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  Like 9/11, the sinking of the Titanic clings to American memory, slicing across sex, race, age, geographical, and class divides. Generations later, mental snapshots of the disaster develop at the briefest mention. An iceberg on a moonless night. The Law of the Sea: women and children first. The fortunate watching from insufficient lifeboats while […]

Baseball aficionados often argue that certain records will never be broken. A classic example is Cal Ripken’s 2,632 consecutive-games-played streak. However, for the most part, the arguments given to support an assertion that a particular record will never be broken are subjective and not analytically rigorous. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine […]

Jackie Robinson, center, shows his son Jack Jr. and the son of Roy Campanella the statue of Abraham Lincoln that stands outside the Essex County Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey in February 1951. (SABR-RUCKER ARCHIVE)   On July 18, 1949, Jackie Robinson appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify against Paul Robeson, […]

The 1954 Winter Meetings opened on December 6 at New York’s Hotel Commodore with an agenda filled with issues that had plagued the sport for years. They included the ongoing decline of the minor leagues, the increasing misalignment of major-league franchises with the national population, and player-management conflicts. Owners left the meeting two days later […]

Despite the picturesque setting of Honolulu, baseball’s owners were a largely dispirited lot as they headed into the 1982 winter meetings. They were a year and a half removed from a brutal strike in which they had failed to achieve their main objective of direct player compensation for free agents; many teams were losing money; […]

The Brooklyn Robins reached the World Series for the third time as a National League franchise, under manager Wilbert “Uncle Robbie” Robinson during the 1920 season. Brooklyn’s first National League championship occurred in 1890, when they finished first in the NL with an 85–44 record; they tied the American Association champion Louisville Colonels in the […]

When a group of major-league baseball all-stars traveled to Japan in November 1979 for a series of games, it represented a shift, of sorts. Since the end of World War II, most baseball tours of Japan had been by single teams. A US all-star team had not played in Japan since the Eddie Lopat All-Stars […]

In February 1933 – when Jackie Robinson was 14 years old – Heywood Broun, a syndicated columnist at the New York World-Telegram, addressed the annual dinner of the all-White New York Baseball Writers Association. If Black athletes were good enough to represent the United States at the 1932 Olympic Games, Broun said, “it seems a […]

Willie Mays’ skills had diminished by the time the New York Mets traded for him in May 1972. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   After almost 20 years as a Giant, Willie Mays was traded from San Francisco to the New York Mets in May 1972. It was a shock to the baseball world, since Horace Stoneham, old-fashioned […]

Willie Mays with the Minneapolis Millers in 1951. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   The New York Giants purchased the Minneapolis Millers in 1946. It took five years for Minneapolis fans to fully process the impact. A charter member of the American Association in 1902, the Millers had a rich history that extended to the final decades of […]

Small-market teams often complain about the unfairness of baseball’s financial structure, contending that teams in large markets have disproportionate access to money to spend on players, giving them an unfair competitive advantage. Big-market teams disagree. But when it comes to the movies, there can be no argument. At the cinema, big-city teams such as the […]

Jackie Robinson lifts a pennant to commemorate his being traded from the Brooklyn Dodgers to the New York Giants on December 14, 1956, at his home in Brooklyn. (SABR-RUCKER ARCHIVE)   In October 1956, the Brooklyn Dodgers faced the New York Yankees in the World Series for the sixth time in Jackie Robinson’s 10 years […]

A real “put-down” for a club is to get shut out in both games of a doubleheader. This happened to the Red Sox on Labor Day of 1974 when the Orioles almost put the Beantowners out of business for the season. Actually, they were close games, with Ross Grimsley beating Luis Tiant 1-0 in the […]

From the beginning of professional baseball in the nineteenth century and continuing through the first decades of the twentieth, Georgia was a popular site for major-league spring training. Between 1871 and 1953, more than 20 major-league baseball franchises from 14 cities held their spring training in the state (see table 1).[fn]In order to prepare these […]

  On June 24, 1972, Bernice Gera became the first woman to umpire a professional baseball game. Immediately after the game ended, she quit. She fought baseball for five years for the chance to umpire a professional game. Why fight so long for an umpiring career, just to give it up after one game? We […]

Nelson Rockefeller stands with Jackie Robinson, who served as a special assistant on community affairs for the New York Governor in the 1960s.   Between 1960 and 1968, Jackie Robinson was widely regarded as the most famous Black Republican in the country. Following his announced retirement from baseball in January 1957, and in remarkably short […]

  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 […]

Advertising billed The Great American Pastime as a comedy that would “keep us all in stitches.”   Following the Second World War, the baseball genre film enjoyed considerable popularity with Hollywood filmmakers hoping to recapture the commercial success of The Pride of the Yankees (1942). As that film re-told Lou Gehrig’s life story, many of […]

Vinland baseball team circa 1920. (Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas)   Before sport became an integral aspect of Americana, early iterations of games catering to the working class were quite violent. In the eighteenth century, prizefighting, cockfights, and bear baiting, accompanied by drinking and gambling, were common recreational activities. Pious Americans in Protestant […]

Coming off their fourth National League pennant of the decade and seventh overall, the Boston Beaneaters were not considered a lock for the 1898 championship. Baseball touts and prognosticators were divided as to whether the club was up to a repeat, or if Baltimore, which had upset Boston in the Temple Cup, or New York, […]

League Park as seen from the air. Note the large bleacher section in left field. (Strongsville Public Library / Public Domain)   In 1914 and 1915, for the only time in baseball history, two baseball teams, one a major league team and the other a minor league team, played a full schedule of games in […]

  In mid-March 1921—amid delay in the criminal proceedings pending against those accused of corrupting the 1919 World Series—baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis placed the eight indicted Chicago White Sox players on the game’s ineligible list. “Baseball is not powerless to defend itself,” an impatient Landis declared. “All these players must vindicate themselves before they […]