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Supportive parents attend their kids’ baseball games. The more involved will drive the carpool or volunteer to coach. Ramón Vázquez Sr. went above and beyond: he started a team so his son could get more playing time. By his own admission, Ramón Jr. was a baseball nut, but far from a phenom: “I wasn’t (a) […]

A hard-throwing, fast-living left-hander, Rube Benton pitched professionally for 24 years, compiling a 150-144 record and 3.09 ERA in his 15 seasons in the National League. Benton had a reputation for drinking, gambling, and driving too fast, all three of which combined in various ways to interrupt his major-league career. He eventually died at age […]

Catcher Jack Zalusky’s major-league career was brief; seven games for the New York Highlanders during a September trial in 1903. His defensive skills were in demand for more than a decade, but constant squabbles with team management over his salary eventually soured each team he played for. If nothing else, he played on teams with […]

“What other player is there who bats like [Carl] East, fields like East, throws like East from right field and then can pitch the kind of a game that Carl did yesterday?” — Wichita Beacon, July 6, 19211   Carl East was a pitcher and an outfielder in the minor leagues. Like Babe Ruth, he […]

John Fowler was one of the true pioneers of American baseball, one overlooked by the National Baseball Hall of Fame for more than a century after his death until he was elected in 2022 to Cooperstown — the same village where he had grown up as a teenager. In Black baseball history, he is the […]

From 1950 to 2008, the Philadelphia Phillies won five National League pennants and two World Series. Only one man was a part of the Phillies organization during each of those five pennant years — Maje McDonnell. McDonnell joined the team in 1947 as a batting-practice pitcher and, except for the period 1966-1973, was with the […]

On April 7, 1977, on a bitterly cold afternoon in Ontario, Canada, the Toronto Blue Jays made baseball history playing host to the Chicago White Sox in their inaugural game. Promptly yielding two first inning runs things looked little better after the Jays’ first two batters struck out. Doug Ault, the Jays’ third hitter heard […]

Lewis “Buttercup” Dickerson was a stocky little outfielder – 5-foot-6 and 140 pounds – who played in the big leagues for seven seasons (1878-81; 1883-85). When in form, he was a capable hitter, batting .284 overall at the top level and leading the National League in triples with 14 in 1879. However, he was also […]

 In the age of 100-pitch limits and “five and fly” starters, this sounds like a video game gone haywire: Leon Cadore and Joe Oeschger each pitched 26 innings on May 1, 1920, completing the longest game in major-league history. Cadore was a Brooklyn favorite who spent his childhood in the borough and earned respect for […]

“An indispensable playoff weapon here on pocket change.” – Sportswriter Mike Lopresti commenting on Timo Pérez, October 17, 2000.1 “I’m still very new at this; I don’t know everything that entails fame. I love the fans. All game long, they’re yelling at me and having fun with me.” – Timo Pérez, October 16, 20002   […]

The Chicago Cubs have had some outstanding second basemen in their long history. Four of them are enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame: Johnny Evers, Rogers Hornsby, Billy Herman, and Ryne Sandberg. There were some who thought that Ken Hubbs might take his place next to them in Cooperstown. “Kenny would have been […]

In 2019 Justin Verlander led the major leagues with 223 innings pitched. His workload was less than half of the post-1900 major league record 464 innings by Ed Walsh in 1908. And it was less than one-third of the all-time mark — 680 innings by Will White in 1879. It is hard to imagine a […]

Before the age of television, umpires worked in anonymity, only a handful of dominant personalities gaining widespread recognition. Among the virtually unknown arbiters is Ernest Cosmos Quigley, an outstanding and influential umpire who also was the greatest sports official in history. Indicative of how overlooked he has been is the fact that even a fairly […]

During his two years as a baseball executive, from November 1889 to August 1891, Charles A. Prince was a director of the pennant-winning Boston club in the sole year of the Players League and the president of the pennant-winning Boston Reds club in the final year of the American Association. In between, from November 1890 […]

Alex Remneas, mistakenly considered by some to be the first Montanan to make the big leagues, was born in Minneapolis before moving to Watson Township, Montana (Great Falls), as a baby.1 After three career games with the 1912 Detroit Tigers and 1915 St. Louis Browns that amounted to 7.2 innings pitched, the “Iron Duke” returned […]

Ken Burns’s documentary Baseball opens with a line that characterizes the hard-driving spirit of Irish-blooded players like Jimmy Esmond, who came up in the early twentieth century. “The game’s greatest figures have come from everywhere: coal mines and college campuses, city slums and country crossroads. A brawling Irish immigrant’s son [John McGraw] who for more […]

Reflecting on the life and career of Pud Galvin, a writer commented that a proper accounting of Galvin’s achievements “would be a task of time and would … require a volume in size almost equal to the dictionary.”1 Galvin pitched for 16 years during a career that spanned three decades, four major leagues, and countless […]

A diminutive lefty who was one of baseball’s biggest stars of the rollicking 1890s, Wee Willie Keeler continued to “hit ’em where they ain’t” through the first decade of the Deadball Era. The tiny (5-feet-4½-inches, 140 pounds) right fielder’s career covered 19 big-league campaigns, and in 13 of them – every year from 1894 to 1906 […]

Cookie Rojas is one of a handful of major leaguers who played every position in his career including pitcher. Of that group, he is the only one to make both the American and National League All-Star teams. Rojas worked in the major leagues as a player, coach, manager, and broadcaster for more than five decades. […]

Lee Quillin distinguished himself during 13 years in professional baseball in the early 20th century. He played for the 1906 World Series champion Chicago White Sox and the 1907 Sox team, contributing as a utility infielder. The right-hander also put together four minor-league seasons hitting over .300, plus another at .298; he helped his clubs […]

Pedro Guerrero was hitless in 11 consecutive at-bats. In a 162-game season, three games without hitting safely is not atypical, but Guerrero was wrapping up an exceptional month, already having hit 14 home runs, one short of the National League record for June. Entering the final day of the month, the Los Angeles Dodgers trailed […]

The Stolen Base King was in the twilight of his magnificent career. Lou Brock had shattered the all-time stolen base record on August 29, 1977, when he stole two bases to surpass Ty Cobb with his 892nd and 893rd stolen bases. Now, he had accumulated 929 in his great career. But as the saying goes, […]

Fans often remember the ends of seasons more readily than the beginnings. What is often associated with the beginnings of the 1975 season for the Cincinnati Reds is that on Saturday, May 17, 1975, the Reds stood at 19-19 and in second place 5½ games behind the rival Los Angeles Dodgers and just a half-game […]

Montreal mayor Jean Drepeau with (from left) John Bateman, Jim “Mudcat” Grant, and Maury Wills on Opening Day in New York, April 8, 1969 (COURTESY OF THE McCORD MUSEUM, MONTREAL)   When the International Olympic Committee chose Montreal as the host city for the 1976 Winter Olympics, Jean Drapeau, the mayor of Montreal, told the […]