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A crowd of 34,078 showed up for Opening Day 2012 at Tropicana Field. A group of 120 season-ticket holders carried an enormous American flag on the field for the pregame ceremony. The 2011 wild-card banner was lifted to the rafters, joining those from 2008 and 2010. Jim Dundee, son of boxing legend Angelo Dundee, threw […]

“Life moves pretty fast,” the title character of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off says after fooling his parents into thinking he is too sick to go to school. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Ferris, a high-school senior from a Chicago suburb, refuses to miss that day’s […]

When the Baltimore Orioles hosted the Louisville Colonels for an American Association doubleheader at Oriole Park on June 17, 1889, the visitors hadn’t won a game in almost four weeks. After defeating Baltimore on May 21, the Colonels had lost 20 straight, more than any other Association or National League team. Louisville’s 19th and 20th […]

“You see, it’s like this. You get the guy out a couple of times and the law of averages is bound to catch up with you.”  – White Sox starter Billy Pierce.1   Left-hander Billy Pierce led both leagues with a 1.97 earned-run average in 1955. His 20 wins led the American League two years […]

On August 24, 1918, the Chicago Cubs hosted the fifth-place Brooklyn Robins, who were 24½ games back of first place but had won nine of 15 games against the front-running Cubs. The second-place New York Giants were 10½ games out of first with a little more than a week left in the season and the […]

In 2019 a record 42,823 batters struck out1 — more than 17 per game. Dozens of pitchers today average a strikeout or more every inning. Yet the single-game record of 21 strikeouts by a pitcher, set in 1962, still stands. Changes in the game — strict pitch counts and the rarity of starters going even […]

Scipio Spinks and Gary Nolan never faced off as starting pitchers in the major leagues during the five seasons, 1969 through 1973, when their careers overlapped in the National League. That’s a shame, because when the pitchers started against each other in the short-season Class A Northern League one night in August 1966, they combined […]

One of the rarest occurrences in baseball is the natural cycle. Of 334 known cycles in major-league history through the 2021 season, only 17 have been identified as natural cycles, meaning the single, double, triple, and home run happened in that order.1 In August 1886, three seasons after the first known natural cycle in big-league […]

“He’s either the poorest great third baseman or the greatest poor third baseman.”1 In perhaps one of the best non-Yogi-Berra quotes in baseball history, this was Branch Rickey’s assessment of Frenchy Bordagaray, a colorful outfielder/third baseman who played for several teams in the 1930s and 1940s. He was free-spirited enough to fit in with both […]

In his first full season in the majors, Dan Griner lost a big-league-most 22 games with the moribund St. Louis Cardinals in 1913. But few probably gave him a hard time for that dubious feat because “Big Dan,” a chiseled 200-pound former football player, didn’t take kindly to insults. He KO’d three teammates the following […]

Gene Conley excelled at the major-league level of two sports and is the only athlete to own dual-sport championships in major-league baseball and the NBA. Besides pitching for the World Series champion Milwaukee Braves in 1957, he was a member of three NBA championship teams with the Boston Celtics. He was the first player to […]

“I’ve done football for fun,” Lindsey Nelson once said. “I did baseball for a living.”1 He made an extravagant living as one of network television’s premier college and pro football broadcasters while following the New York Mets from worst to first and back for the first 17 years of their history. During three decades he […]

In the 1970s, three decades after his four-year major-league playing career had come to an end Johnny Welaj (pronounced “WELL-eye”) wrote to author Harrington E. Crissey Jr. to reminisce. “It was great to be associated with [Philadelphia Athletics manager] Connie Mack,” he said. “There are not enough good things that baseball can say of him. […]

Dave Danforth (1890-1970) is one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the history of the national pastime. He was “the icicle of the swirling vortex” for most of his career, and the mystery of what he threw and how he pitched has never been resolved.1 “Danforth, if you believe the boys in the […]

But for a bit of luck—if he’d been with a different organization, in which he wasn’t caught behind an all-star like Dick Groat or if he hadn’t suffered two broken bones in the seventh of what would turn out to be 10 minor-league seasons—shortstop Dick Barone might have had a longer stint in the major […]

When the curtain rose on the New York Yankees’ 1929 season, for the first time in team history each ballplayer wore a numbered jersey. Catching for New York that day was John Grabowski, the large block 8 on his back signifying his spot in the batting order. One of three backstops that Yankee manager Miller […]

Right-hander Tom Sturdivant pitched 10 years in the major leagues, for seven different teams over both leagues (wearing seven different uniform numbers). His first team was the New York Yankees, the team that first signed him, and he won Game Four of the 1956 World Series for them, evening the series against the Dodgers at […]

The 1906 season opened for the Boston Beaneaters in Brooklyn on April 12. Making his major-league debut that day with Boston was outfielder Johnny Bates, a compact left-handed swinger (5-feet-7 inches and around 170 pounds). Batting fifth in the lineup, Bates strode to the plate to face Harry McIntire in the second inning. The 22-year-old […]

Tim Murchison was a 23-year old left-hander who went north in the spring of 1920 with the eventual World Champion Cleveland Indians. He had excelled at Guilford College and logged about 600 innings in the minors. The St. Louis Cardinals had given him a brief look in 1917. But he worked only five innings for […]

These days, a man coming from Gayville might be taunted in some circles, feted in others. There appear to be two Gayvilles in South Dakota, one an unincorporated place on the western edge of the state and the other a town in Yankton County in southeastern South Dakota. In 2010, the population was 407. In […]

Chick Morgan could have boasted of playing in the major leagues with the Detroit Tigers, or of a 17-year career spanning three decades as a professional player. Yet, somehow, it seems quite plausible that his greatest satisfaction could have been that 80 years after he began his first season in the minors, his great grandson […]

A decent hitter with some extra-base power and a defensive standout at both catcher and first base, Jack Kerins1 spent his seven-season major league playing career entirely in the American Association. He also put in two brief stints as an interim club manager. When throwing arm miseries brought Kerins’ playing days to a close, he […]

Marty Keough came from a family with a deep sports tradition that so far encompasses four generations and both genders. His father was Cecil D. “Zeke” Keough, a star right-hander at the University of California at Berkeley. Marty said, “He beat USC, I think, two or three times in one year. That was his claim […]

What came to be known as the Yankees Dynasty began under the twenty-four-year stewardship of Jacob Ruppert. Known as “Colonel” because of his prior service in the National Guard, Ruppert owned and operated a profitable brewery, served four terms in the United States Congress, and in 1915 purchased half of the New York Yankees. His […]