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It was like old times in New York City. Both of Gotham’s professional baseball teams were in late-season division races. A quirk in the schedule had both the Mets and Yankees as home teams on September 12. And both clubs were hosting their closest adversary in their respective divisional races. The Mets had a matinee […]
Most Phillies fans have Father’s Day 1964 etched in their hearts and minds. In the first game of a doubleheader against the New York Mets in Shea Stadium, Jim Bunning pitched the seventh perfect game in major-league history and the first in the National League since 1880. Acquired from the Detroit Tigers in the offseason, […]
It looked like the best-of-five National League Championship Series was going to be a short one. The Montreal Expos had outhit Los Angeles in Game One, but they couldn’t get the big hit when they needed it. The frustrating loss was their 10th in a row at Dodger Stadium and the 19th in their last […]
A sellout crowd packed Fenway Park and then waited 20 minutes for the rain to subside. Not a long wait to honor a man who had spent 23 years donning a Red Sox uniform. When he started in 1961, Carl Yastrzemski was just a kid charged with the unenviable task of replacing Ted Williams in […]
The New York Mets were in a bad mood. After bolting out of the gate and looking seemingly invincible with a 20-4 record to start the 1986 season, they had appeared all too human, posting just a 6-5 record on their recently concluded 11-game road trip. Manager Davey Johnson, in his third season as the […]
Larry Walker’s hold on a major-league job was slowly slipping away. His first full season in the big leagues had gone reasonably well; in only 419 at-bats he nearly posted a 20-20 season.1 Walker was even named to the 1990 Topps’ All-Star Rookie team. But a 1991 spring-training slump had carried over into the regular […]
The 1968 Chicago White Sox opened the season with 10 straight losses; they then followed up the disastrous start by winning 11 of their next 17 games. An astute fan might not have been surprised by either set of events.1 The previous season’s team had finished in fourth place, three games behind the league-leading Boston […]
The July 7, 1974, game between the Oneonta (New York) Yankees and the Newark (New York) Co-Pilots of the Class A New York-Penn League had to be delayed for 27 minutes while the sun set behind center field at Newark’s Colburn Park.1 Before and after that interruption, Oneonta pitcher Greg Diehl left Co-Pilots hitters completely […]
In 1980 Minnesota’s Gary Ward wasn’t even in the majors long enough to use up his rookie status. (His official rookie season took place in 1981.) Even so, against the Milwaukee Brewers on September 18, 1980, Ward accomplished what fewer than 200 other major-leaguers – and only 12 actual rookies – did when he hit […]
In the 30-year period from 1957 to 1986, the Baltimore Orioles compiled the best record in the major leagues, collecting three World Series championships, six American League pennants, and eight division titles along the way. And then suddenly, after winning the 1983 World Series, the team went into a rapid decline, winning progressively fewer games […]
The Cleveland Indians hosted the Boston Red Sox for a doubleheader on the first Sunday in August 1958. The two teams were pretty much neck-and-neck in battling with four other teams for second place in the American League standings, with the Yankees far out in front of the tightly-bunched pack. The Indians were 17 games […]
“I didn’t even slide. I’m very proud of that.”1 This was Boog Powell’s description of his first-ever inside-the-park home run, nine seasons and nearly 200 homers into a career better known for clearing fences than dashing around basepaths. Yet it was his running that put an exclamation point on the Baltimore Orioles’ 15-run shellacking of […]
Bill Cissell went from a farming community in Perry County, Missouri, to becoming “baseball’s costliest player.” The right-handed multi-position infielder played nine seasons in the major leagues from 1928 to 1938. He was found in 1949 “painfully ill and penniless in a gloomy one-room Chicago apartment” living with his 13-year-old son Gary. He’d been there […]
Baseball is a difficult game to play well for those with two good arms but Pete Gray did it with one. Gray played only one season in the major leagues, 1945, but that was enough to have a lasting positive influence on people with disabilities. His accomplishment enlightened those of us who are perfectly formed, […]
From 1955 through 2003, Clearwater’s Jack Russell Stadium served as the spring-training home of the Philadelphia Phillies. (After he died in 1990, it became Jack Russell Memorial Stadium.) One would surmise that Russell, a right-hander who pitched in 557 games over the course of 15 seasons in the major leagues, must have been quite a […]
“I realized that this was a short-lived career, and I did something to prepare myself for what was to come later. I never spent a winter without doing something constructive. I never played winter ball. I went to school or I took courses in advertising, radio and TV production. I even took books on the […]
Two days in the major leagues – back to back. Swede Carlstrom’s big-league career began on September 12, 1911. He wrapped up his career on September 13. He didn’t enjoy an auspicious debut with the Boston Red Sox. The Boston Globe noted that Carlstrom, “late of the Lawrence [Massachusetts] club,” had a difficult game at shortstop. “The young […]
From the 1960s until his death in 1991, Bert Convy was a household name with an authentic nice-guy persona. But before that, he was a minor-league baseball player. It was not well known to the millions of people who knew him as an entertainer—game show host, actor, and, briefly, member of a 1950s rock group […]
Suggest today to Costen Shockley that judging by the newspaper headlines of 50 years ago he must have been quite a high-school baseball player, and he replies with a prideful chuckle that conveys barely a trace of conceit, “Yeah, I was pretty good.” Indeed he must have been. After dominating on the baseball diamond for […]
First we’ll use Spahn, then we’ll use Sain, Then an off day, followed by rain. Back will come Spahn, followed by Sain And followed, we hope, by two days of rain. —Gerry Hern, Boston Post, September 14, 1948 Nobody would mistake Post sportswriter Hern’s famous lines for “Casey at the Bat” or even poetry […]
“The integrity of the game is the umpires. Nobody else. The entire integrity of the game is the umpires.” — Doug Harvey1 It was the late 1980s. The Cincinnati Reds had replaced the Big Red Machine with the Nasty Boys, and the Nastiest of the Nasty Boys was Rob Dibble. In the beginning of […]
In 1922, pitcher Karl Schnell became the first graduate of Palo Alto High – a school with several notable alumni in athletics1 – to make it to the majors in baseball. The son of German immigrants had starred in college for the Saint Mary’s Phoenix ball club. Playing with and against future Hall of Famers, […]
Brooklyn boy John Franco grew up watching the New York Mets at old Shea Stadium, which became his home park for 14 of 21 seasons in the majors. There the pitcher entered games to the ringing chords of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Franco was good – he had to be, to play until the […]
SABR Quebec Chapter meeting reportCage aux Sports Resto-Bar, MontrealNovember 5, 2011 Present: Jack Anderson; Jack Beausoleil; Jacques Doucet; Robert Duval; Ghislain Henri; Maxwell Kates (SABR-Toronto, guest); Alain Usureau; Norm Watt (SABR-Toronto, guest); Bill Young (Meeting Chair) Regrets: Alain Dumas; Daniel Papillon; Alexandre Pratt; and Philippe Cousineau who sent this comment from Paris … Missed Game […]