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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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Oakland A’s were the pride of the American League West as winter turned to spring in 1972. The 1971 A’s had become just the second team to win the Western title, after the Minnesota Twins claimed the honor in the first two seasons following the adoption of divisional play in 1969. But the A’s […]

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 […]

All-Star Football Game program, 1941. (COURTESY OF BRYAN STEVERSON)   “There but for the grace of God” is an expression used when someone avoids a very serious situation, possibly life-threatening, and gives credit to the Almighty.1 In the life of Jack Roosevelt Robinson, this thankfulness applied on December 7, 1941. After a disappointing 1940 football […]

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 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 […]

On August 20, 1887, the Binghamton, New York Bingos (International League) folded. The Binghamton Daily Leader described the meeting which ended the Bings season: The directors met. . .and shook dice to see whether the Bingos should go or linger and the festive cubes said they should meander. And now we ain’t got any Bings. […]

You sat so close to the field you could almost touch the players. After the last out, you could run the bases. The stands, usually wooden, were rickety, and monstrosities in construction; the distances to the fences were eccentric. But the quaint old ballparks (not stadiums) had a warmth and charm, a different smell from […]

This is the musical score to one of the songs devoted to Mays in 1954, written by Willard Robinson and performed by Johnny Long and His Orchestra. (Courtesy of KeyMan Collectibles)   James S. Hirsch, a biographer of Willie Mays, wrote that even before his Rookie of the Year Award, his MVPs, batting title, numerous […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume V (1990).   On October 15, 1988, with a runner on first, Kirk Gibson of the Los Angeles Dodgers jerked a slider from the Oakland A’s Dennis Eckersley into the stands for a 5-4 victory. Newspaper reports noted that it was the first […]

The turbulence in the business of baseball reached its height in 1890. The players, through their Brotherhood association and chafing under the owners’ efforts to exert more control over them, assembled the financial backing to form their own league, the aptly-named Players’ League. The magnates of the National League and the American Association — particularly […]