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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 […]

“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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Like the 1987 world champion Minnesota Twins, the 1909 St. Paul Gophers featured a home-grown first baseman, a hard-nosed leader nicknamed “Rat,” and an outstanding center fielder from Chicago. Unlike the Twins, the Gophers were cruelly prevented from playing major league baseball because of the prevailing apartheid of the time. In the face of almost […]

As the major-league ownership gathered in Chicago, Illinois from December 8 through 10, 1931, the Great Depression was a silent partner to the discussions. Unemployment rose dramatically in 1931, topping out at 16 percent and showing no signs of relenting. Attendance dropped at almost every ballpark during the 1931 season, and overall attendance for the […]

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 […]

On August 29, 1966, the Beatles played what would be their final live concert ever at Candlestick Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. The event provided much enjoyment for the concertgoers as the band, still wearing matching suits and their mop-top hairstyles, played a setlist of hits and other music they had recorded over […]

COLLABORATOR’S NOTE: Between his big-league broadcasting debut with the 1953 St. Louis Browns and his current work as the radio voice of the Houston Astros, Milo Hamilton worked for the St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, and Pittsburgh Pirates. He came to Atlanta with the Braves in 1966 and stayed for ten seasons. […]

When the 1941 major-league baseball season ended, the Chicago White Sox were in a familiar spot: for the third straight year and the fifth time in six seasons, the White Sox had finished in the American League’s first division under manager Jimmy Dykes. While the team’s first pennant since 1919 still seemed a long way […]

This article was originally published in “The SABR Book on Umpires and Umpiring” (SABR, 2017), edited by Larry R. Gerlach and Bill Nowlin.   Umpires “Bullet” Rogan, Robert Boone, and Hurley McNair, Ruppert Stadium, May 2, 1940. (NOIR-TECH RESEARCH)   “What about our Negro baseball umpires? They are cussed, discussed, made the subject of all […]

In 1887, for the only time in major league history, a strikeout required four strikes. Giving hitters an extra strike obviously would increase offensive production. However, an interesting (and unanswered) question is the size of the increases across various performance measures. This article presents the first statistical analysis of this issue, made possible by the […]

Although calculations have been made, computer simulations have been analyzed, and the coefficients of restitution and drag of baseballs in flight have been measured in laboratories, the actual relationship between number of home runs hit and stadium elevation has not been empirically observed over a wide range of elevations in order to compare with predicted […]