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Los Chorizeros baseball played an essential role in the life of the Mexican American community of East Los Angeles.

In their book The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong tell a small but striking story of the racial insensitivity of Justice Harry A. Blackmun.1 It happened during the drafting and circulation of opinions in Flood v. Kuhn, the 1972 baseball antitrust case.2 As the story goes, when Blackmun circulated the […]

This article was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s August 2021 newsletter.   If Fred Odwell isn’t the most obscure home run champion in the history of major league baseball, it’s only because the competition is surprisingly stiff. After all, who remembers Oyster Burns, who shared the National League lead in 1890, or Braggo […]

In 1876, the United States was a century old and had 38 states. Grant was president, and Custer met his end at Little Big Horn. Alexander Graham Bell was demonstrating his telephone, but Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb was still three years away. In Chicago, horse drawn streetcars rattled along cobblestone streets in front of […]

1908 Reach All-Americans with Mike Fisher (Rob Fitts Collection)   The “King of Baseball” was on the prowl for a new opportunity. Mike Fisher, known by everybody as Mique, was a bom promoter and bom self-promoter. He was a risk taker, tackling daunting projects with enthusiasm and usually succeeding. He was the quintessential late-nineteenth-century American […]

Phoenix Indian School Baseball Team c. 1910. (Author’s collection)   To understand why America’s first peoples joined exhibition baseball teams that toured the country from the 1890s through the 1930s, it helps to review the US government’s boarding schools for native children. The stories of these exhibition teams and the federal boarding schools are closely […]

This paper explores potential areas of improvement in the JAWS statistic and proposes an alternative for evaluating candidates for the Hall of Fame. In 2004, Jay Jaffe created the Jaffe WAR Score system (JAWS) based on Baseball Reference’s bWAR.1 Its stated purpose is “to improve the Hall of Fame’s standards, or at least to maintain […]

Speaking before a banquet of baseball aficionados in Philadelphia at the turn of the century, editor Francis Richter of Sporting Life extolled the “steady progress” baseball had made as business and sport since the inception of the National League. “Every patron of the sport,” he began, “knows that baseball is a fixed and stable-business which […]

Pittsburgh Pirate Honus Wagner is the greatest shortstop of all time. Baseball guru Bill James ranks Wagner as the second greatest baseball player in history, behind only Babe Ruth. He 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 […]

If Bob Sheppard, longtime public address announcer for the New York Yankees, was class personified, Tex Rickards, who held a similar slot with Dem Bums, reflected the spirit of the “woiking” class Brooklynite.1 And while Robert Merrill, the classy Metropolitan Opera baritone, often sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at Yankee Stadium, at Ebbets Field the […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. “When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” — Lord Kelvin “One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter […]

One of baseball’s highest-regarded feats is the cycle: “A single, double, triple, and home run (not necessarily in that order) hit by a player in the same game.”1 In the history of major league baseball (1876–2023) there have been 351 documented regular-season cycles, including seven in the Negro Leagues.2 The distribution of the starting defensive […]

The 1915 season had been a tough one for Organized Baseball, and murky moods were probably spread widely across the sport as the annual meetings approached in November and December. As noted in a Sporting Life preview of the four-day meeting of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL), membership had plunged from 47 […]

From 1925 through 1948, the Greater Pittsburgh region was enriched by two major-league-caliber Black baseball franchises, led usually by the Homestead Grays, but temporarily surpassed by the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1932 through 1936. In the early twentieth century the region’s Black communities confronted challenges well beyond those of the Great Depression, principally the geographic fragmentation […]

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).   Frank Bancroft, the new manager of the Providence Grays, was having second thoughts. Had he done well to leave Cleveland, where he had been treated kindly and where, the previous season, he had led his club to a […]

Warren Ballpark in Bisbee, Arizona, has hosted baseball games since it first opened in 1909. (Courtesy of Jacob Pomrenke)   Today, the term “Cactus League” refers to an annual rite of spring: affiliated professional baseball’s preseason in Arizona. But MLB’s Cactus League was not the first! In 1910, a league far removed from the slick […]

Unlikely as it may seem, a careful reading of Louisville’s two major daily newspapers in January 1978 does not reveal a single article of local origination announcing that one of the city’s former sports cornerstones had passed away in upstate  New York. Perhaps it was a mark of shame to Louisville’s sense of  history that […]

During a five-week span in 1932, minor-league legend Buzz Arlett accomplished the Herculean feat of twice blasting four home runs in a game. That season, he wore the uniform of the International League Baltimore Orioles and led the loop with 54 round-trippers. It happened in the year immediately following his one and only bittersweet trip […]

What we have in this special edition of the Baseball Research Journal are four snapshots of events and personalities from the wide world of “baseball-and-the-law”: Roger Abrams on arbitration and the 1975 Andy Messersmith reserve-clause case; Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court’s 1922 decision in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League of Professional […]

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 […]

In 1944, even the Browns were able to win an American League pennant, having previously come close only when the George Sisler-led 1922 assemblage barely lost out to Babe Ruth and the pre-Lou Gehrig Yankees. But it could have turned out quite differently. Missing from the action The 1944 Red Sox were missing three of […]

In 1999 the Society for American Baseball Research completed a poll that ranked Harry Wright as the third largest contributor to 19th-century baseball. Though hindsight is often said to be 20/20, that is questionable in this case. In fact, the 19th-century perception of that question was quite different. In a November 1893 edition of The […]