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For a batter or pitcher, the best—or worst—of the “Three True Outcomes” is a home run or a strikeout.1 The rates of the both home runs and strikeouts have increased substantially over the years. To illustrate, let’s compare 1949 and 2019. In the National League in 1949, 42,711 at bats resulted in 935 homers and […]

This appendix accompanies the article “Player Win Averages” written by Pete Palmer and published in the Spring 2016 Baseball Research Journal. To scroll down to pitchers, click here.   Player Win Averages-Batters Player Games PW RW Barry Bonds 2986 120.3 123.2 Henry Aaron 3298 97.2 94.6 Willie Mays 2992 95.7 87.5 Mickey Mantle 2401 92.4 […]

In Eight Men Out, author Eliot Asinof wrote about the 1919 Chicago White Sox: “Many players of less status got almost twice as much on other teams. … (Charles Comiskey’s) ballplayers were the best and were paid as poorly as the worst.” This passage sums up the entire foundation of Asinof’s thesis: Low salaries and […]

The baseball community met at the Galt House hotel in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, December 3-9, 1992. Reportedly, 1,800 to 1,900 people registered for the annual meeting, with vendors increasing the size of the meeting to about 2,500. By most accounts, the 1992 Winter Meeting was especially eventful, highlighted by a number of prominent free-agent signings […]

Editor’s note: In the Spring 2012 issue of “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game,” noted Black Sox expert Bob Hoie used player salary data to put to rout the long-held notion that the 1919 Chicago White Sox were underpaid. As it turns out, the Sox had the second-highest player payroll in the major […]

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. Over the decades, major-league baseball has produced a host of memorable teams, but only one infamous one — the 1919 Chicago White Sox. Almost a century after the fact, the exact […]

A great deal has been written about the faceoff between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds in the best-of-nine 1919 World Series. Probably no other baseball World Series has drawn more attention from commentators and historians. However, the vast majority of words written about the Series relate to what has become commonly known […]

This article was selected as a winner of the 2016 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award.   This well-known Chicago Tribune photo of Black Sox defendants, attorneys, jurors, and supporters shows them celebrating the not guilty verdicts on the steps of the Cook County Courthouse on August 2, 1921. A number of the celebrants have numbers inscribed […]

Author’s note: I met Joe Wood in the early 1980s after I called and said I’d like to interview him. His daughter invited me over. Joe and I spent a lot of time together, often watching Red Sox games on television and comparing players from different eras. All this was before a taped interview, which […]

Few single-game achievements are as highly-regarded as the cycle: “A single, double, triple, and home run (not necessarily in that order) hit by a player in the same game.”1 Since 1876, there have been 344 documented regular-season cycles in the history of major league baseball (excluding the Negro Leagues).2 Table 1 breaks down the players […]

(Photograph by Duane Rieder.)   In the immediate aftermath of Roberto Clemente’s New Year’s Eve plane crash while on a mercy mission to Nicaragua, there were calls for him to be inducted by acclamation into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His qualifications were never questioned; he was only the 11th player to reach 3,000 […]

Topps commemorated Ryan Zimmerman’s 11th career walk-off with a collectible card in 2018. (THE TOPPS COMPANY)   “The pressure is on him, man. It’s not on me. I’m supposed to get out.” — Ryan Zimmerman1 Baseball games are filled with moments of great theater. What do we expect before the curtain rises? Perhaps a great […]

Al Kermisch, who joined SABR in 1971, was a baseball researcher for over 60 years. His paper, “Walter Johnson: King of the 1-0 Hurlers,” appeared in the first SABR Baseball Research Journal in 1972, and in 1975 he debuted “From a Researcher’s Notebook”: seven small stories covering 4½ pages. This became a regular feature and […]

From 1920 to 1958, baseball fans across the Deep South and Southwest looked forward to the annual Dixie Series, a best-of-seven postseason matchup between the playoff champions of the Southern Association and the Texas League. In 1967, after an 8-year hiatus, owners in the Double-A Texas League and the newly created Southern League resurrected the […]

The white sand beaches and warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico provide a pleasant distraction to the residents and tourists of Pensacola. A sense of optimism swept the Pensacola community in 1939 as the economy took a turn for the better with the ending of the Great Depression. During that summer, another form of […]

Defining baseball’s best all-around players begins with Branch Rickey. The maverick executive instrumental in integrating baseball, Rickey was also a pioneering sabermetrician. He invented the category “five-tool players” for the rare talents who excelled at hitting for average, hitting for power, running, fielding, and throwing.1 Since Rickey tagged Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle as the […]

By 1920 the idea of matching two high-minor-league teams in a lesser version of the major-league World Series had finally taken root. Informal series had been staged in 1904, 1906, 1907, 1917, and 1919. In 1920, the pennant winners of the International League (IL) and of the American Association (AA) met in the Little World […]

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. My interest in the Black Sox Scandal began at summer’s end in 2002, and by the following June, I was sufficiently addicted to the subject that I simply had to visit […]

The date was October 14, 1972. Families across North America gathered around their wood-paneled television sets to watch Game One of the World Series that Saturday afternoon.  Many fans in the televised audience had not seen the Oakland A’s or the Cincinnati Reds in a regular-season contest.  There stood the Reds along the first-base line […]

Historians and scholars of the Big Fix and the Black Sox Scandal often bemoan the endurance of myths about the 1919 World Series and its aftermath.1 Thanks to a complicated interplay between evolving literary representations of the events of 1919-20 and popular films like Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams, mention of “the Black […]

Is Henry Aaron a greater player than Willie Mays? Was Joe DiMaggio better than Ted Williams? Those were just two of the tough decisions members of the Society for American Baseball Research were asked to make in a survey of the greatest baseball players born in the different states. Aaron and Mays were matched because […]

  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 […]

The life of Jimmie Reese as described by Tom Willman, journalist and friend.

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 […]