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When the Boston Red Sox scored three ninth-inning runs to walk off the Seattle Pilots on August 7, 1969, it probably wasn’t divine intervention at work; it was probably just a first-year expansion team frittering away a game, the way expansion teams do. But with hundreds of nuns1 and one of America’s most prominent churchmen […]

If Bobby Ojeda tantalized the team he once played for in Game Three of the 1986 World Series, Ron Darling tortured the team he grew up rooting for in Game Four. A night after Ojeda got the New York Mets on the board for the first win of the Series by holding Boston to 1-for-7 […]

Among trivia buffs, Houston Astros pitcher Larry Yount is often cited as having the shortest career in big-league history. Called into one game in 1971, he was injured while warming up, and was removed without facing a batter. About 1,000 players have reached the big leagues for only one game1 — including defensive substitutes who […]

Darryl Strawberry struggled early in the 1985 season. He injured his hand on May 11 when he made a diving catch and tore a ligament in his thumb. The injury forced him to miss seven weeks. He was still voted to the National League All-Star team that year. (He seemed embarrassed by his selection.) Strawberry […]

A teenage Willie Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons. Mays’ father did not allow him to join the Black Barons full-time in 1948 until school was over at the end of May. (Courtesy of Memphis Public Library)   The Birmingham Black Barons and the Kansas City Monarchs met at Rickwood Field for Game Two of […]

A scorecard from the 1967 season of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the team’s last of 72 successive years in the International League and its predecessor. (Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)   Monday September 4, 1967, the annual Labor Day holiday in Toronto, was a day of many endings. For schoolchildren it was the […]

The 1966 New York Yankees were two seasons removed from a seven-game World Series loss to a powerful St. Louis Cardinals team in 1964. The 1965 season saw the Yankees collapse into sixth place in the American League, their worst finish since 1925. As the 1966 season began, the team’s future looked slightly brighter. In […]

Editor’s note: Have you ever wondered where the statistics that appear on Baseball-Reference.com or Retrosheet.org come from? For those of us who access those indispensable websites every day, it’s hard to imagine a time when historically accurate baseball stats weren’t readily available. But those stats weren’t handed down through the years in pristine, pre-formatted fashion […]

Equally at home rounding the bases or rounding up cattle, Dave Philley played major-league baseball with the same no-nonsense efficiency he successfully utilized in operating his 557-acre ranch and managing his other business enterprises. David Earl Philley was born on May 16, 1920, in Garret’s Bluff, a suburb of Paris, Texas, in the northeastern part […]

Seventy percent of the world is covered by water, the rest is covered by Devon White. Considered one of the best defensive outfielders to play the game, White was a human highlight reel who worked tirelessly to hone his craft. He was a raw athlete when he was drafted as a third baseman in the […]

Few if any baseball men have worked harder for longer than Mel Didier. He pitched just two years in Class D, but he spent more than 60 years in professional baseball as a scout and executive. As former Los Angeles Dodgers GM Fred Claire said, “I don’t know of anyone who has been in more […]

In 1956, the fall of my freshman year at Ohio State, I went out for the frosh basketball team. (Freshmen then were still not eligible for varsity sports at major colleges.) I had no great expectations considering my modest portfolio of high school hoops exploits. My primary motivation was to meet the head freshman coach, […]

A Wisconsin hero on the football gridiron and the baseball diamond, Robert James ‘Red’ Wilson was a bright, talented, and dedicated student-athlete who later enjoyed a good major league career as a catcher for the Chicago White Sox, the Detroit Tigers, and, briefly, the Cleveland Indians from 1951 to 1960. One of the greatest athletes […]

Few players have managed to overcome greater challenges to succeed in professional baseball than Gary Ryerson. In 1952 an outbreak of poliomyelitis, more commonly called polio, swept the United States. The infectious virus attacked mostly the legs and caused muscles to become weak, poorly controlled, and ultimately paralyzed. The epidemic struck 57,628 Americans.1 Of those […]

Negro League historian James A. Riley portrays Leroy Grant as a “hulking first sacker [who] was susceptible to bonehead plays in the field and on the bases, and evidently made some critical errors during the 1917 season.”1 In truth, although Grant did have some rough times in 1917, he was considered by many of his […]

Bill Harman was a shy country boy who became a leader. He was a star basketball and baseball player at the University of Virginia. As the basketball team’s captain, he led the Cavaliers into the 1941 National Invitational Tournament. And then he played one summer for the Philadelphia Phillies, collecting exactly one base hit. He […]

When the Baltimore Orioles announced their 2015 Hall of Fame class, it seemed fitting that Gary Roenicke and John Lowenstein would be inducted together. The two previously shared left field duties for the Orioles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not an ideal situation for Roenicke – a former first-round pick still in the […]

On the last day of the 1955 regular season, 18-year-old Roger Marquis played one inning in right field and batted once for the seventh-place Baltimore Orioles. That was his only major league appearance, and he was out of professional baseball altogether by age 21. Roger Julian Marquis was born on April 5, 1937, in Holyoke, […]

Mark DeJohn was never a household name. As of 2015 he was monitoring minor-league practices for the St. Louis Cardinals. Though his title, field coordinator, was modest and his public profile was low, DeJohn fulfilled his two primary goals: “I just want to stay in the game and be a Cardinal.”1 DeJohn was a light-hitting, […]

Sixteen members and guests of the Bob Broeg St. Louis Chapter gathered at The Original Crusoe’s Restaurant in South St. Louis on Monday, December 19, 2016. Chapter president Brian Flaspohler called the meeting to order. He began by recounting some of the subjects discussed at the recent chapter board meeting, including the need to replace the stolen […]