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Choices … Decisions: A player has already connected for one double, one triple, and one homer in the game and needs only a simple single in his next plate appearance to achieve the cherished cycle—one of baseball’s rarest accomplishments and one that will inscribe his name permanently in the record books. If he comes through […]

From 1920 to 1958, baseball fans across the Deep South and Southwest looked forward to the annual Dixie Series, a best-of-seven postseason matchup between the playoff champions of the Southern Association and the Texas League. In 1967, after an 8-year hiatus, owners in the Double-A Texas League and the newly created Southern League resurrected the […]

Dodger Stadium has been home to the Los Angeles Dodgers since 1962 (Courtesy of the Los Angeles Dodgers)   Baseball is at one and the same time an idyllic game for children and a gravely serious business for adults. A sport that can be played on a pastoral commons requires, in the world of commerce, […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. “When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” — Lord Kelvin “One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter […]

If the business of baseball seemed bleak following the previous season, the 1893-1894 offseason started from a different place in attitudes toward the business of baseball. Following the upheaval of recent seasons, Sporting Life proclaimed, “Both artistically and financially the season was the most successful since 1889.”1 Just as the negative outlook following the 1892 […]

Cy Young said he didn’t have the speed he once had but could still “lob a hook up there.” (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   The reader probably knows that Cy Young is baseball’s all-time winningest pitcher with 511 victories and that his 22-year career ranks as one of the greatest in baseball history. […]

From left to right: Takehiko Bessho, Eddie Lopat, Joe DiMaggio, and Tetsuharu Kawakami. (Rob Fitts Collection)   In 1951 American troops still occupied Japan, but their mission had shifted. Rather than seeing the country as a former enemy to be subjugated, Japan was now viewed as an ally in the fight against communism. As the […]

On June 10, 1944, during the ninth inning of a 13-0 blowout, an event occurred that is known to many fans with at least a passing knowledge of baseball history: Joe Nuxhall, at a mere 15 years and 316 days of age, made his way into an actual regular-season major league game, becoming the youngest […]

Individually and collectively, baseball and advertising may be said to hold a mirror up to America. The image in the glass, however, is not always pretty. For the first century of its history, with very few early exceptions, “American” as defined by Organized Baseball, did not extend to those of African descent. As has been […]

Introduction The most important events of the season were the founding, organization, and successful completion of its championship season by the American Association of Professional Base Ball Clubs (AA), and the market responses by the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs (NL), the incumbent, and the death of longtime NL President William Ambrose Hulbert. […]

Heinie Groh of the Cincinnati Reds had one of the most distinctive bats in baseball history, a “bottle bat” which had about a 17-inch barrel that tapered sharply to a thin handle. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   Introduction Over the centuries, baseball bat shapes have undergone all kinds of contortions: Bat diameters have […]

The National League and the American Association entered their respective winter meetings — hereafter called the annual meetings1 — buoyed by the growing popularity and profits of the past 1886 season.2 The owners recognized that to further expand the popularity of baseball and, with the consequent rise in attendance, increase their profits, they had to […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).   When a team of Japanese collegians defeated their American counterparts to claim the 1984 Olympic gold medal for baseball, stunned American fans realized what the Japanese have felt for years: Baseball is as truly theirs as ours. Japan’s […]

A team’s season record is massively influenced by luck. Suppose you take a coin and flip it 162 times to simulate a season. Each time it lands heads, that’s a win, and when it lands tails, that’s a loss. You’d expect, on average, to get 81 wins and 81 losses. But for any individual season, […]

This article was published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 34 (2005).   A team’s season record is massively influenced by luck. Suppose you take a coin and flip it 162 times to simulate a season. Each time it lands heads, that’s a win, and when it lands tails, that’s a loss. You’d expect, on […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).   The literature on the New York Yankees is presumably indicative of baseball literature generally, except’ of course, that Yankee literature, like Yankee tradition, Yankee Stadium, Yankee uniforms and Yankee hot dogs, has a pinch or two of special interest, the […]

Evaluating a player’s talent, ability, and contributions to his team is an important task of analyzing the game of baseball. In recent years, the prevalent metric for player evaluation has been Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which distills the evaluation into a single number that can be compared directly with that of other players. WAR measures […]

President John F. Kennedy delivered the ceremonial first pitch in Washington’s Griffith Stadium on April 10, 1961, to inaugurate baseball’s new era. The debut of the new Washington Senators against the Chicago White Sox was the first game in the 10-team American League, marking the majors’ first expansion since 1901. The creation of the two […]

They were called the “Hitless Wonders.” Chicago Tribune writer Hugh Fullerton wrote on August 21, 1906, “To those who have not seen the Sox in the wonderful winning streak, it is a wonder how they score so many runs on so few hits. Let them see the Sox cake every advantage of misplays and let […]

The 1950 ManDak League Champion Winnipeg Buffaloes, featuring four Negro Leaguers: Hall of Famers Willie Wells (front row, fourth from left) and Leon Day (middle, far left), as well as Lyman Bostock (middle, far right) and Butch Davis (front, second from right). Third from right in the front row is John Kennedy, who never played […]

Leona Kearns was a young woman, a teenage pitcher during the Roaring Twenties. Eddie Ainsmith was once a major-league catcher. When their lives intersected, tragedy was the result. Back when automobiles were rare and baseball players heroes, Claude and Evalina Gard Kearns raised seven children in the small town of West Union, Illinois: Russell, Forest, […]