his own right, and one of the most well-traveled hitters of the Deadball Era. During a professional career that lasted nearly two decades, the free-swinging right-hander played for fifteen different clubs, including eight in the major leagues. Despite his […]

“Funny thing, nobody asked me about my pitching,”1 said the hurler best remembered as the only pitcher to hit two grand slams in one game. Yet Tony Cloninger was much more than a great hitting pitcher. In the waning days of Warren Spahn’s great career, the Milwaukee Braves looked to Cloninger to step into the […]

On page 1,444 of the fourth edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia published in 1979, Joe Staples nestles in obscurity between journeyman outfielder Leroy Stanton and Hall of Famer Willie Stargell.1 The scant entry is the reflection of a rather unremarkable career. He appeared in seven games with the 1885 Buffalo Bisons, recorded just one hit […]

Immersed in a pennant race that would go down to the wire, the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers took the field at Busch Stadium in St. Louis on September 28, 1966, in hopes of putting distance between themselves and their two closest competitors. The St. Louis Cardinals had no intention of making this endeavor any easier […]

Clyde Kluttz, a journeyman catcher-turned-scout, convinced Charlie Finley to pay a young North Carolina pitcher named Jimmy Hunter $50,000 to sign with the Athletics in 1964. A decade later, Kluttz, then a super scout with the Yankees, persuaded the All-Star now known as “Catfish” to accept $3.75 million to come to New York in the first of a flood […]

One of the greatest pitchers in 19th-century major-league baseball, Tim Keefe won 342 games and still ranks among the top ten pitchers in lifetime victories. He was known for his change-of-pace pitch, which he used to establish a still-standing major-league record of 19 consecutive victories in 1888. “No more graceful, skillful and strategic pitcher ever […]

Cliff Melton stormed through the 1937 National League as a rookie pitching sensation for the New York Giants and even received consideration as a possible Game One World Series starter over future Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell. But Melton’s insistence that Hubbell teach him to throw a screwball, the rarely used pitch featuring an outward […]

A 1 1/3-inning stint with the 1938 Boston Bees was the only major-league action that pitcher Mike Balas achieved during a professional baseball career that spanned a dozen years, from 1929 through 1940. His greater legacy to baseball, though, was his conscientious objector status during World War II. Unlike the majority of his ballplaying brethren […]

Frank Whitney was a reserve outfielder for Boston in 1876, the first year of the National League. Playing in only 34 games in his career, Whitney was better known in the Boston area for playing on the popular Lowell, Massachusetts, amateur team. His name rarely appears in newspaper accounts of the time, other than to […]

Walter John Gilbert was born December 19, 1900, in Oscoda, Michigan, a small town on the Au Sable River where an Air Force base and the lumber industry are the major sources for the local economy. His father, a lumberjack by trade, moved his wife and only child to Duluth, Minnesota, when Wally was just a […]

“That’s the hardest hit ball I ever saw.” – Terry Moore1 The ball came off the bat of Walter Sessi, the unlikeliest of heroes for the 1946 World Champion St. Louis Cardinals. Sessi debuted with the Cardinals in 1941 and was hitless in 13 at-bats. After missing four seasons while serving in World War II, […]