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After breaking into the American Association in 1882 at the age of 28, Leech Maskrey had a run of four-plus seasons in the big leagues. During this time he accumulated more than 1,500 plate appearances in 414 games. Maskrey remained active in baseball until he turned 50, with his post-major-league involvement in the sport including […]

“He was the greatest manager I ever played for, perhaps the greatest manager who ever lived, and that includes managers in the big leagues. I’ve never played for a guy who could get more out of every ballplayer than he could. He knew how to communicate with everybody and to treat every player as an […]

Among numerous icons from Cuba’s somewhat murky pre-revolution past, swarthy-skinned pitching ace José de la Caridad Méndez Báez stands at the very apex of the heap. Among the young nation’s first true national sporting heroes, the rawboned fastball hurler maintains an indelible image as one of the earliest icons of island baseball history. But it […]

Explorer Juan Ponce de León was way off. More than five centuries before Global Positioning Systems became commonplace, his obsession with the mythical fountain of youth took him from the Spanish Caribbean colonies to the still unexplored Floridian peninsula, where he met his demise when the natives did not take kindly to his quest. In […]

“I had a gift. That’s about all there was to it.” – Bill Byrd1 A Negro League ballplayer had no greater testimonial to his individual play than selection to the annual East-West All-Star Game. Of those who were pitchers, only three appeared in seven or more games. Leon Day led the way with nine, followed […]

James Edward Rice was born on Sunday, March 8, 1953, in Anderson, South Carolina, to Roger and Julia Rice. Residents of the town say that even as a lanky teenager, “Ed,” as he was – and remains – known to his friends, showed promise. He led his 1969 American Legion team to the state finals. […]

A big man with a famous scowl and a name that felt ripped from a James Bond film, Mo Vaughn was a hulking 6-foot-1, 225-pound lefty hitter whose frame dangled over home plate. Baseballs seemed to disintegrate on impact when he exploded out of his crouched stance, extending one arm to the sky on his […]

During the 1889 season, rookie right-hander Alex Ferson parlayed pitching intelligence and an excellent curveball into a commendable record for a last-place team, the National League’s Washington Senators. He was 17-17 (.500) for a club that was hapless otherwise (24-56, .300). But a promising start went unfulfilled. It soon became apparent that the 5-foot-9, 165-pound […]

For a brief period in the early 1890s, Al Johnson was an influential, if not overly trustworthy, actor on the major league baseball scene. A wealthy young industrialist, he was the first and the most important of the money men attracted to the Players League cause. In the league’s formative days, Johnson recruited other capitalists […]

Fielder Jones was an exceptionally talented ballplayer and manager. He played while professional baseball was still in its infancy, from 1896 to 1908 and briefly in 1914 and 1915. He won pennants with Brooklyn of the NL in 1899 and 1900 and with the Chicago White Sox in 1901 and 1906. As the White Sox […]

Long ago, baseball crossed the Pacific Ocean from the U.S. to Japan. Soon the reserve clause followed. It would reach back from Japan to the U.S. and bite its own tail, like a snake forming a ring that burst into fire–the “Working Agreement.” The first man it trapped was Masanori “Mashi” Murakami, the first Japanese […]

Sled Allen may have been born in Missouri, but he found both his home and his calling in the West Texas town of Lubbock. He fielded a baseball team there in the 1920s and won what was then the country’s most prestigious semipro tournament in 1925. He was a top wrestling promoter and later became […]

Ponchatoula, Louisiana, in the 1930s was a small town that had suffered a number of lumber mills closing in the previous decade. By the 1930s, it was known primarily as a strawberry farming region. It was into this area that on October 2, 1934, Earl Lawrence Wilson was born. He later changed his name to […]

On May 25, 1950, Philadelphia Phillies rookie pitcher Bob Miller shut out the Pittsburgh Pirates on eight hits for his third straight victory of the season. Phillies coach Benny Bengough spoke to the Associated Press after the game about his young hurler: “… He hasn’t any trick deliveries but he can hit a dime with […]

R C Stevens, said one of his minor-league managers, was “capable of breaking up a game anytime he took his bat in hand.” He hit 191 home runs in 12 minor-league seasons, but didn’t meet the test in the major leagues, and played only briefly in four seasons, three of them (including 1960) with the […]

The man who hit the first home run at Fenway Park was a native of North Grafton, Massachusetts: Hugh Frederick Bradley. Bradley’s parents were Joseph A. Bradley and Sarah Nutting Bradley and they celebrated his birth on May 23, 1885. Hugh had one brother, John E. Bradley, 11 years his junior. The first time we […]

After graduating from Duke University in 1974, John Poff made it to the majors for 31 games in 1979 and 1980. He hit .218 in 91 plate appearances. The first baseman-outfielder retired after the winter of 1981-82. “My career in baseball was frustrating,” he later said. “I wanted and felt I deserved a lot more […]

Frank Thomas played during an era when team owners looked upon their players as chattels. By their standards, Frank Joseph Thomas was considered a rebel. Much of his career was spent bickering with management over his worth to them. In his early career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Thomas’s adversary in such battles was the man […]

One of the most influential figures in the history of the sport, Charles Comiskey had a 55-year odyssey through professional baseball that ran the gamut: captain of one of the greatest teams of the nineteenth century; league-jumper during the 1890 players’ rebellion; one of the chief architects of the American League’s emergence in 1901 as […]

Baseball records, like other forms of knowledge, are not chiseled in stone. Our knowledge changes over time as new information comes to light.1 At the start of the twenty-first century, baseball’s consensus was that Jimmy “Nixey” Callahan had thrown the American League’s inaugural no-hitter, in 1902, and Bob Rhoads had tossed the first one for […]

Bobby Bonds was not expected to break into the majors in 1968,1 but the 22-year-old was hard to ignore by late June – he was tearing up the Pacific Coast League with the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate in Phoenix. Through 60 games, Bonds was leading the PCL in three categories with a .370 batting […]

Baseball folklore has it that Abner Doubleday “chased the cows out of Elihu Phinney’s cow pasture on an afternoon in 1839”1 and thus was inspired to invent the game of baseball. While home on leave from the United States Military Academy, as the story goes, Cadet Doubleday (Class of 1842) drew up the rules and […]

It would have been fitting if Rod Serling had gone to a baseball game in Geneva, New York, on August 22, 1961, and found himself trapped in some kind of twist ending – hit in the head by a foul ball, perhaps, to wake up alone in a deserted ballpark. After all, the danger of […]

Neither team was in contention when the Milwaukee Brewers and Cleveland Indians played a Labor Day doubleheader at Milwaukee County Stadium in 1973. In fact, both were under .500 and bringing up the rear in the American League East Division. Perhaps the biggest attraction was Gaylord Perry’s presence on the mound for Cleveland. The reigning […]