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Thief River Falls Ladies Baseball Team Champions of Northern Minnesota 1893. (Courtesy of Pennington County Historical Society)   Despite the fact that the great American pastime has been almost exclusively identified as a male sport, women have played baseball in Minnesota for over 100 years. In the early years, from the late nineteenth century through […]

Professional athletes naturally experience hot and cold streaks. However, there’s been a debate going on for some time now as to whether professional athletes experience streaks more frequently than we would expect given the players’ season statistics. This is also known as having “the hot hand.” For example, if a player is a 75 percent […]

Defiance College in northwestern Ohio has fielded a baseball team since 1905. Like most small colleges, Defiance places academics ahead of athletics, and the baseball team generally loses more games than it wins.1 The 1961 baseball season, however, was a shining exception. That season the Defiance College baseball team was invited to the National Association […]

A Hot Stove League question was the impetus for this study. “Why have batting averages declined since the 1920-1940 era?” A popular answer was the rise of relief pitching. Formerly, the argument runs, batters during their fourth and fifth game appearances faced a tiring pitcher, whose stuff and delivery they had had a chance to […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. Introduction In his December 29, 2005 internet blog, John Thorn, the noted baseball author and SABR member, mentioned that the shotgun that killed Ty Cobb’s father in 1905 had been part […]

AT 4:09 A.M. on Easter morning, April 19, 1981, just 51 minutes before sunrise, a hardy group of 17 freezing souls huddled in the 28-degree pre-dawn chill of McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, R.I. They had just seen their beloved PawSox close out the thirty-second inning of a 2-2 tie against the Rochester Red Wings. When […]

Introduction and Context In 1938, the major leagues returned to New York City for the winter meetings, while the minor leagues held their meetings in New Orleans for the first time since 1916. The minor leagues sought to promote uniformity, and with the nation’s economy beginning to emerge from the Great Depression, several minor leagues […]

Four members of the 1935 Detroit Tigers were later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Three of them were among the finest players of their era, while the fourth was a very good player whose election was the subject of debate. All were instrumental in the Tigers’ winning the 1935 championship, their first.Four members […]

Catcher Wilson Ramos is one of many athletes who have undergone LASIK surgery during their professional careers. He had the surgery performed in 2016, according to published reports. (Trading Card Database)   Since the 1990s there have been increased reports of prominent athletes undergoing refractive surgery including laser assisted in situ keratomileusis (LASIK). Some refractive […]

The 1957 American Legion Central Catholic Team. The author is in the front row, furthest to the left. (Author’s collection)   Attend most high school baseball games in Texas today, and you will encounter a beautiful stadium with a staffed food shack. The walled outfield is most likely carpeted with neatly trimmed artificial turf, and […]

Introduction The offseason after the 1913 championship season was one of turmoil. It saw the players taking formal steps to improve their working conditions, the ouster of a league president, and the opening salvos of a new war with an “outlaw” major league. American League Because of the impending world tour, set to depart on […]

Doug Glanville in his new baseball memoir notes that many players, “rewarded with huge contracts because of their offensive prowess, . . . have developed a kind of attention deficit disorder when it comes to defense. . . . If you put up tremendous offensive numbers year after year, the game will cut you a […]

Opening Day in Toronto, April 7, 1977, as a snowstorm blankets the field at Exhibition Stadium. (Courtesy of Elliott and Helene Wahle)   The date was September 4, 1967. As Canada’s centennial summer drew to a close, a sparse crowd of 802 gathered at Maple Leaf Stadium to watch the hometown Leafs of the International […]

BASEBALL BATS OUTSIDE THE BOX There are a number of different ways to reach first base safely, one of which is by hitting a baseball. Applying the expression “thinking outside the box” to the art of hitting, one will eventually conclude that there is a better baseball bat out there just waiting to be discovered. […]

There was one sentence that I read in Ted Williams’ autobiography, My Turn At Bat, which set me off on a personal research journey that took me some unexpected places and raised a few eyebrows along the way. It was a 44-word sentence about his mother, which I really only focused on the third time […]

  New Yorkers love baseball. Their passion for the national game (and its bat-and-ball precursors) can be traced back into the earliest decades of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, scores of juvenile and adult teams in New York vied for bragging rights or trophy balls on emerald fields and dusty lots.1 Boys […]

Missed, bad or wrong calls are part of nearly every game and can have an influence on the run of the play as well as the final score. Emotions can run particularly high when a player perceives a pitched ball is out of the strike zone but the umpire calls “strike.” Is it possible that […]

This article was originally published in “Baseball in the Buckeye State,” the 2004 SABR convention journal.   The evolution of baseball’s playing and scoring rules was a slow and turbulent process beginning in the nineteenth century. Apart from the early establishment of such basics as four bases and their 90-foot separations, there was plenty of […]

Pat Gillick once observed that it should take 10 years for an expansion team to emerge into a contender.1 The Hall of Fame executive would know; he oversaw the burgeoning of two of the 14 expansion teams. On one hand, his Astros were still a few years away from contending when he left Houston for […]

Editor’s note: An abridged version of this interview was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s October 2020 newsletter.   David Crawford Jones is a former chairman of the Deadball Era Committee and the editor of Deadball Stars of the American League, published by Potomac Books in 2006. With a master’s degree in U.S. History […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 31 (2002).   John McGraw was one of the most successful baseball managers ever, leading the New York Giants to ten pennants in his 30 years with the club. His arrival in mid-1902 marked the turning point in the fortunes of the Giants, a […]

According to conventional baseball wisdom, the home team enjoys a significant advantage in batting last. But in the early days of big-league baseball, it was not uncommon for teams to choose to bat first.1 By the time the American League declared itself a major league in 1901, home teams batting first had become a rarity, […]

On November 9, 1953, the United States Supreme Court issued a one paragraph opinion in Toolson v. New York Yankees, Inc.1 The decision affirmed three lower federal court decisions that turned aside lawsuits challenging the Court’s 1922 ruling regarding the application of the nation’s antitrust laws to Organized Baseball.2 The concluding sentence succinctly declared that […]

Who invented baseball? This question has held a niche in the American consciousness since the 1880s. The most widely known answer is that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. The casual observer who knows one thing about baseball’s origin knows the Doubleday story. The next answer is that Alexander Cartwright invented […]