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Oscar Charleston is shown here in the uniform of the Santa Clara Leopardos, circa 1923. The 1923-24 Leopardos, for whom Charleston played, were considered the best Cuban team in history—a team so dominant that halfway through the season the league simply declared them champions and then reorganized. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   April […]

Unlike major leaguers from the Bambino to Turkey Mike, Roberto Clemente never forged a career on the silver screen. But his one celluloid connection in The Odd Couple is worth probing because of his legend — and because it is a textbook example of the manner in which simple anecdotes and truths of any kind […]

For the past two years I have pored over approximately 2,000 media guides, from the  1960s through 2007, to find material for this article. In addition to learning about players’ off-season jobs, marital status, children, fathers, brothers, hobbies, and other oddities, I found out a great deal about media guides themselves. Let others devour reams […]

On November 11, 1918, minor-league owners from 40 teams, representing seven leagues, were preparing for a somber discussion about whether baseball would even be played in the 1919 season1 when word came down that the World War had ended. The “war to end all wars” had caused an existential crisis throughout the baseball world. The […]

All managers think about strategy, but one can argue that no manager this side of John McGraw changed our prevailing understanding of baseball strategy as much as Earl Weaver. In his seminal work, Weaver on Strategy, and in various quotations uttered while holding court, Weaver presented insights that may have long been implicitly understood by […]

Editor’s note: This article is a fictional press release from our special issue of The National Pastime looking ahead to the future of baseball in the 21st century.  INTERCONTINENTAL BASEBALL LEAGUE SCHEDULED TO START LEAGUE PLAY IN 2039 (Geneva, Switzerland) — Several national baseball organizations throughout the world jointly announced today the creation of the […]

Honus Wagner, the greatest shortstop of all time, was a longtime hero in Pittsburgh. So how did the beloved Pirate get routed in the 1925 race for sheriff of Allegheny County? He ran into presidential politics in Pennsylvania.Pittsburgh Pirate Honus Wagner is the greatest shortstop of all time. Baseball guru Bill James ranks Wagner as […]

 Minor-League Winter Meeting The prospect of war cast a long shadow over the National Association meeting for 1941. Europe and Asia had been mired in conflict for more than two years by this time, and just days after the meetings concluded, the United States would be forced to enter the second worldwide war of the […]

In the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s, some professions have remained sacrosanct. The country appears light years away from having a woman president. Baseball, with its archconservative leanings, has virtually negated the active role of women within its sacred domain. It is ironic that both of these bastions of male chauvinism […]

Hall of Fame executive Ed Barrow secured his legacy during his years with the Yankees. He joined New York’s front office after the 1920 season as their first de facto general manager. The next year the team won its first pennant; during his 24-year tenure, from 1921 through 1944 (through 1947 he stayed on as […]

In 1876 a base on balls was charged against a batter’s average, then 11 years later in 1887 it is credited to the average. These anomalies were the manifestation of a decades-long discussion on how to think about the base on balls. This discussion only affected averages in those two years, but continued beneath the […]

The Curse of the Bambino hovered over the Boston Red Sox for more than 80 years, from the time they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees after the 1919 season until early in the 21st century. The team that won four world championships in the 1910s didn’t win another until 2004. A close […]

While the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club was the most enduringly influential of the clubs that sprang up prior to the Civil War, it was not the first to play the game, or the first to be organized, or the first to play a “match game,” or the first to play by written rules. If the […]

The researchers at Protoball — the de facto authorities on baseball’s ancestral and descendant games — unsurprisingly categorize the popular recreational sport of kickball as a baseball derivative.1 But how did kickball originate? In On the Origins of Sports: The Early History and Original Rules of Everybody’s Favorite Games, authors Gary Belsky and Neil Fine […]

William Howard Taft was a baseball fan, but he was neither the first nor the most fanatical on the Supreme Court that decided the Federal Baseball antitrust case — not by a long shot.

When the Yankton Treaty was signed in 1858, the United States government acquired a large parcel of land: the northernmost part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, much of which had been Sioux Indian land. In 1861, the area was incorporated as the Dakota Territory. Its borders changed over the next decade, at one time […]

As the 1959 Winter Meetings approached, both the nation and baseball were on a roll. For America, the postwar economy was firing on all cylinders. The Space Race against the Soviet Union was on, and a burly, proud nation was confident of ultimate victory. Television ratings toppers like Father Knows Best reflected a culture that […]

Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, who played for the Cincinnati Reds 36 years before Jackie Robinson came along, should be credited with crashing the color barrier. —Felipe Alou Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, who played for the Cincinnati Reds 36 years before Jackie Robinson came along, should be credited with crashing the color barrier. —Felipe […]

The 2014 baseball season’s adoption of expanded instant replay review not only introduced another wrinkle into our national pastime, it opened the door into a brand new arena of statistical analysis over 50 years in the making.

Happy Felton, an all-around entertainer of a long-gone era, won fame in television’s infancy as the creator and host of Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang — a kiddie-oriented television program broadcast live from Ebbets Field. The Knothole Gang is as much a part of the Golden Age of post-war Brooklyn, and the era’s Dem Bums nostalgia, […]

The first season of the National League ended on a bittersweet note. While the league crowned Chicago its inaugural champion and all eight franchises remained solvent through the season, the magnates went into their first postseason meeting with a major concern: Two franchises had failed to finish their schedule, and dealing with the issue threatened […]

  Actor Chadwick Boseman portrayed Jackie Robinson in “42: The True Story of An American Legend,” released in 2013.   Jackie Robinson was one of the most complicated men to ever play the game, and so it is no surprise that fictional representations of him largely fail to fully capture this nuanced hero. His is […]

For years, the convention has been to view the Federal League, the last challenger to actually take the field against Organized Baseball, as having been doomed from the start, ultimately suffering an “inevitable collapse.” Upon closer examination, however, the events of the Federal League war demonstrate once again that certainty is most expertly determined in […]

Early days with the Montreal Royals. March 6, 1946. (Courtesy of Rachel Robinson and the Estate of Jackie Robinson)   On Tuesday, October 23, 1945, 15 of Montreal’s sportswriters and broadcasters were invited to a press conference at the home of the Montreal Royals, Delorimier Stadium, and were promised “a major announcement.” The Triple-A International […]