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A Tennessee native who played baseball and basketball at Georgia Tech,1 Bob Tillman caught the eye of Red Sox scout George Digby, who signed him out of Middle Tennessee State on January 18, 1958. Tillman, a 6-foot-4 right-hander, earned a place in baseball history with his first official major-league at-bat, which left the yard in […]

Metropolis, Illinois, is the hometown of Superman, the comic-book character who leaps tall buildings in a single bound. Back in the day, Robert Dale “Hawk” Taylor was the genuine article when it came to baseball. Unlike mild-mannered Metropolis Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent, who left his office, entered a phone booth and came out as […]

4,256. 755. 5,714. 511. .366. As baseball has often been described as a game of numbers, fans, reporters, and students of the game would most certainly recognize the preceding list of significant digits. These were the career accomplishments forever linked to the respective immortals Pete Rose, Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan, Cy Young, and Ty Cobb. To that list, another […]

Glenn Beckert had a good-but-not-great career for the good-but-not-great Chicago Cubs teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those teams starred a quartet of baseball immortals in Ernie Banks, Ferguson Jenkins, Ron Santo, and Billy Williams. Steadily and sometimes spectacularly manning the keystone sack and batting second, Beckert made four All-Star teams, received MVP […]

“I think I was put on this earth to be a coach.”1 “Have you ever had an itch you can’t scratch? Athletes have one for life, a ‘jock’s itch’ that a ton of Tinactin won’t cure.”2 So writes Tom House, former left-handed pitcher who, after he retired from baseball, went on to pursue graduate studies. […]

“Moe was just scary. The whole league was afraid of him.” – Terry Ryan, future Minnesota Twins GM and teammate of Moe Hill’s in 19731 “A living legend, the Hank Aaron of Class A ball.” – Rick Wolff, a Midwest League opponent of Hill’s in 19742   If ever a player personified minor-league baseball, it […]

Ken McBride anchored the pitching rotation for the Los Angeles Angels during their first three years in the American League. He led the staff with 36 wins during those years and was the starting pitcher for the American League in the 1963 All-Star Game. In that game, in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, McBride faced a […]

For young Dickie Cole, growing up in Southern California in the 1930s, dreams of becoming a major leaguer must have seemed as distant as the nearest big-league team, the St. Louis Cardinals, half a country away. Lying on the living-room floor and listening to France Laux doing the Cardinal games on KMOX radio in St. […]

To his contemporaries, he was a hard-nosed player, a throwback to earlier days, when players like Ty Cobb played the game as if their lives depended on it. Opponents labeled him “hard-headed” and “red-nosed.” Latinos had their own title for him: El Divino Loco or the Divine Madman. But it was Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster Bob […]

A versatile defender who played as a utilityman in both the infield and outfield, Harry Hanebrink played for the two Milwaukee Braves teams that won the National League pennant in the 1950s, one of which won the World Series. He was also part of a much larger team that captured an even more important victory […]

“If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I’d still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better. He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw and […]

Don Wilson’s early death in mysterious circumstances ended what might have turned into an exemplary pitching career. Born in Monroe, Louisiana, on February 12, 1945, Donald Edward Wilson moved with his family to Southern California and settled in Compton, a city just south of Los Angeles. He played in the local Little League and for […]

Box scores don’t lie. But sometimes they cannot tell the whole truth. Like a classic novel, whose layers are best understood by reading its criticism, a box score’s secrets can be revealed through game stories. Context enables a deeper understanding of history, allowing the pieces of the puzzle to expose the entire picture. The April […]

The underachieving Milwaukee Braves were on the verge of losing their eighth consecutive game and falling further behind in the pennant race. They trailed by a run in the bottom of the ninth of their July 22, 1959, contest against the Cincinnati Reds. Second baseman Roberto “Bobby” Ávila, acquired one day earlier and in the […]

In the summer of 1975, a London punk named John Lydon was invited to audition for a rock band after he was seen wearing a T-shirt with the phrase “I HATE PINK FLOYD.”1 He passed the audition and adopted the name Johnny Rotten. The band became the Sex Pistols, and the pen-scrawled shirt entered punk-rock […]

Hoyt Wilhelm pitched in 1,070 games in his 21-season major-league career, a record at the time. Of those games, 1,069 were played in the United States. The knuckleballer’s only appearance in Canada occurred on June 17, 1970, a little more than a month before his 48th birthday, when his Atlanta Braves matched up against the […]

The fourth-place Philadelphia Phillies seemed to have the upper hand on the defending World Series champion Milwaukee Braves once again. The Phillies had defeated the Braves in their previous five meetings in 1958, including come-from-behind victories in the bottom of the ninth the past two evenings. They threatened to make it six straight wins when […]

When the 1959 season opened, the Milwaukee Braves were favored to win their third consecutive National League pennant. Picked for first by 147 (65 percent) of the 226 writers polled by The Sporting News, they were listed no lower than third place on the remaining ballots. A similar consensus had the Los Angeles Dodgers pegged […]

For a while, Boston National League fans who saw Brooklyn play at Braves Field had a decent chance of seeing a lot of extra baseball. On May 1, 1920, the teams played 26 innings to a 1-1 tie – still the longest game in major-league history as of spring 2022. Two days later they played […]

Jim Ray Hart broke into the majors with the San Francisco Giants as a 21-year-old third baseman in 1963.1 From 1964 through 1967, he averaged 29 home runs per season, finishing in the top 10 in the majors three times. Accolades included placing second in the 1964 National League Rookie of the Year voting,2 receiving […]

Willie Mays returned to New York when the San Francisco Giants traded him to the Mets on May 11, 1972.1 “It’s a wonderful feeling to be coming back here,” said Mays, who left with the Giants for California after the 1957 season. “I’ve always loved New York and I liked San Francisco, but this is […]

Buffalo hadn’t hosted a major-league baseball game in over a century. The Queen City was once home to the National League’s Buffalo Bisons, who last played on October 10, 1885,1 and the Federal League’s Buffalo Blues, who last played in Buffalo on September 8, 1915.2 While Buffalo witnessed several successful minor-league teams throughout the twentieth […]

The 1985 All-Star Game – a 6-1 National League win at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis – lacked drama. For the crowd of 54,960, that may have been disappointing. But for members of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, which operated the stadium, it was a relief. In its fourth season as home of […]