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“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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Bringing Cliff Garrison on board was an experiment which didn’t work out all that well. The 1928 Red Sox weren’t in too much of a position to be highly selective, though. They’d finished in eighth place — last place — for five of the prior six years, and were seventh the one year they weren’t […]

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 […]

Charles Ernest Brinkman spent parts of six seasons as a backup catcher in the major leagues, all but four games of the last season with the Chicago White Sox. Despite a .172 career average, he remained in the majors as long as he did on the strength of his stellar defense. As a collegian at […]

Although Ernest “Spoon” Carter was never in the top tier of Negro League aces, he had enough pitching acumen to remain in great demand over the course of a 17-year career that also included stints in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, and Canada. In fact, teams’ desires for Carter’s services placed him at the center […]

If his only claim to fame had been giving a young pitching prospect named James Bell his nickname, “Cool Papa,” he would have perhaps been the answer to a baseball history trivia question. Had his sole contribution to the story of the game been that of teaching a young Satchel Paige how to throw what […]

Over the course of three decades in the early 20th century, Robert Joseph Connery was a major-league scout and minor-league player, manager, and owner. He was the closest friend of Hall of Fame manager Miller Huggins, and was Huggins’s scout with both the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees. Best known as the […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Those fans among the 20,413 at the Angels-Blue Jays game on April 15, 1994, who left after the seventh inning must have been shocked when they eventually heard the final score. Through seven innings, California led Toronto, 6-3, in what could be describe as a typical major-league game, but over the next two innings the […]

At 6:30 A.M. on July 14, 1969, Bill Stoneman was a private first class in the Vermont National Guard, fulfilling military obligations to his country at Camp Johnson in Colchester, just north of Burlington. At 4 P.M., with the day’s duties complete, Stoneman got into his car and headed to another job in another nation […]

Roberto Clemente played his entire 18-year career with the Pirates and recorded exactly 3,000 base hits, one of 32 players to reach that coveted mark as of 2021. He had a .317 batting average in 2,433 games. Clemente had four hits in 39 games and five hits in eight games, the final time on August […]

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 […]

By Andrew North Some 70 cranks from Canada and the United States gathered on November 3-4, 2018, in London, Ontario, for the third annual Canadian Baseball History Conference. The Conference featured 14 half-hour research presentations, in addition to these special events: A tour of Labatt Park, the world’s oldest continuous use baseball park. Named Tecumseh […]