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The team that was the last to integrate had been – 26 years earlier – the first to field a native of Mexico in the major leagues. The team was the Boston Red Sox, who took until 1959 to field a Black ballplayer – Pumpsie Green. In 1933, however, when Baldomero Melo “Mel” Almada took […]

On April 6, 1970, the Cincinnati Reds were a club transitioning from one era to another. By midseason the Reds would leave their longtime home at Crosley Field for the brand-new Riverfront Stadium. Without necessarily knowing it, the Reds stood on the brink of the most successful era in team history. Expectations were raised. Cincinnati […]

The Mets have an unusual affinity for finding themselves in notable marathons. Take that late May 1964 game at Shea Stadium, for instance — a nightcap of a doubleheader that went on for 23 innings and nearly 7½ hours and ended in a San Francisco Giants victory behind Gaylord Perry’s 10 frames of relief. Fast-forward […]

Although he had an excellent 20-season major-league career, Rafael Palmeiro may be best remembered for something he did off the field. Called to a congressional hearing before the 2005 season to discuss the use of steroids in baseball, he wagged his finger while emphatically denying using banned substances. Just five months later, about two weeks […]

“I just want to get hits.”1 With this sentiment, 21-year-old César Cedeño paced the Houston Astros to a 10-1 thumping of the first-place Cincinnati Reds on August 2, 1972, hitting for the cycle in front of an Astrodome crowd of 31,838. Cedeño was in his third big-league season. He had finished fourth in National League […]

With the designated hitter in place in both leagues starting in the 2022 season, no pitcher will be able to match what Mel Stottlemyre did in 1964. As the New York Yankees won their 11th game in a row and closed in on a fifth straight pennant, their rookie sensation had five hits in five […]

On June 21, 1967, the fourth-place Boston Red Sox faced the ninth-place New York Yankees in the second game of a two-game set at Yankee Stadium. The Red Sox had easily won the previous game, 7-1, behind the five-hit pitching of Gary Bell and home runs by Joe Foy and Carl Yastrzemski. The loss was […]

This is a tale of two 24-year-old right-handed starting pitchers, two lefty relievers, and a Tuesday night matchup at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium that produced what the New York Times called a game of “classic pitching and outrageous contrasts,” as José DeLeón of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Ron Darling of the New York Mets rewrote […]

The largest crowd to witness a baseball game in Canada so far, 59,260 boisterous fans, jammed Montreal’s Olympic Stadium for a doubleheader between the Expos and Pittsburgh Pirates on July 27, 1979.1 The fans had plenty of reasons to be enthusiastic that evening. Not only were the Expos involved in the first real pennant race […]

Ralph Kiner’s 301 home runs, the product of an unparalleled slugging spree in the late 1940s and early 1950s, ranked first in Pittsburgh Pirates franchise history when Willie Stargell made his big-league debut in 1962. Blossoming into a prodigious, consistent power threat over the next decade, Stargell overtook Kiner in 1973 with his 302nd career […]

The misery that was the 1986 National League East pennant race for every team except the New York Mets was just about over. There was just a week left in the season; the Mets had already won 102 games. They led the second-place Phillies by 20 games and were in Pittsburgh on Sunday, September 28, […]

In the mid-1960s, noted artist Norman Rockwell lived and painted in the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts.1 The baseball-related events that took place there on Thursday, May 13, 1965, seem perfectly suited to his brush—wholesome, all-American, small-townish, and, to a twenty-first-century eye, vanishingly obsolete. Schools in the small city of North Adams let out at […]

No matter your perspective, the 1919 Patriots Day opening day doubleheader at Braves Field just didn’t feel the same as those previously played in the twentieth century. Many things swirled in the festive atmosphere that April 19, including the lingering sweet aroma of the January 15 molasses tank explosion/flood tragedy in the North End that […]

On April 2, 2017, the Giants and the Diamondbacks met on Opening Day at Chase Field in Phoenix. The 49,016 in attendance saw a glamorous pitching matchup of postseason stalwart Madison Bumgarner for the visitors and 2009 Cy Young Award winner Zack Greinke for the home team. The game delivered more than the Mad Bum-Greinke matchup. There […]

For Jim Kaat, the last of his 31 career shutouts undoubtedly was the most amazing of them all. It came June 4, 1980, a 10-inning blanking of the New York Mets at Shea Stadium – just over a month after the St. Louis Cardinals purchased the 41-year-old left-hander from the New York Yankees. Kaat had […]

The National League’s 1969 season was one of the most memorable in history because of the legendary collapse of the Chicago Cubs and the improbable rise of the New York Mets to claim the East Division title and go on to win their first-ever World Series. Both teams had reputations for being perennial losers, so […]

In 1947 Clint Hartung, the Hondo Hurricane, was going to be the biggest thing to hit New York baseball since Babe Ruth. Like the Babe, the 6-foot-4, 215-pound giant could pitch and hit home runs out of sight. The Giants signed Hartung in 1941. He had led his high-school team in Hondo, Texas, to the […]

A switch-hitting reserve catcher (.228 career batting average) who came up in the Red Sox farm system, Tim Blackwell had his best season at the plate as a Chicago Cub, hitting .272 and catching full-time in 1980. Blackwell grew up in San Diego and participated in Little League baseball. A star in two sports at […]

Every great city has its own great bar. Elizabethan London had the Mermaid Tavern. Paris has its Deux Magots. In New York City in the 1950s, there was no shortage of options, but for sports fans there was only one choice: Toots Shor’s. Initially located at 51 East 51st Street, across the street from Radio […]

Of the thirteen World Series (1903-1917) covered by Philadelphia sportswriter Billy Weart, the most important was in 1908. Non-writers overcrowded the press box, causing the scribes to form the Base Ball Writers’ Association, with the goal of securing ballpark creature comforts in the press facilities, which were often congested with fans who were unwilling to […]

Days after his graduation from college in June 1915, Rupert Mills was signed by the Newark Peppers of the Federal League. A Newark native and a locally renowned schoolboy athlete, Mills was deemed the potential fan magnet desperately sought by Peppers management. Unhappily, the new recruit proved unequal to the task, batting an anemic .201 […]

Excepting some otherwise brief ventures as a young man, this 14-year-old runaway spent nearly 60 years in professional baseball as player, manager, owner, innovator and groundskeeper. In this latter capacity, Henry Fabian was considered “one of the great masters of his craft.”1 St. Louis Browns owner Bob Hedges tried to entice him from the Texas […]

Were the Boston Red Sox the last major-league team to sign a black player? Or were they one of the first? Did the Red Sox actually have a black ballplayer long before Pumpsie Green and 22 years before Jackie Robinson debuted with the Dodgers? Havana’s Ramon “Mike” Herrera totaled 276 at-bats in 1925 and 1926 […]

Although Marty Castillo appeared in only 70 games for the 1984 Detroit Tigers, he is best remembered for his clutch postseason production. Not only did Castillo knock in the winning run to clinch the pennant in the third game of the American League Championship Series, but he also put the Tigers ahead to stay in […]