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Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement on which Jews fast, seek forgiveness from God and other people, and rehearse their deaths1 — occupies an iconic space in the annals of baseball and American Jewry. Jewish-American fans regularly contemplate and debate whether Jewish players will and should play on the holy day.2 Yom Kippur in […]

Appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s research on Babe Ruth’s RBI record.

Meooowwwwww, avoid black cats! Don’t step on the base lines! Don your rally cap! Grab your magic seat and jewelry! Superstition has been a part of baseball since the game’s earliest days. Almost anything and anyone have been fair game to promote personal and team good fortune: pre-game meal rituals, lucky clothes and equipment, mascots, […]

  In recent decades, rules in several professional sports have been revised with a goal of reducing the length of games or matches. Both pro and college football have changed their timekeeping rules repeatedly to shorten games. In hockey, five-minute overtime periods, often followed by shoot-outs, have become routine in non-playoff games. Tie-breakers are played […]

Silas Kenneth Johnson was born in Danway, Illinois on Friday, October 5, 1906. He shared his strong Norwegian heritage with older brother Alvin. Their parents, Nels and Tillie Johnson, added two more male siblings—Jesse and Tilman—to the family roster soon after Si was born. The clan soon migrated to the small town of Marseilles, Illinois, […]

On August 4, 1948, the Roseville Press-Tribune trumpeted the arrival of a new professional baseball team. The Far West League’s financially failing Pittsburg Diamonds were moving ninety miles northeast along what was then US Highway 40 to Roseville, just outside Sacramento.1 The late-season move was bold; although Roseville today ranks among California’s fastest growing cities […]

This essay is intended as an exploratory survey of baseball players of the 1880s, what they did in the offseason, and how — or if — they planned for their future economic security. The purpose is to examine how the individuals of this era responded to the economic opportunities offered by their baseball careers and […]

It’s the top of the 10th inning, and there is one out in this hotly contested All-Star Game. A runner is on third by way of the triple, another on first via the intentional walk, but now the pitcher has this batter on the ropes with a 2–2 count. The crowd is evenly split between […]

Minneapolis Millers shortstop Andy Oyler topped a pitch into the mud in front of home plate at Nicollet Park. Before the visiting team could find the ball, Oyler raced around the bases for what may be the shortest home run in history. This story has been around for over 100 years. For more than half […]

Rising from the prairie grass, a few miles south of downtown Houston, from the grazing land that only recently, in half-century terms, had been the longtime home to large herds of beef cattle, the brand-new Astrodome now stood boldly on those same plains as a spot-on caricature of every large incoming spaceship depicted in all […]

This paper explores potential areas of improvement in the JAWS statistic and proposes an alternative for evaluating candidates for the Hall of Fame. In 2004, Jay Jaffe created the Jaffe WAR Score system (JAWS) based on Baseball Reference’s bWAR.1 Its stated purpose is “to improve the Hall of Fame’s standards, or at least to maintain […]

Entering the postseason, the 1975 Cincinnati Reds were widely considered to be baseball’s best team — but there was still the matter of winning the World Series. The Reds had lost the 1972 World Series and the 1973 NLCS to teams considered their inferior by most observers, and neither Sparky Anderson nor his veteran stars […]

With a little luck and considerable pluck, the 1898 Boston Beaneaters were able to overcome injuries to three of their regulars to capture the National League pennant. While injuries would figure in 1899 as well, none matched the far-reaching consequences of the deteriorating mental health of one of the team’s most popular players. During the […]

A team’s season record is massively influenced by luck. Suppose you take a coin and flip it 162 times to simulate a season. Each time it lands heads, that’s a win, and when it lands tails, that’s a loss. You’d expect, on average, to get 81 wins and 81 losses. But for any individual season, […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 2).   Back in the days when I could claim my local race track as a dependent, I always played longshots. Understand, a longshot wasn’t a horse that just might finish ahead of the field—a good longshot was a splendid […]

Luis Olmo played for Guayama against Enid in 1940. By 1943, he and Enid shortstop Red Barkley were teammates on the Brooklyn Dodgers. (National Baseball Hall of Fame and Library)   The town of Enid, Oklahoma, had minor-league baseball in the early twentieth century, with such teams as the 1922 Enid Harvesters in the Class […]

While professional baseball and politics have always been linked, only once has a major league baseball team become a voluntary part of a Presidential campaign. The visible evidence of this happenstance is the 1920 Chicago Cubs’ exhibition game in a small Ohio town against a squad of local semi-professionals called the Kerrigan Tailors. United States […]

This article was published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 34 (2005).   A team’s season record is massively influenced by luck. Suppose you take a coin and flip it 162 times to simulate a season. Each time it lands heads, that’s a win, and when it lands tails, that’s a loss. You’d expect, on […]

A note from the editors of Baseball in the Peach State.