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Stan Benjamin used to say, “If they let you steal first base, I would have batted a thousand.”1 He was easygoing with a great sense of humor, often self-deprecating. His personality must have been forged early in life because a cartoon of the top regional high-school football players in 1932 labeled him “happy-go-lucky” and showed […]

Suter Sullivan was a standout player on what was arguably the worst ballclub in major league baseball history, the woefully inept 1899 Cleveland Spiders. After the Spiders lost their 100th game of the season, the New York Times wrote, “Sullivan seems to be out of place on such a poor team as the Clevelands. He […]

Self-effacing and relentlessly confident, Joe McCarthy was a relatively silent yet authoritative force behind the success of the New York Yankees during 1930s and most of the 1940s. McCarthy’s Yankee teams regularly dominated the American League, and in many seasons New York faced little competition for the pennant. Although he was once famously scorned by […]

Although “Rube” Kroh played only six years in the major leagues (1906-12), his baseball history spans his entire lifetime. He played for numerous minor league teams and pitched some outstanding baseball. A list of his teammates as well as the players he pitched against would include many of the greats of the Deadball Era. Floyd […]

Gone and virtually forgotten today, Claude Ritchey was one of the key members of the first seven of Fred Clarke’s highly successful Pittsburgh Pirate teams of the early 1900s, a time when he acquired a reputation as a sure-handed, clutch-hitting second baseman and a durable performer. And even as late as 1964, after Bill Mazeroski […]

Jackie Tobin’s older brother, Jim Tobin, pitched in the major leagues from 1937 through 1945, first for the Pirates, mostly for the Boston Braves, and then for the last several weeks of his career for the Detroit Tigers. Though Jackie, an infielder, was a little more than eight years younger, the two played in Boston […]

Although obscured by the exploits of his Hall of Fame brother Orator Jim, John O’Rourke had a respectable, if short, major-league playing career. As a 30-year-old rookie for the 1879 Boston Red Caps, John batted .341, with a National League-leading 62 RBIs. But age, injuries, and the security of employment by the railroad cut short […]

Occasionally, a player is taken out of the lineup due to personal misfortune. But in 1930 a scheduled pitcher didn’t take the mound (or ever pitch again) because he died an agonizing death on that very morning. Hal Carlson was a right-handed journeyman who pitched for three teams in the National League. He was a […]

His name was John Edward Robinson, and his nickname was Jack. Jack E. Robinson? A Red Sox player? Jack Robinson was a right-handed pitcher from New Jersey, not the Jackie Robinson rejected by the Red Sox at an April 1945 Fenway Park tryout. He appeared in three games in eight days for the Red Sox […]

Right-hander Truman Eugene Clevenger was born and raised in Visalia, California, went to California State University at Fresno, and signed with the Boston Red Sox to play professional baseball. At no point in his minor-league career did he work for a team that played in Texas. But he still picked up the nickname “Tex” and […]

A towering Southern farm boy with the mind of an engineer, pitcher Ernie Shore is forever linked with Babe Ruth. Teammates on three clubs and in two World Series, they together tossed what many fans and some historians long considered a perfect game—albeit an odd one in which the Babe faced the first batter and […]

When John Otten first stood behind the plate for the St. Louis Browns on July 5, 1895, he brought with him a reputation as a strong defensive catcher who, at age 24, was among baseball’s youngest catchers.1 The effects of a broken thumb four days later, however, brought an early end to Otten’s major-league career […]

Fred “Bones” Ely did not become an everyday starter in the major leagues until he was 30 years old, but then he spent nearly a decade as one of the game’s top defensive shortstops. He gained lasting fame, however, for losing his job with the Pittsburgh Pirates to one of the greatest players in baseball […]

If “What’s past is prologue,” as Shakespeare wrote,1 Ruppert Stadium’s in Newark began with Charles A. Davids, a Bayside, New York, promoter.2 To most of the public, though, it begins with the baseball original for whom the park was named, ultimately housing two teams so good that to some they seemed better than several teams in […]

When Cincinnati Reds manager Dave Bristol got in the face of third-base umpire Bill Williams on May 9, 1969, at Montreal’s Jarry Park, he wasn’t just making a complaint about Williams’s umpiring.1 He was making an obscure bit of major-league history. Williams’s ejection of Bristol during a fifth-inning argument made Bristol the first person ever […]

As the 1978 Los Angeles Dodgers prepared to host the Atlanta Braves in the third game of a four-game series on July 5, the Dodgers were on their way to a third National League pennant in the decade while the Braves were struggling to avoid the fate of another 100-loss season as had befallen them […]

In 1910 attendance at the South End Grounds, home of the Boston Doves, was the lowest in the National League. By all accounts, only 985 fans showed up to see “the first game of the last series of 1910 on the local grounds,”1 a contest between Boston and the Philadelphia Phillies. The spectators witnessed the […]

The Braves had last hosted a World Series game in 1948, and that game was played in Boston. In 1957 the Braves, in their fifth season in Milwaukee, won the National League pennant. The first two games of the World Series were played in New York. The Yankees, behind Whitey Ford, had won the opener, […]

A small crowd of 4,611 braved the “steel gray day”1 at New York’s Polo Grounds to see history being made in a National League game between the hometown Giants and the visiting Boston Braves.2 Hoyt Wilhelm, a 29-year-old rookie right-hander for the Giants, homered in his first career at-bat and then went on to earn […]

By 1914, New York Giants executives had accepted that inconsistent performances had become the norm for Rube Marquard, but they could not have predicted that he was about to make a decision that could have left him exiled to life as a baseball pariah and “certain to be hard ridden by the rooters” in the […]

For the Washington Nationals and their fans, the opening of the 2008 season at brand-new Nationals Park on a Sunday night with a national television audience was an exhilarating experience. Baseball at RFK Stadium seemed like a distant memory.1 RFK, home of the Nationals since 2005, was best described as “leaky and creaky with plenty of […]

Roy Smalley was off to a solid start to the 1981 season for the struggling Minnesota Twins. John Bierig of the Minneapolis Star wrote that he’d been “the only bright spot in a dismal season” for the ballclub.1 Smalley, fresh off signing a four-year contract extension in the offseason, was hitting .294 with 6 home […]

On April 15, 2013, Mike Napoli’s bat and Dustin Pedroia’s hustle gave the Boston Red Sox a 3-2 win in their traditional late-morning home game on Patriots Day and Marathon Monday, the Red Sox’ second walk-off in three days over the Tampa Bay Rays. Just minutes after this game ended, the day’s significance was forever […]

This article was published in The 2005 World Champion Chicago White Sox: Grinders and Gamers (SABR, 2025), edited by Eric Conrad, Mark Morowczynski, Bill Nowlin, and Don Zminda.   ESPN Radio Chicago Sports Anchor and Talk Show Host Tom Shaer and Hall of Famer Carlton Fisk after Shaer MC’d the August 7, 2005 unveiling of […]