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

“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 […]

The baseball season of 1868 ended with the National Association crown changing hands twice in the final month. The 1867 champs, the Unions of Morrisania, maintained their status for most of the season, thanks to playing weaker Eastern clubs during the early months and then taking an extensive Western tour in July and August. When […]

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)   […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

  In mid-March 1921—amid delay in the criminal proceedings pending against those accused of corrupting the 1919 World Series—baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis placed the eight indicted Chicago White Sox players on the game’s ineligible list. “Baseball is not powerless to defend itself,” an impatient Landis declared. “All these players must vindicate themselves before they […]

U.S. All-Star outfield from the 1962 game have their bats locked and loaded. The players are (L–R) Tony Conigliaro, Ron Swoboda, and James Huenemeier. Conigliaro and Swoboda starred for the Red Sox and Mets, respectively. Huenemeier signed with the White Sox, but never got beyond Class A. (HARRY RANSOM CENTER/JOURNAL-AMERICAN ARCHIVES)   Set against the […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. 

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Warren Ballpark in Bisbee, Arizona, has hosted baseball games since it first opened in 1909. (Courtesy of Jacob Pomrenke)   Today, the term “Cactus League” refers to an annual rite of spring: affiliated professional baseball’s preseason in Arizona. But MLB’s Cactus League was not the first! In 1910, a league far removed from the slick […]

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 […]