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The Cleveland Indians boasted a big three who anchored their pitching staff in 1948. The triumvirate featured Bob Lemon (20-14, 2.82 ERA), Gene Bearden (20-7, 2.43), and Bob Feller (19-15, 3.56). They were followed by spot starters Sam Zoldak (9-3, 2.81) and Steve Gromek (9-6, 2.84). Since one of the big three had each pitched […]

September 26 should have been his 30th start. Instead, his coaches, teammates, and 26,9331 fans were mourning the untimely passing of José Fernández2 the previous day in a boating accident. Instead of the atmosphere of relaxed anticipation before a ballgame, the mood was somber inside and outside Marlins Park.3 As the Marlins left the dugout, […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Red Sox right-hander Gordie Mueller was in the big leagues for a little more than three months in 1950. He worked a total of seven innings, over eight games, without a decision, facing 45 batters. He walked 13 of them and struck out only one. Eleven of the batters secured base hits off him, one […]

“This game is tough to play,” said 11-year major-league infielder Doug Flynn in an interview with the author.1 Progressing through the Cincinnati Reds’ system in the early 1970s, Flynn was a utilityman on the Reds championship teams in 1975 and 1976 before being traded to the New York Mets in 1977. A Gold Glove winner […]

On December 12, 2018, at the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, Museum President Bob Kendrick, with historian Jay Caldwell, announced the Negro League Centennial Team. The team was a key part of the Museum’s celebration in 2020 of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro Leagues. The team of 30 […]

Described as “an idealist, a dreamer, and a lover of solitude and nature,” Harry Pulliam was an eccentric dresser (one reporter wrote that “all the colors of the rainbow were utilized by him in the color scheme of his fancy waistcoats”) and fabled storyteller who put all around him at ease, rising to high places […]

During the 1890s southpaw Bert Inks pitched for six different major league clubs – but posted a winning record for only one of them. More than a century later, that performance prompted a 19 th century baseball scholar to declare, “Bert Inks exemplified the lengths to which teams often go to give a left-handed pitcher […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Outfielder Joe Kelley’s sensational play on the diamond earned him the well-deserved title “Kingpin of the Orioles.” He along with John McGraw, Willie Keeler, and Hughie Jennings made up the “Big Four” of the great Baltimore teams of the middle 1890s. Kelley was fleet of foot, sure-handed in the field, and blessed with a powerful […]

“I felt I’d be happier trying to make a living from baseball than any other business I know,” Judge Emil Fuchs said.1 “Happy” would not describe the Judge in the baseball business world: he lost nearly everything he had as owner of the Boston Braves, unsuccessfully striving to make them into a contender from 1923 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]