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Like classmate Jim Thorpe, Frank Jude was one of many outstanding all-around athletes at the Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Indian Industrial School in the early 1900s. He was rushed to the major leagues before he was ready because teams hoped to uncover another American Indian star like the Philadelphia Athletics’ Chief Bender. News features at the time […]

Lew Simmons was a popular performer as a minstrel entertainer both before and after his time in baseball management. One of many persons who linked the theater with nineteenth-century baseball, Simmons was a noted banjoist, a professional comedian of great repute, and an end man with the tambourine in the minstrel show.1 There is considerable […]

In a column for the St. Louis Star in 1910, sportswriter Billy Murphy proclaimed, “We’re going to put you wise to the fact that the fastest man who ever played baseball lives in this city. ’Tis John Magner, who played with the Browns in the early ’80s. Magner was not speedy – he was lightning.”1 […]

Native Philadelphian Monte Cross played short for the Phillies and Athletics during a particularly successful era in his city’s baseball history. After several earlier major-league stops, he manned the position for the slugging, first-division Phillies from 1898 to 1901. Then, jumping to the American League in 1902, Cross helped the Athletics to two pennants over […]

Remember Mathewson, Ames, and Donlin,Buck Ewing, Rusie, Smiling Mickey Welch?Remember a left-handed catcher named Jack Humphries,Who sometimes played the outfield, in ’83? — From Rolfe Humphries, “Polo Grounds.”1   By the usual baseball benchmarks Jack Humphries’ major-league career was the definition of forgettable: backup catcher with the New York Gothams and the Washington Nationals in […]

For several decades, infielder Andy Swan, who played eight games in the 1884 American Association, was accorded a dread distinction. He was believed to be the first major-league ballplayer to have become a murder victim. In time, however, it was discovered that Andy had been confused with Albert D. Swan, a prosperous businessman and a […]

Jim Gilliam’s career was marked by a relentless, intelligent approach to the game and an extraordinary versatility. Although he was not a perennial All-Star or Hall of Fame candidate, his exceptional attributes can’t help but intrigue a thinking baseball fan. He went about his business in a studious way, a craftsman who never stopped refining […]

Consider the two nearly identical rookie seasons below:   AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI AVG Player #1 464 59 127 22 5 20 68 .274 Player #2 482 75 128 23 5 20 56 .266   These highly acclaimed prospects started 18 years apart. Both were center fielders, blessed with power and speed. […]

Seems to Move in Perpetual Sunshine.1 “Baseball is a lot about attitude — not getting too up or down, enjoy each game, then forget it and go on. Review the game, learn from your mistakes, but don’t let it burden you. A lot of things matter more than talent: work, education, never being satisfied. These […]

Miller Huggins was the Hall of Fame manager who led the New York Yankees to their first six American League pennants and three world championships, in the 1920s. He forged unique relationships with both Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert and their star outfielder, Babe Ruth. One newspaperman wrote, “Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert saw in Huggins a […]

Frank Albert “Fay” Young was one of the most influential sportswriters in the Black press, during a career that spanned five decades. Modern scholars have praised him for his thorough coverage of Negro Leagues baseball,1 as well as for reporting on athletic events at historically Black colleges.2 Writing at a time when few Black newspapers […]

Venezuelan catcher Bo Díaz played for all or part of 13 seasons in the majors, plus 14 more in his homeland’s winter league. He helped the Philadelphia Phillies win a National League pennant in 1983 and was part of six champion teams with the Leones del Caracas. Díaz made it to the majors on the […]

Bob Quinn was a baseball man for more than 60 years. He started as a player in the 1880s, although he never made the majors, and then became a business manager/general manager. At various points from 1917 through 1945, he held this role at the big-league level with the St. Louis Browns, the Brooklyn Dodgers […]

In 1964 columnist Dick Young cracked, “Battered plate umps will insist upon double Blue Cross coverage if Jesse Gonder continues to do all the catching for the Mets.”1 The humor in the reference to Gonder’s league leading 21 passed balls was lost on the African-American backstop. Until later in life, when he appeared to come […]

The advent of free agency for players in the 1970s provided hot stove league fodder for baseball fans with news of players, their agents, team owners, and lawyers negotiating multi-million-dollar contracts and perks such as tax-deferred annuities and all sorts of other inducements. Nearly 100 years earlier, all that one particular 19th-century free agent wanted […]

Even if he had never gone on to own the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner would have had a proud legacy in his hometown of Cleveland. By the early 1970s, he was one of the city’s captains of industry, having taken his family shipping firm to new heights and used it to leverage a purchase […]

Catcher Mike Brumley’s future in the major leagues appeared bright in 1964. That year Topps issued baseball card number 167, featuring two “Senators Rookie Stars”– Brumley and Lou Piniella. Piniella had a lengthy career as both a player and manager, but Brumley’s major-league stint spanned just three years. He collected 151 hits, five home runs. […]

Arguably one of the slowest runners in baseball, Edward Frank Burtschy earned the nickname “Molasses Shoe,” or “Moe” for short. The bulky 6’3”, 208-pound hurler may have tarried on the base path but the hard throwing righty, in the vernacular, could bring it. The problem was where. Blessed with a blazing fastball and cursed that […]

Early in his career Lou Bierbauer’s surname appeared in box scores in abbreviated form as “Bauer,” as did that of his younger brother Charlie, a marginal minor league infielder in the early 1890s. In 1883 Lou began serving as the principal catcher for the top semipro team in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he was born on […]

In late July 1901, the Philadelphia Athletics traveled to Cleveland to complete an 11-game Western swing with a two-game series against the Blues. When the series opened on Saturday, July 27, the home team won, 4-3, but Philadelphia’s Napoleon “Nap” Lajoie was 3-for-5, boosting his batting average to a league-leading .429 in the American League’s […]

The first years of the 1970s were turbulent ones on American college campuses. In some places the upheaval even invaded that seeming bastion of order and tradition, the baseball diamond. The University of Vermont was a case in point. In mid-May 1971, Edward C. Andrews Jr., president of the financially troubled flagship state university, announced […]

The New York Yankees had won the American League pennant each season from 1955 to 1958, but as they hosted the Chicago White Sox on Friday, July 17, 1959, in the opener of their four-game series, Chicago, not New York, topped the AL standings. In a game Joe Trimble of the New York Daily News […]

In Wisconsin during the mid- and late 1950s, the most recognizable voices in the entire baseball-crazy state belonged to Earl Gillespie and Blaine Walsh, the Milwaukee Braves’ tandem of radio broadcasters. In stores, on front porches, in open convertibles at stoplights, their descriptions and accounts of the games was unavoidable. Love-struck residents of the Badger […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the December 2020 edition of the SABR Black Sox Scandal Committee Newsletter.   “Cook County what crimes are committed in thy name” — Ernest Hemingway, letter to a friend, August 1921 Things were looking good for aspiring author Ernest Hemingway in the summer of 1921. He had […]