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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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’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. 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 […]

“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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

John McGraw, seen with Philadelphia Phillies manager Pat Moran, led the New York Giants to a record-setting 26-game winning streak in 1916. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, BAIN COLLECTION)   On a dreary Friday afternoon, September 29, 1916, 43-year-old John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, stood in the third base coaching box at the Polo […]

Histories of the Philadelphia Phillies portray the club’s admission to the National League (NL) as a straightforward and swift process. Early in 1883, League president Abraham G. Mills informed former star player and old friend Alfred J. Reach that the Worcester franchise was moving to Philadelphia. Mills asked Reach — now a successful business entrepreneur […]

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 […]

In order for a baseball team to achieve its ultimate objective (winning the World Series), it must first, during the regular season, win the most games in its division (or, since 1994, have the best winning percentage among the second-place teams) and thereby proceed to postseason play. Moreover, the absolutely essential component for winning the […]

The Harrisburg Giants joined the Eastern Colored League in 1924 with a powerful lineup centered around player-manager Oscar Charleston, a future Hall of Famer.1 But the Giants faced a problem: Pennsylvania’s blue laws prevented baseball from being played on Sundays, a significant hit to the team’s fiscal prospects.2 Yet a solution stood just 40 miles […]

Fred Kipp, Gil Hodges, Wally Yonamine, Vin Scully, Roy Campanella and Don Demeter at the October 18 reception at Chinzanso, Tokyo. (Rob Fitts Collection)   The Brooklyn Dodgers straggled into Idlewild Airport in Jamaica, Queens, on the morning of October 11, 1956. It had been a long, grueling season, ending the day before with a […]

All baseball fans are familiar, if not from the movie, then from the grainy newsreel footage, with Lou Gehrig’s legendary speech at Yankee Stadium home plate on July 4, 1939. Yet that was not the first nor the last time a speech would have a dramatic impact at The House that Ruth Built. Baseball, football, […]