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The most important statistic for a baseball team is wins (winning percentage)—the more (higher), the better. And even the most casual fan knows that the essential component for winning is scoring runs—at least one run (more than the opposing team) in a game. Thus, contributing to the scoring of runs can be considered the supreme […]

Following the events of Pearl Harbor and in Europe, on January 15, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis: “I honestly feel it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.” Thus, through 1945, the heroic military efforts of Americans in World War II would be complemented and […]

The 2007 Old-Timers Day included Whitey Ford (16), Yogi Berra (8), Reggie Jackson (44), Don Mattingly (23), Ron Guidry (49), Moose Skowron (14), Don Larsen (18), Graig Nettles (9), Bobby Murcer (1), Goose Gossage (54), Paul O’Neill (21), Scott Brosius (18), Joe Pepitone (25), and Chris Chambliss (10). (Jerry Coli/Dreamstime)   The original Yankee Stadium, […]

Babe Ruth is frequently lauded as the greatest player in Major League Baseball history, and arguably the first true superstar athlete. Ruth transcended the game of baseball, and with the aid of agent Christy Walsh, he profited tremendously from that transcendence. Beyond his salary and bonuses paid by the Yankees—which made him the highest-paid player […]

Among the more noteworthy events in major-league baseball in 2010 were a) the San Francisco Giants winning their first World Series since 1954 (when the franchise was based in New York) when they defeated the Texas Rangers in five games; b) the in-season retirement of several stars, including future Hall of Famers Randy Johnson, Frank […]

1885 Carlisle student baseball team (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)   Children played baseball at the United States Training and Industrial School at Carlisle Barracks. On one level, they were children like any others, playing a game, having fun running about. But to the children, their teachers and coaches, school administration, the federal government, […]

“Heroes get remembered. But legends never die.” So says an apparition of Babe Ruth in The Sandlot. Statues affirm their permanence. Capturing a ballplayer’s essence creates a bond with passersby who stop to absorb the player’s importance to the game and admire the sculptor’s handiwork framing a moment. Ruth’s likeness adorns Oriole Park as a […]

Nearly 300 no-hitters have been thrown in the major leagues since 1876, but none of them have been thrown by a San Diego Padre. The closest any Padres pitcher has come to pitching immortality since San Diego joined the National League was on July 18, 1972, when Steve Arlin pitched 8⅔ hitless innings against the […]

The Cape Cod Baseball League, one of the top summer collegiate circuits, celebrated its first 100 years in 1985. This brought to mind David Q. Voigt’s suspicion of centennials. Writing on the origins of the Boston Red Stockings in the December 1970 issue of The New England Quarterly, Voigt noted that many baseball centennials had […]

In the early 1960s, each of the recent expansion cities played host to the MLB All-Star Game, New York in 1964, Anaheim in 1967, Houston in 1968, and Washington DC in 1969. The 1968 baseball season took place against a backdrop of racial violence. The late 1960s trembled with social and political turbulence, with the […]

In the relatively progressive state of Minnesota, African Americans were still able to participate on integrated amateur and semi-professional ball teams. Two men in paticular, slugger Billy Williams and crack infielder Dick Brookins, figured prominently on the Midwestern diamonds of the early twentieth century, although their experiences with the color line took radically different turns.

  The 2014 Little League World Series left baseball fans everywhere awestruck. With her 70-mph fastball, a 13-year-old girl by the name of Mo’ne Davis pitched a complete-game shutout to lead her team, the Taney Dragons, to a 4-0 victory. In doing so, she was the first girl ever to pitch a winning game in […]

Yankees owners Jacob Ruppert and Til Huston realized early in their partnership that New York wouldn’t tolerate anything less than a championship team. Ruppert had a championship in mind when he hired Miller Huggins to manage the club in 1918. According to Ruppert: “Huggins had vision. Getting him was the first and most important step […]

More than two decades ago, Pete Palmer contributed what I think is one of the best baseball statistical analysis efforts ever done. The results were published in The National Pastime in 1985, in an article entitled “Do Clutch Pitchers Exist?” Palmer examined pitchers with at least 150 decisions between 1900 and 1983, accounting for how […]

Golf Magazine deemed that Babe Ruth was “once America’s most famous golfer.” Ruth was hitting the links while the Olympic trials were being held in Baltimore. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   It has been noted that history is cyclical, and there is nothing new under the sun. Baseball’s relationship with the International Olympic […]

Sabermetrician and founder of STATS, Inc. Richard “Dick” Cramer wrote the article “Average Batting Skill Through Major League History,” in which he demonstrated that the average major-league batter has gotten better over time.1 This article hopes to chart a parallel improvement of the average batting statistics over the course of baseball history. This is a […]

Who are the best players in the history of the Pirates? Everyone responding to that question will, of course, approach it differently. Some may rely on their personal recollections of thrilling plays and great moments, others might look at old newspapers and read about World Series exploits, and still others will review the record books […]

This article was originally published in “Above the Fruited Plain,” the 2003 SABR convention journal.   In the so-called deadball era, the Western League supplied fans with some exciting pennant races. In 1902, Denver finished one and a half games behind pennant-winner Kansas City—but found themselves in fourth place in a six-team league! Both Colorado […]

This article was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s August 2024 newsletter.   Standing less than five-feet tall, Deadball Era arbiter Barney Bricelin was the game’s smallest umpire. That diminutive stature, however, garnered him little sympathy or respect from players, baseball fans, or the sporting press. Bricelin’s umpiring tenure was punctuated by assaults upon […]

All baseball fans can attest to the truism that baseball is a game that hinges on timing and inches. To the fans of a team eclipsing 100 victories, a season feels joyous and swift. Other seasons are made interminable by loss after loss. Line drives either just clip the foul line or miss wide by […]

Introduction The statistic Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, is an increasingly popular method of quickly determining a player’s worth, and by extension, the value of an entire team. Baseball is unlike most sports in that there is a multitude of statistics to describe a player, but WAR eloquently summarizes a player in one number. Rather […]