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Los Chorizeros baseball played an essential role in the life of the Mexican American community of East Los Angeles.

The year 1947 was a banner one for the Brooklyn Dodgers. At the same time as the newly desegregated Dodgers seized the National League pennant, the team expanded its appeal to a demographic not traditionally served by organized baseball. It was also a banner year for the advertising industry. With the abatement of wartime shortages, […]

Leo Durocher’s season-long suspension in 1947 resulted from several years of his riotous behavior. The pattern started during his playing days with the New York Yankees. “For what?” Such was Leo Durocher’s first response to the news on April 9, 1947, that Commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler had suspended him from baseball for the 1947 season.[fn]Durocher, […]

The National League winter meetings of 1897-1898 were conducted during a period of good feeling among club owners, with Cincinnati Reds boss John T. Brush at the height of his influence. The gatherings were highly productive in terms of the adoption of new legislation and policy, although some initiatives, particularly the player-conduct commandments known as […]

“I Must Go Dear and Talk to Father” She had just finished saying goodbye to some luncheon guests and was walking past her husband’s study. She realized something was terribly wrong. His secretaries were scrambling, and two phones were in use. She overheard the phone conversations, and knew there had been an attack. She returned […]

After two years of unlawful contract signings and other roster-jumping shenanigans that produced end­less lawsuits, baseball’s Great Tampering War settled down as the 1903 NL campaign began on Thursday, April 16, in Cincinnati and St. Louis. Though person­al disgust and distrust may not have subsided between all franchise owners, a signed truce between the long­ […]

Major League Baseball (MLB) is awash in advanced metrics that more reliably describe key aspects of players’ offensive and defensive performance compared to “traditional” statistics. PITCHf/x and Statcast greatly contributed to this. The power of the original Statcast system came from its effective integration of high-definition video cameras and Doppler radar.1 Whereas cameras were useful […]

Introduction: Entry, Reaction, Conflict, Change, Growth An important event leading into the 1882 season was the founding and organization of the American Association of Professional Base Ball Clubs (AA). The National League (NL) survived the difficult economic environment of the late 1870s and the club competition with the International Association. It emerged as the sole […]

Jackie Robinson, center, shows his son Jack Jr. and the son of Roy Campanella the statue of Abraham Lincoln that stands outside the Essex County Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey in February 1951. (SABR-RUCKER ARCHIVE)   On July 18, 1949, Jackie Robinson appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify against Paul Robeson, […]

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. Author’s note: Jules Tygiel and I collaborated on this story for SPORT magazine in June 1988. Subsequently it appeared in SABR’s The National Pastime, in several editions of Total Baseball, and […]

The Havana Sugar Kings played in the International League between 1954 and 1960. It was a short existence, but a memorable one. The Sugar Kings began with hopes of a major league franchise, experienced a shooting during a home game and a political revolution, won the International League’s Governor’s Cup and the Junior World Series, […]

One of baseball’s most highly-regarded accomplishments by an individual player is hitting for the cycle: collecting at least one of each of the four types of safe hits (single, double, triple, and home run) in the same game. While recognized as a rare and remarkable feat, the cycle has been achieved 286 times during the […]

Mislabeling all winter baseball played in California as “California Winter League” ignores the uneven color lines that existed in that time and place.

During the 1940s National League baseball was largely dominated by the Cardinals and the Dodgers. St. Louis won four pennants in the decade while finishing second five times. Brooklyn took three flags and were runner-ups three as well. Besides a horrendous 1944 season, “dem Bums” were third the rest of the time. It was the […]

This article was originally published in “The Northern Game—And Beyond,” the 2002 SABR convention journal.   Had he not pitched for the Boston Braves, Warren Spahn might have won 400 games. For one thing, he had the bad fortune to play for Casey Stengel, in Spahn’s words, “before and after he was a genius.” Stengel […]

This article provides an in-depth look at Ted Williams and his year spent in Minneapolis.

Jackie Robinson’s time in Montreal was fleeting, but he still made an impact on baseball and the world in 1946. Before the 27-year-old Robinson began to wear the famous Brooklyn Dodger blue with number 42 on his back, he wore uniform number 9 and led the International League in batting with a .349 average (a […]

“Television is not only just what the doctor ordered for Negro performers; television subtly has supplied ten-league boots to the Negro in his fight to win what the Constitution of this country guarantees as his birthright.” — Ed Sullivan1   Jackie Robinson appears on The Ed Sullivan Show on May 20, 1962. (Courtesy of Ed […]

Introduction and Context The 74th annual Winter Meetings were held in New Orleans from Sunday, December 1, to Friday, December 5, 1974. New Orleans hosted the annual meeting on two earlier occasions, in 1916 and 1938, but had not been home to the event in 36 years. Recent struggles between the Players Association and the […]

Adam Ford and his wife, the former Jane Cruttenden, ca 1872. Seated center is Jane’s father Lauriston Cruttenden, one of the early settlers of St. Marys. Ford’s marriage into the respected and influential family provided an immediate boost to both his social standing and his political aspirations. (St. Marys Museum and R. Lorne Eedy Archives, […]

This essay, which was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game, is modified only slightly from the keynote speech delivered at the 12th Annual Seymour Medal Conference, in Cleveland, April 27–29, 2007. The presentation theme of the conference was “How Did […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Journalism History, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2006.   Had baseball card collecting been popular in the 1920s, fans of the nascent Negro leagues likely would have coveted the cards of Andrew “Rube” Foster, C.I. Taylor, Ed Bolden, and John Blount. Because these men were team owners and […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume II (1987).   “Poets, it should be noted, keep shaping their metaphors out of the ruins of their existence, in contradistinction to the powerful on this earth, whose stock in trade is the fable of their victories.” The poet Stanley Kunitz was referring […]