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Introduction and Context Professional baseball was mired in conflict throughout 1901. The American League abandoned the National Agreement of 1892 and announced its intention to compete on equal terms with the National League. The National League faced not only an external threat from the self-proclaimed new major league, but internal disunity revolving around organization and […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).   Who reads baseball juveniles? It’s pretty sure the kids still do; those series books in the shelves at Braswell Memorial Library here in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, look pretty well-thumbed to me. I’m hoping that adults do, too, or that […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, No. 14 (1994).   My most desired time-machine dream game happened on August 2, 1930. On a hot, humid summer night in Kansas City, Missouri, two men, one with smoke and the other with fire, engaged in a wild, free-swinging 12-inning contest that would result […]

In 1915, the Chicago Tribune announced a contest to find the three best amateur baseball players in Chicago. The prize for the three youngsters would be a chance to join each of Chicago’s major league teams, the American League White Sox, the National League Cubs, and the Federal League Whales. The contest’s origins, execution, and ultimate success […]

I reached Michael Haupert in his car as he was driving home to Wisconsin from his annual trip to Cooperstown. My email in-box tells me the date was May 22, 2015. Tom Shieber, senior curator at the Hall of Fame, had told me Mike, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, was […]

In 1877, an auburn-haired 20-year-old from St. Louis, Missouri, took the field for George McManus’s St. Louis Brown Stockings. The career of baseballist Thomas Joseph “Tom” Loftus parallels the story of the first 35 years of pro ball. Born on November 15, 1856, Loftus was a minor- and major-league baseball player, team captain, scout, manager, […]

On John Klima’s 2009 book about Willie Mays and the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons and James S. Hirsch’s 2010 book, “Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend.”

For reporters covering the Red Sox, the 2004 baseball season started in the earliest hours of October 17, 2003. That was when Boston suffered another in four-score and five years of excruciating defeats, a 6-5 loss to the Yankees on Aaron Boone’s game-ending and series-ending – Game Seven at that – home run in the […]

One hundred years ago on Thursday, September 2, 1880, teams representing two of Boston’s prominent department stores, Jordan Marsh and Company and R. H. White and Company, played a game of baseball at Nantasket Bay on the oceanside of Hull, Massachusetts. This game would have held no historic value and would long since have been […]

In 1892, Frank Grant played for the Gorhams and then the Cuban Giants on his way to a Hall of Fame career. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   During a playoff game in October 1905, Leland Giants pitcher Walter Ball rushed onto the diamond at Chicago’s West Side Park and threw a punch “with […]

After the passing of nearly 40 years, as is the case since World War II, we are inclined to recall events differently than the way they really happened. Now, there’s nothing wrong with fantasizing a little or adding color to actual events, but the amount of distortion and misleading material that has been published in […]

It’s often said that there are no ties in baseball. If a game is deadlocked after nine innings,1 you keep playing until someone wins.2 That’s the general rule, to be sure, but tie games have occurred in the past, for all sorts of special reasons.3 And the neck tie, the real subject of this essay […]

“One thing I can’t go for is any “hero” stuff. I know I am no hero. All right, I flew 39 missions—I know too many others who flew 100 and more. . . .Just because I happen to be in baseball, it seems to be big news. Well, I’m not kidding myself and I am […]

The main subjects considered by the magnates during the National League winter meetings of 1900-1901 were: (1) the ever-increasing threat of competition posed by the fledgling American League; (2) possible recognition of a revived American Association as a counterbalance to the AL, and (3) player contract modifications proposed by the latest incarnation of the players […]

The history of baseball in America has always been closely tied to the history of race in America. The progression of baseball from an exclusionary sport to a beacon for integration and eventually to a global game has paralleled our country’s movement from slavery to the civil rights movement to modern day multiculturalism. While the […]

Introduction and Context As the American and National Leagues prepared for the 1924 winter meetings in New York City, drama laced the usual business agenda of trades, rulings, and discussion of regulations. The NL had faced trouble internally since the end of September, when its president, John Heydler, disclosed, first to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis […]

Scores of professional ballplayers have made their way from the big leagues to the big screen. A few, including Chuck Connors, Bob Uecker, and John Beradino (who played for the Browns, Indians, and Pirates as Johnny Berardino), became successful actors or media personalities. Some, notably Babe Ruth, appeared in movies as themselves, or as thinly […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume V (1990).   In his wonderfully compact and brilliant Take Time For Paradise, the late Bart Giamatti says, “If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss and the hope for reunion — if […]

Perry Barber was just the second woman to umpire at Yankee Stadium, in 1985. (Courtesy of Perry Barber)   On Sunday, September 9, 1973, Ronnie Bromm became the lone member of the most exclusive club on the planet: Women Who Have Umpired at Yankee Stadium. She held that title all by herself for a long […]

There was once a time when Major League Baseball did not completely control all the players in the minor leagues. It was a time before farm systems and a time before the major leagues could pull players from a minor-league pennant race to supplement a major-league bench at will. It was a time before the […]

One measure of player endurance is consecutive games played. Another measure, which could be considered a superior one, is highest percent of scheduled games played in ten consecutive years. Only five of the highest rated players in the percent calculation compiled long consecutive game streaks. Lou Gehrig is unquestionably the highest ranking player using either […]

Other pennant races have been undecided longer, had more participants, and perhaps other cities have been as involved with their teams as was St. Louis in 1922, but for the lasting effect it had on the future of a franchise, probably no race could match the impact of the one between the New York Yankees […]

Recent study has revealed the claim of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York to pioneer status, as well as that of Alexander Cartwright to be the game’s inventor, to be suspect if not altogether baseless. I have taken up the latter claim at length in Baseball in the Garden of Eden and will […]

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth on July 4, 1939 on Lou Gehrig’s last day at Yankee Stadium. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.)   Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig weren’t exactly best friends or worst enemies, weren’t exactly master and pupil, weren’t exactly equals on or off the field. Half a generation apart in age1 […]