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The U.S. Supreme Court, 1921–22. Back row, left to right: Louis D. Brandeis, Mahlon Pitney, James McReynolds, and John H. Clarke. Front row, left to right: William R. Day and Joseph McKenna, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, and Oliver Wendell Holmes and Willis Van Devanter. (Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)   […]

Four books on the Bronx Bombers.

What we have in this special edition of the Baseball Research Journal are four snapshots of events and personalities from the wide world of “baseball-and-the-law”: Roger Abrams on arbitration and the 1975 Andy Messersmith reserve-clause case; Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court’s 1922 decision in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League of Professional […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 29 (2000).   Imagine if a young major-league pitcher, like Andy Pettitte of the Yankees, decided, for whatever reason, to become an outfielder in the year 2001. And imagine if he hit over .300 for the next five years, culminating in 2005 by winning […]

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. Babe Ruth was presented with flowers before a game during the 1934 baseball tour of Japan.   November 20, 1934; Shizuoka, Japan With a flick of his wrist, the boy received […]

  In 1904 when Tyrus Raymond Cobb arrived on the professional baseball scene, his first name was not at all well known. In fact, most fans had never even heard of anyone with that particular name—Ty himself apparently among them. That was to change in short order, however, as Tyrus Cobb’s fame spread nationally within […]

“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 […]

As tensions between owners, general managers, and players mounted, the winter meetings of 1993 featured battles over the commissioner’s chair, the free-agent process, revenue sharing, and the salary cap. These points of contention collided over four months of meetings that began in early November, when the general managers met in Naples, Florida. The National Association […]

This article was originally published in “Baseball in Chicago,” the 1986 SABR convention journal.   You and I embark on a wondrous journey as we are magically whisked away to a long-ago time and place. We stand on the corner of State and Madison. The familiar iron-facade entrance of Carson, Pirie, Scott’s is behind us […]

The fall of 1878 found Harry Wright in a tight spot. The tale of how Harry’s troubles came about is a long one, finding its roots way back in 1868. Wright had been managing and captaining the leading nines of professional baseball since that year. The next season the precedent-breaking all-profes­sional Cincinnati Red Stockings established […]

A look at the Dodger way of scouting, tracing its roots back to Branch Rickey. 

Set against the backdrop of a country emerging from war, and entering into a period of prosperity, the Hearst Sandlot Classic for 20 years offered a showcase for young baseball talent. Many of those who participated signed professional contracts and others were able to obtain scholarships to further their education. Everyone who participated gained memories […]

How much control, if any, does a pitcher have over whether a batted ball in play falls in for a hit? What if something that had traditionally been regarded as the pitcher’s responsibility was simply the residue of luck? Asking himself these questions,1 Voros McCracken, a paralegal who participated in a Rotisserie league in his […]

It could be argued that the most famous sentence ever written by a Canadian author is W.P. Kinsella’s, “If you build it, he will come.” That ghostly utterance may only be matched by Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson’s equally phantomic line about Pierre Trudeau: “he haunts us still.” Being interested in both political and baseball […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume IV (1989). “In the vast range of baseball novels boys’ books written by men like John Tunis to adult novels written by men like Bernard Malamud, women for the most part have been either complaisant wives or stupid bimbos — or perhaps sexual […]

George Davis, one of the turn of the century’s finest ballplayers, remains an enigma with regards to his personal life and character. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   Of the more than 300 individuals enshrined in Cooperstown, perhaps the most enigmatic is George Davis. Despite an outstanding 20-season playing career—and twice being manager of […]

This article was honored as a 2021 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award winner.   More than a decade has passed since American City Business Journals (ACBJ), a subsidiary of Advance Media, the company that bought the Sporting News in 2006, moved the publication’s editorial office from St. Louis to Charlotte, North Carolina, and closed The Sporting […]

New York Giants stalwarts Christy Mathewson and John McGraw. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)   They open the door. They’re opening thirty doors at once, but I can only talk about mine. Air from 2040 goes out, and air from 1905 comes in. The first thing I do is cough. It smells like horseshit and coal smoke […]

Honus Wagner, or Hans as he was almost universally called, was relieved the season was over. His 20th campaign in the big leagues and 17th with the Pittsburgh Pirates had been physically and emotionally draining. The 1916 season had been troublesome even before it started and had only gotten worse. Many had predicted Wagner would […]

Taken on Labor Day in 1902 during a doubleheader between the Phillies and Chicago Orphans, the photo shows the edge of the grandstand and bleachers along the third base line where the collapse would take place less than a year later. (Author’s Collection)   Introduction “From the lips of a frightened little girl came a […]

Claims pop up with frequency that this team or that invented the pitching rotation. These find life in our modern media and attract proponents. Thanks to David Smith, Tom Ruane, and scores of volunteer researchers, we have Retrosheet, and there are methods to determine rotation patterns and fact-check such comments as one spoken by New […]

All baseball fans are familiar, if not from the movie, then from the grainy newsreel footage, with Lou Gehrig’s legendary speech at Yankee Stadium home plate on July 4, 1939. Yet that was not the first nor the last time a speech would have a dramatic impact at The House that Ruth Built. Baseball, football, […]

INTRODUCTION It is not unusual to hear a sports fan or announcer say something like, “The window for this team is closing.” But what exactly does this expression mean? The general notion is that a team has a limited number of years when it can contend for a championship. Saying the window is closing implies […]

The yardstick for enshrinement in Cooperstown is generally determined by a player’s ability to dominate a decade. Dale Murphy more than met that standard. Crippled by recurring knee problems that required mid-career surgery, Murphy retired with 398 home runs—one fewer than first-ballot inductee Al Kaline and 16 more than 2009 inductee Jim Rice. When he […]