Search Results

1908 University of Washington and Waseda teams. (Rob Fitts Collection)   Links between Japan and the Seattle area are nothing new. They were first forged in the late nineteenth century when Japanese began immigrating to the Pacific Northwest, and they’ve strengthened over the years. One of the consequential connections has been baseball. In 1905 a […]

Roland Hemond has worked in Organized Baseball since 1951, when he was hired by the Hartford Chiefs, the Boston Braves’ farm club (Class A-Eastern League) for a $28.00-a-week entry-level job. Along the way, Hemond has worked as an executive in the front offices of the Boston/Milwaukee Braves, Los Angeles/California Angels, Chicago White Sox (twice), in […]

Forfeits were relatively commonplace in the early days of baseball. There was at least one forfeit in the major leagues every year from 1883 to 1907, including 13 in 1884. A review of the reasons for these forfeits reveals how ”bush league” the major leagues still were. In 1889, St. Louis’s American Association team failed […]

As the story goes, in 1899 Barney Dreyfuss purchased the Pittsburgh National League club, arranged a trade with the team he previously owned, the Louisville Colonels, and spirited away all of Louisville’s best players, including Honus Wagner, Fred Clarke, and Rube Waddell. This established the Pirates as one of the dominant National League teams for […]

During the first years of the twentieth century many of the most celebrated—and marketable— major leaguers supplemented their incomes by headlining in vaudeville or touring in legitimate plays during the off-season. A few even appeared in motion pictures: a new medium that was revolutionizing the way in which Americans passed their leisure hours. And so, […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in “The Journal of Illinois History” (Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter 2006) and reprinted in SABR’s “The National Pastime” (No. 26, 2006). The version below has been edited for clarity and updated with new information about the Black Sox Scandal that has come to light in the years […]

Jackie Robinson, left, and heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson wave to supporters in 1963 at LaGuardia Airport in New York City as they leave for Alabama to work with the Civil Rights Movement. (SABR-RUCKER ARCHIVE)   “Justice too long delayed is justice denied” was the phrase used by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his […]

Ebbets Field has been gone for nearly half a cen­tury, but the place still has a remarkable grip on our consciousness. Two recent books have been devoted to the lovable old ballpark in Flatbush. Yet even these in-depth works don’t shine much light on what happened after the Dodgers left Brooklyn. They touch briefly on some […]

As the Civil War continued to impact America, the population pressed forward with daily and seasonal routines including recreations like baseball. The top clubs in the Northeast continued to slowly increase the number of games they played each season, which had dwindled since the onset of the conflict. The game was steadily overtaking cricket as […]

To see anybody in Shelby, NC, on a Saturday afternoon in the 1940s was easy enough: head toward one of the cotton mills that sponsored a baseball club. Folks packed the stands to talk about wars and depressions, family matters, and local politics. But it was baseball that commanded center stage. Sometimes the game even […]

Lee Lowenfish. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 683 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, photographs. Branch Rickey. Branch Rickey’s Little Blue Book. Edited by John J. Monteleone. Preface by Stan Musial. New York: Macmillan, 1995. 142 pp. Index. Murray Polner. Branch Rickey: A Biography. Revised Edition. Foreword by Branch B. Rickey. […]

“Don’t tell me about Ruth; I’ve seen what he did to people…. I’ve seen them: kids, men, women, worshipers all, hoping to get his famous name on a torn, dirty piece of paper, or hoping to get a grunt of recognition when they said, ‘H’ya, Babe.’ He never let them down; not once! He was […]

This excerpt is from the SABR book, Yankee Stadium 1923-2008: America’s First Modern Ballpark. We are honored to include this reminiscence by longtime Stadium tour director Tony Morante of his time working in baseball.   As a New York Yankees employee from 1958 to 2018, I had the good fortune to witness or par take […]

San Francisco Giants Hall of Famer Willie Mays influenced the lives of two other Giants, Bobby and Barry Bonds, both of whom who had significant careers of their own. He was Bobby’s teammate with the Giants, while taking on the role of godfather for Barry as a youngster. When Barry later became a Giant, Mays continued […]

“Spring training is almost as old as baseball itself. The best evidence points to spring training first taking place in 1870, when the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the Chicago White Stockings held organized baseball camps in New Orleans. Other baseball historians argue that the Washington Capitals of the National League pioneered spring training in 1888, […]

Although the last decade of the Steroid Era was associated with an increase in the number of players sustaining productive MLB careers beyond age 32 — including Barry Bonds, who set a single-season record with 73 home runs in 2001 at age 36 — it is not clear that PEDs were actually responsible for this […]

The Annus Mirabilis that was 1884 left a massive fallout for the campaign of 1885. For the first time, there had been three major leagues operating simultaneously, and the messy multi-circuit milieu — especially the tenuous stability of the freshman Union Association, and the renewed tensions between the National League and the American Association — […]

The Detective (1968), starring Frank Sinatra and Lee Remick, featured Yankee Stadium transformed into a football field. (20th Century Fox)   “Baseball stadiums are never only about baseball. Their utility is both more dynamic and more poetic.”1 Some landmarks are so burned into our collective mind’s eye that their image tells the story of their […]

Happy Felton, an all-around entertainer of a long-gone era, aggressively and successfully marketed his skills as a dance-band leader, musician, master of ceremonies, actor, comedian, and radio-stage-vaudeville performer for two decades beginning in the late 1920s. Then he won fame in television’s infancy as the creator and host of Happy Felton’s Knothole (or, Knot-Hole) Gang—a […]

“The unionization of professional athletes has been the most important labor relations development in professional sports since their inception.”1 Journalist Studs Terkel called Marvin Miller “the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis,” long-time president of the United Mine Workers and founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.2 Actually, he may have sold Miller […]

Milwaukee County Stadium was in its third season as home of the National League’s Braves when it hosted the inaugural Global World Series in 1955. (Courtesy of the Milwaukee Brewers)   Half a century before there was a World Baseball Classic, there was the Global World Series. The scars of World War II had not […]

The image of American higher education reflected by college athletics is any­thing but flattering. As of March 1982, 17 schools were on the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s pro­bation list—the highest number for a single period—and the Association’s enforcement department declared that the list would lengthen before it shortened. An additional 35 schools were under investigation […]

Early days with the Montreal Royals. March 6, 1946. (Courtesy of Rachel Robinson and the Estate of Jackie Robinson)   On Tuesday, October 23, 1945, 15 of Montreal’s sportswriters and broadcasters were invited to a press conference at the home of the Montreal Royals, Delorimier Stadium, and were promised “a major announcement.” The Triple-A International […]

A fictional tale about a personal rivalry between a Minneapolis player and a St. Paul player in the late 19th century.