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The longest homerless stretch of Joe Mauer’s Hall of Fame career began in August 2014 and carried into 2015, spanning 324 plate appearances and lasting until Mauer’s Minnesota Twins visited the Pittsburgh Pirates on May 20. With the score tied in the top of the 13th inning, Mauer hit Antonio Bastardo’s pitch over PNC Park’s […]

Dick Fowler (left) and Phil Marchildon (right) at Philadelphia Athletics spring training in the late 1940s. (Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)   It was no coincidence that the Philadelphia Athletics’ two best pitchers in the 1940s were from the province of Ontario.1 There was a simple reason for it: Connie Mack’s Athletics had […]

Minnesota Twins slugger Harmon Killebrew was in an unusual home-run slump and appeared to leverage a late-season exhibition game and related home-run derby to get back on track. In dramatic fashion on the next day against the Baltimore Orioles, he slammed his 500th and 501st home runs to join an elite group of nine players […]

On Monday afternoon, May 26, 1930, at Yankee Stadium, Washington was looking to win its sixth in a row and 10th of its last 11. The Senators started the day in first place in the American League with a 25-10 record, four games ahead of the second-place Philadelphia Athletics. New York stood third at 18-15. […]

The 1994 major-league season is remembered primarily as the first since 1904 to be cut short by a strike and not have a postseason. Interim Commissioner Bud Selig officially called an end to the season on September 14,1 just over a month after the last games were played. The season did have several bright spots, […]

Frank Robinson wasn’t used to seeing Olympic Stadium so full. He looked up at the structure’s Teflon sky and told himself, “Hey, there’s fans in the upper deck!”1 Indeed, throughout Robinson’s three years as manager of the Montreal Expos, big crowds had been rare. Yet to many of the 31,395 spectators, some who recalled the […]

The 2000 National League Division Series against the NL West champion San Francisco Giants and the wild-card New York Mets was the first postseason series played at Pacific Bell Park. The Bayfront stadium was opened in April of that year. The Giants finished with a 97-65 regular-season record, 11 games ahead of the Los Angeles […]

If Calvin Schiraldi had never been called upon to pitch in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, we might think of his career in baseball as a story of encountering and overcoming adversity — a series of comebacks. But Red Sox manager John McNamara did call Schiraldi in from the bullpen in the […]

Phil Gagliano grew up in a baseball-oriented family. Though his grandparents on his father’s side of the family hailed from southern Italy (Sicily and Calabria), and on his mother’s side from the Tuscany region, the second-generation Americans took to baseball whole-heartedly. Phil’s father, Ralph, who was a director of purchasing at a wholesale food business […]

Over the past 10 years, baseball fans in Minnesota have been given the gift of watching this beloved sport in two new, spectacular ballparks — Target Field and CHS Field. While those in the stands relax on a beautiful summer evening at the Twins game in Minneapolis or the Saints game in St. Paul, there […]

Arguably the first great first baseman of the twentieth century, George Sisler was the greatest player in St. Louis Browns history. An excellent baserunner and superb fielder who was once tried out at second and third base even though he threw left-handed, Sisler’s primary asset was his left-handed swing, which he used to notch a […]

Jack McKeon never made it to the major leagues as a player but he eventually made his mark in the majors as a manager and general manager during his long career in baseball. Along the way he earned numerous accolades and will be remembered as one of the more colorful managers and general managers in […]

After college Bill Essick had to choose between life as a musician and one in baseball.  He chose baseball and left his native Illinois to begin his minor-league pitching career in Salt Lake City.  After a brief promotion to the major leagues and roughly a dozen years as a successful minor-league manager, Essick joined the […]

Imagine being able to say you’d seen the big-league debuts of Ernie Banks, Roberto Clemente, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Bill Mazeroski1 – not to mention an All-Star Game, a no-hitter, a four-homer game, and a batter hitting for the cycle. Some baseball lovers spend a lifetime hoping to see those kinds of milestones. Bill […]

A star athlete in high school and at the University of Michigan, Elmer Gedeon played a handful of games for the Washington Senators in 1939. He died while flying a bombing mission over France in 1944, less than a week after his 27th birthday. James T. Taaffe, a fellow officer in the U.S. Army Air […]

There is a kind of Holy Trinity of obsessions all serious baseball fans believe in. First, they fixate on statistics perhaps more than fans of any other major sport in America. Even the most casual fan at a game is bombarded with a barrage of facts and figures from attendance tallies to numbers quantifying a […]

With Hall of Famers Waddell and Marquard at the top, the roster of major-league pitchers nicknamed Rube contains about 20 entries. Among the least-remembered of these is Rube Peters, a pre-World War I right-hander who had brief tours of duty with the Chicago White Sox and Brooklyn Tip-Tops. Like countless other aspiring hurlers, Peters lacked […]

“It exceeded all proportion, It could not be contained, It bloomed round like a dark sunrise, It glistened in the rain. The little boys with crew cuts Or blond locks oh so fair Would look and cheer with wonder At Oscar Gamble’s hair.” —Roy Peter Clark1   Oscar Gamble made his big-league debut in 1969 […]

Of the 22 men who played for the Boston Red Stockings over the five years from 1871 through 1875, 17 were American-born and the other five were born in other countries. There was one Canadian, one Irishman, and three from England. George Hall (Stepney) and Harry Wright (Sheffield) were both English natives. So was Samuel […]

Second baseman Newt Allen’s Kansas City Monarchs teammates gave him the nickname “Colt” in 1922 because he was the youngest member of the team.1 Over the course of a 23-plus-year career in the Negro Leagues that also included stints in other countries, Allen proved to be one of the best players ever to man the […]

George Pfister spent 56 years in Organized Baseball. However, he played just once in the majors, with the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers. It came on September 27, in the second to last game of the NL pennant-winners’ season. Pfister, then 23 years old, came in for the last five innings – but there was just one […]

As fast as he was on the bases and in the outfield, at times it seemed Ken Henderson couldn’t outrun an expectation first pinned on him at age 17. While it came with a big name, Henderson said the expectation was never one he sought. Instead, he often considered it unfair and unrealistic. But it […]

SABR’s Bud Metheny/Virginia Eastern Shore Chapter met on Sunday, September 15, 2019, at the Williamsburg Library. Thanks to Paul Boren and Alexis Collins for their great presentations yesterday. 1) Scouting the Mind – Alexis Collins With the rise of analytics and video in the scouting of players, is it possible to develop a quantifiable method […]