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At Fenway Park, the umpires take the field through the same runway as used by the visiting team.   All professional umpires use the same basic mechanics on the field, from rookie ball to the major leagues. This includes positioning behind home plate and on the bases, as well as how to indicate “out,” “safe,” […]

Bordering Hoboken — which dubs itself the “birthplace of baseball” because of the legendary 1846 game between the Knickerbockers and the New Yorks at Elysian Fields — Jersey City stands on the edges of the Hudson River and Newark Bay, somewhat obscured by the baseball notoriety of its neighbor to the northeast and the epic […]

Manager Paul Richards, right, seen here shaking hands with New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel in 1958, is often credited with the invention of the “Waxahachie Swap,” where a pitcher changes place with a position player before returning to the mound. Richards was born in Waxahachie, Texas. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Baseball managers have platooned players […]

Dick Higham, with the 1877 Syracuse Stars. Second row from the back, left to right, Higham is the third seated with arms crossed. (Public Domain)   Any book about major-league umpiring would not be complete without a mentionof Richard “Dick” Higham.1 He was a professional player in the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players […]

Orchardist John Chapman, otherwise known as Johnny Appleseed, spent the early 1800s sowing apple seeds throughout Ohio and beyond, expecting them to grow into bountiful trees. Bob Feller, the winningest and to many the most beloved pitcher in Cleveland Indians history, embarked on a similarly ambitious crusade after his Hall of Fame career. He spent […]

This present study is an outgrowth of my presentation in 2004 at SABR 34 in which I addressed the pattern of scoring in a game, such as the possible importance of one-run wins, come-from-behind wins, etc. The first point to establish is the rate of scoring by home and road teams in each inning. The […]

A .357 Magnum fired at arm’s length slams your eardrums with 168 decibels of volume. Rumbling car subwoofers can pump out as much as I76 dB. A police siren logs in around 140 dB, a rocker’s wailing guitar at 120 dB. Of course, it mat­ters how far you are from the source, but even at a […]

Who are the best fielders of all time, at each position? How can we compare a Bill Dickey with a Bill Freehan, a Bobby Doerr with a Bobby Grich, an Amos Strunk with an Amos Otis? With these age-old riddles in mind, I closeted myself in a room with The Baseball Encyclopedia, a pocket calculator, […]

When the American League expanded for a second time in 1969 and split into a pair of divisions, the California Angels could be excused for still thinking of themselves as an expansion team, since they had come into existence only eight years earlier. Over the course of this brief lifespan, the Angels had compiled a […]

The full track during the early years of Yankee Stadium was a precursor to the “warning track” that is now a ballpark standard. (Library of Congress, Bain Collection)   Yankee Stadium was built for baseball, but it turned out to be an exceedingly versatile structure. Football was played there. Championship boxing, concerts, religious revivals. Popes […]

October 16, 1958 Robert Hyland, General Manager, KMOX Radio In my opinion, there is no more effective way of strengthening mutual understanding among nations than through the people to people approach, and I am convinced that international sports engagements are playing a very important role in building international friendship and good will. For that reason, […]

Wow! Look at all those bright colors. The baseball field at the Astrodome suddenly resembled a Tequila Sunrise. Yellow, red, and orange floated over jade green Astroturf as the players took their positions. Perplexed fanatics couldn’t take their eyes off the gaudy new 1975 uniforms on the backs of their Houston Astros. Thankfully, the back […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume III (1988).   If you spent most of your formative years in Nebraska, as I did, the major leagues were like a fairy tale. In the late 40’s and early 50’s the closest major league park was in St. Louis. Harry Caray’s voice […]

Happy Felton, an all-around entertainer of a long-gone era, aggressively and successfully marketed his skills as a dance-band leader, musician, master of ceremonies, actor, comedian, and radio-stage-vaudeville performer for two decades beginning in the late 1920s. Then he won fame in television’s infancy as the creator and host of Happy Felton’s Knothole (or, Knot-Hole) Gang—a […]

One of the most exciting accomplishments in major league baseball is exciting because of its rarity. When a batter hits for the cycle, he gets a single, double, triple, and home run in the same game. From 1876 through the end of the 2017 regular season, there have been only 319 instances of a batter […]

Jackie Robinson, center, shows his son Jack Jr. and the son of Roy Campanella the statue of Abraham Lincoln that stands outside the Essex County Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey in February 1951. (SABR-RUCKER ARCHIVE)   On July 18, 1949, Jackie Robinson appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify against Paul Robeson, […]

A memorial program was conducted in Spokane in July to commemorate the eight Spokane players and the bus driver, who died on June 24, 1946, when their team bus careened off a narrow road in the Cascade Mountains. (Courtesy of David Eskenazi)   Blessedly, professional baseball has had very few terrible moments, incidents that end […]

  The major league baseball clubs of Cleveland and Cincinnati have much in common. They call the same state home. Both have established a proud tradition that dates back to the nineteenth century, and have enjoyed success and endured failure. They are mid-market teams who can afford to compete when managing resources wisely, but can’t […]

With a runner on third base, the pitcher faces a dilemma. Throwing breaking balls is risky because the ball may go past the catcher, thereby allowing the runner to score without a hit. But if the pitcher avoids throwing breaking balls altogether, the batter can anticipate fastballs exclusively, increasing his ability to record a hit, […]

Choices … Decisions: A player has already connected for one double, one triple, and one homer in the game and needs only a simple single in his next plate appearance to achieve the cherished cycle—one of baseball’s rarest accomplishments and one that will inscribe his name permanently in the record books. If he comes through […]

Cliff Kachline has been deeply involved in sports: writing, sports memorabilia, and almost everything else connected with sports — especially baseball — for more than a half century, and through it all he’s maintained his boundless energy, youthful high spirits, and keen sense of humor. In The Politics of Glory: How the Baseball Hall of […]

Many different methods exist for projecting the performance of major leaguers in a variety of statistical categories for an upcoming season. These projection systems include Brad Null,1 Bill James Handbook,2 CAIRO,3 CBS,4 CHONE,5 ESPN,6 Hardball Times,7 Hit Tracker,8 KFFL,9 Marcel,10 Oliver,11 PECOTA,12 RotoWorld,13 and ZiPS.14 Despite the availability and prevalence of these systems, there has […]

In an article in the 1994 Baseball Research Journal, Charles Blahous explained a system to determine the probability of various players in various seasons putting together a 56-game hitting streak. I will describe some improvements to Mr. Blahous’s method, which I believe result in probabilities that are more accurate and, in almost all cases, lower […]