Search Results

Speaking before a banquet of baseball aficionados in Philadelphia at the turn of the century, editor Francis Richter of Sporting Life extolled the “steady progress” baseball had made as business and sport since the inception of the National League. “Every patron of the sport,” he began, “knows that baseball is a fixed and stable-business which […]

Mislabeling all winter baseball played in California as “California Winter League” ignores the uneven color lines that existed in that time and place.

Prince Edward Island native and H&D League alumnus Vern Handrahan with the Kansas City Athletics in 1966. (Prince Edward Island Sports Hall of Fame)   The Halifax and District (H&D) Baseball League was a postwar offspring of the Second World War when Nova Scotia, and Halifax in particular, served as a major debarkation point for […]

Gerry Nugent and the Phillies were flat broke. Worse than that: They were concave broke. Not only were they penniless, they were in debt to the National League. NL president Ford Frick went looking for somebody to rescue the franchise. Bob Paul, sports editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, was approached by local sports promoter […]

On September 21, 1954, the Atlanta Crackers, champions of the Double A Southern Association, and the Houston Buffaloes, champions of the Double A Texas League, squared off in Atlanta’s venerable Ponce de Leon Park in the first game of the 32nd annual Dixie Series, the South’s version of the World Series.1 Houston finished the regular […]

Babe Ruth, right, battled fiercely with Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert and manager Miller Huggins over the years. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   He filled the ballpark with fans who craved to see him hit the long ball. His home runs forever changed the game from scientific baseball to power hitting, and he helped […]

A list of hit sequences for players who completed a cycle during the 1920-2017 period.This is the online appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s “‘When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It’: Who Took the Cycle or Quasi-Cycle?”   Click here to scroll down for Table A-2: Sequences for Players Who Completed a Quasi-Cycle […]

Dummy Hoy taught his teammates sign language, which they began to use in game situations and even off the field. Initially, Hoy when at bat had to turn around to look at the umpire’s hand signal in order to see the call, ball or strike. Opposing pitchers would rush him. In 1887, after adopting the […]

In the typical telling of the Jackie Robinson life story there are two acts. The leading figures in both acts are White men. Act I is the run-up to White baseball: Pasadena, UCLA, the United States Army, the Kansas City Monarchs, the scouting of Clyde Sukeforth. This Act concludes in Branch Rickey’s Ebbets Field office […]

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. Twelve managers have won more games than Bill McKechnie. None has won more respect. Deacon Bill McKechnie was the first to lead three different teams to the World Series and the […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).   Frank Bancroft, the new manager of the Providence Grays, was having second thoughts. Had he done well to leave Cleveland, where he had been treated kindly and where, the previous season, he had led his club to a […]

Sports officials have long possessed a less-than-desirable reputation in the eyes of the general public. Negative images of baseball umpires—and the conflicts that arise between them as arbiters of the rules and others—have been promulgated for well over a century. For example, Voigt described the umpire of the late nineteenth century as “…America’s manufactured villain.”1 […]

The headline in the March 13, 1903, edition of the New York Times read “Baseball Grounds Fixed.” The nonbylined article described an agreement, announced by American League President Ban Johnson, that a plot of rocky land was leased for the construction of a ballpark to be occupied by the newly minted New York American League […]

I wish that someone had told me when I was 15 years old that Willie Stargell was starting a five-year tear that would transform him from a good home run hitter to one of baseball’s superstars. If they had, I would have taken more mental snapshots of the man who was not yet  “Pops.” While […]

It has become almost as rare as the major-league Triple Crown, and even more so than its statistical opposite of a pitcher winning 20 games in a single season. Since 1980, there has been only one pitcher who lost 20 games in a single season—21 to be exact—and there is no reason to think baseball […]

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives” – Jackie Robinson As people and events recede into the mists of the past, people and events that have resonated in our own times become as remote to the next generation as ancient history is to ours, and our task is […]

The yardstick for enshrinement in Cooperstown is generally determined by a player’s ability to dominate a decade. Dale Murphy more than met that standard. Crippled by recurring knee problems that required mid-career surgery, Murphy retired with 398 home runs—one fewer than first-ballot inductee Al Kaline and 16 more than 2009 inductee Jim Rice. When he […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 24, 2004.   Black America at the end of the 1920s was a very different place than it had been just a few years earlier. The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centers of the North, which had […]

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone could do it. The hard is what makes it great.” — Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own (1992)   One might not think summer evenings at the ballpark and the staid atmosphere of America’s concert halls have much in common, […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 4, No. 1, in Spring 1985.   THE COURT HOUSE This is that theater the muse loves best. All dramas ever dreamed are acted here. The roles are done in earnest, none in jest. Hero and dupe and villain all appear. Here falsehood skulks […]

INTRODUCTION Someone should have told Charles H. Weeghman to be “careful of what you wish for,” because wishes sometimes come true. Weeghman found fame and fortune in turn-of-the-century Chicago with a chain of downtown quick-lunch restaurants. Like many of his contemporaries, he itched to be involved in the world of sports, and after a few […]

On June 21, 1952, the Harrisburg, Pa., Senators of the Inter-State League announced plans to sign a female player to a contract. She was Mrs. Eleanor Engle, 24, a 132-pound stenographer at the State Capitol. She worked out with the club at shortstop the next day, but did not play in the game against Lancaster. […]

As the 1959 Winter Meetings approached, both the nation and baseball were on a roll. For America, the postwar economy was firing on all cylinders. The Space Race against the Soviet Union was on, and a burly, proud nation was confident of ultimate victory. Television ratings toppers like Father Knows Best reflected a culture that […]

This article is based on the presentation I gave at SABR 48 in Pittsburgh in 2018 to address the issue of game length which has become a hot issue in recent years. In 2014, then-commissioner Bud Selig announced the formation of a committee to investigate the issue. Since taking office, current commissioner Rob Manfred has […]