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  New Yorkers love baseball. Their passion for the national game (and its bat-and-ball precursors) can be traced back into the earliest decades of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, scores of juvenile and adult teams in New York vied for bragging rights or trophy balls on emerald fields and dusty lots.1 Boys […]

The 13-year-old third baseman from Colorado, who identified his race as Hispanic American, didn’t look far from home when he named his favorite player, who also happened to be his favorite athlete and his hero: Colorado Rockies’ Carlos Gonzalez. A 14-year-old Minnesotan, who proclaimed his primary position on his select baseball squad as third base, […]

  Smile. Tilt your head. Lean back. A little more. You’ve got it. Right there. Beautiful! Snap! With each pose, each shutter click, Marla Collins crossed the line from Chicago Cubs ballgirl to Playboy model. Both paying roles relied on sexuality: one teased and implied, the other overt. And before you hyperventilate about “pornography,” know […]

Today not too many people remember Dexter Park, but in the first half of the twentieth century it played host to many the top baseball stars of the majors and the Negro Leagues. Those who attended games there remember it with respect and affection. Some stoutly maintain that it was in Brooklyn, but it was […]

Among the more noteworthy events in major-league baseball in 2010 were a) the San Francisco Giants winning their first World Series since 1954 (when the franchise was based in New York) when they defeated the Texas Rangers in five games; b) the in-season retirement of several stars, including future Hall of Famers Randy Johnson, Frank […]

Entering the 1920 season, the defending American League champion Chicago White Sox were not favored to repeat. Almost all experts picked Cleveland, who’d finished second in 1919. The prognosticators cited Chicago’s poor performance in the 1919 Series, doubts about the team’s pitching depth, the retirement of first baseman Chick Gandil, and suspicions that the Sox […]

0-10, 10.32: That is the major-league career line for one William T. Stecher of Riverside, New Jersey. If you look it up, the record book tells you that Stecher also holds the records for the “most career games by a pitcher who lost all his games (0–10)” and “most career innings by a pitcher with […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume III (1988).   If you spent most of your formative years in Nebraska, as I did, the major leagues were like a fairy tale. In the late 40’s and early 50’s the closest major league park was in St. Louis. Harry Caray’s voice […]

After winning three pennants in a row from 1891 to 1893, the Boston Beaneaters were denied a fourth consecutive championship during the 1894 season when the brawling Baltimore Orioles earned their first National League title. The team’s prospects for 1894 were derailed early that January when veteran catcher Charlie Bennett lost both of his legs […]

The American Association (AA) began operation in 1882 as a major league, challenging the National League’s (NL) hegemony in professional baseball that had existed since the NL’s founding six years earlier. The AA had a mostly successful ten-year run until it merged with the NL in 1892. An interesting question is whether, at any time […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume IV (1989). Editor’s Note: Why are Cub books different? Because Cub fans are different. No team in baseball has such a long-term tradition of efficient losing as the Cubs. So Cub fans don’t write books full of poetry about Babe Ruth (or about […]

Introduction and context It is a tale of precedent set and precedent broken. While the combined majors and minors confab would one day be called the winter meetings, minor-league meetings were first actually held in October, so Buffalo was among the first Northeastern cities to host the meetings in December (December 5, to be precise), […]

Moving into 1909, change was in the wind. All ballparks had been, up to that point, made of wood, but Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, and St. Louis’ rebuilt Sportsman’s Park opened that year as baseball’s first steel-and-concrete facilities.1 More umpires were hired so that the majority of big-league games would now feature two […]

Jackie Robinson slides to home plate in an attempt to avoid the tag during a game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers game at Ebbets Field on May 13, 1956. Catcher is Ray Katt. Batter is Clem Labine. It was one of the times he didn’t make it. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME […]

On January 1, 1925, local newspapers announced that the St. Paul Saints of the American Association had been sold to Bob Connery, longtime New York Yankees scout. This started a close relationship between the two teams which included a regular shuttle of players between the Saints and Yankees. What was not known at the time […]

1931 All-Americans in front of the Oriental Hotel in Kobe (National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, NY)   It was a tour initially framed by the dreams of retired fringe major-league outfielder Herb Hunter, the continuing quest of a Japanese newspaper publisher to bring Babe Ruth to Japan before he retired as a player, and the metastasizing […]

After a 90-loss, ninth-place season in 1966, the Boston Red Sox entered spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, with a new manager and a new outlook.Spring training 1967 was quite different from spring training 1966 for the Boston Red Sox. We can remember 1966 as the year when Earl Wilson was turned away from the […]

Editor’s Note: On this page, Parts One and Two, which were published separately in the Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 issues of the Baseball Research Journal, are combined into one article as the author intended. Sandy Koufax (SABR-Rucker Archive)   American Jews have long had a love affair with baseball. They have played baseball since […]

A crowd heads toward Braves Field. The ticket and administration building (shown at left) still stands and today serves as the headquarters for the Boston University police. Note the trolley tracks in the foreground, indicating the path of transit vehicles exiting from within the ballpark itself. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   The best stories […]

Growing up in New England, it was an article of faith that the 1967 Red Sox won the American League pennant with the help of divine intervention — that it was an “Impossible Dream.” With the passage of time, this depiction has become less satisfying, if for no other reasons than that it gives short […]