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Gavy Cravath led the National League in home runs six times in seven seasons. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   What more is there to say about Clifford Carlton “Gavy” “Cactus” Cravath, the enigmatic Deadball Era slugger relegated to the dustbin of baseball history by George Herman Ruth? How about this: He was likely the first player to […]

William Shuttleworth and Harry Sweetman of the Maple Leaf Baseball Club of Hamilton, 1860. (Toronto Globe, August 15, 1903)   After quietly resting in the backroom of Canadian sports history for over a century, William Shuttleworth is now fully recognized for his role in establishing the country’s first formal team, the Young Canadians (later Maple […]

Freddie Fitzsimmons of the New York Giants gives a pitching clinic for the All-Japan team. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Giants)   On the morning of June 29, 1953, readers of the Globe Gazette in Mason City, Iowa, were greeted by a headline on page 13: “New York Giants Invited to Tour Japan This Fall.”1 […]

Most people associate the history of night baseball with a few isolated incidents, Larry MacPhail in 1935, Johnny Vander Meer’s double-no-hitter in 1938, Wrigley Field in 1988. But the story is a complex one, going all the way back to the first night game in 1880, just a few months after Edison perfected the incandescent […]

The more Hall of Famers a team owns, the more championships it wins, right? Research suggests a far different picture. For one thing, those Famers may be finished.   ALTHOUGH MUCH IS WRITTEN about Hall of Fame players, little is written about the teams they have played on together. Fans who know the answer to […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, No. 2 (1983). Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century. — Mark Twain . . . social inequality … means that in all the relations that […]

Lou Gehrig has usually been described as playing in the shadow of his long-time teammate, Babe Ruth. This was true, particularly when it came to hitting home runs. Gehrig overtook the Babe in home runs on a season basis only when the latter was winding down, and he had no chance to overtake Ruth on […]

In the baseball fantasy Field of Dreams, the spirits of various diamond greats come to play ball on a field rising magically out of Midwestern corn stalks. “Ty Cobb wanted to play,” chuckles Shoeless Joe Jackson. “But no one could stand the son-of-a-bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it.” In […]

The highest grossing baseball movie of all time, A League of Their Own, features a 15-second scene where an African-American woman picks up an errant ball and throws it back with such snap that it raises eyebrows.1 The film tells the story of what is now known as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGBPL), […]

The National Football League and baseball have enjoyed a close relationship from the beginning. To capitalize on the popularity of baseball, pro football teams have, at times, adopted major league names: Boston Braves, Brooklyn Dodgers, Cincinnati Reds, New York Giants, New York Yankees, and Pittsburgh Pirates. The Jets picked their name to rhyme with the […]

Background Unlike the turmoil of the previous few winters, baseball in December 1970 was relatively calm. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was secure in his job for at least the next five years, and the owners and players had agreed to a new CBA in May. The 1970 baseball Winter Meetings were held in Los Angeles, from […]

The 1950 ManDak League Champion Winnipeg Buffaloes, featuring four Negro Leaguers: Hall of Famers Willie Wells (front row, fourth from left) and Leon Day (middle, far left), as well as Lyman Bostock (middle, far right) and Butch Davis (front, second from right). Third from right in the front row is John Kennedy, who never played […]

Color postcard view of Sherman Institute, c. 1903. (Collection of the author)   On February 21, 1903, a warm and sunny Saturday, the baseball team of the nation’s newest Native American boarding school played its first game. The Sherman Institute was set among citrus groves outside Riverside, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. The […]

SABR members have selected all-star fielding teams for each decade since 1900. Wary of the dangers lurking for the baseball researcher, they have not ventured into the poorly charted territory of the 19th century. But the urge to explore is irresistible to those willing to rush in where wise men fear to tread. The selections […]

Fans come from miles around—families in wheezing Model Ts, farmers by horse-drawn wagons, folks of all ages on bicycles and on foot. Down flat, dusty roads past fertile fields of potatoes, melons, and corn ripening fast in the late summer sun. Their destination—the sleepy little town of Parksley, Virginia, hard by the Maryland state line […]

The 1972-73 A’s were the first team not named the New York Yankees to win back-to-back world championships since, well, the A’s. Some four decades and two franchise relocations earlier, Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics had claimed the 1929 and 1930 world championships. His team reached a third straight World Series in 1931, but the A’s […]

Introduction The annual baseball winter meetings of 1928 took place in three cities. The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (the minors) went north for its 27th annual convention, filling the King Edward Hotel in Toronto from December 5 to 7. The chief topic of conversation was a continuation of 1927’s primary sticking point, the […]

“It takes courage to be a pioneer”1   The Hero Two Doors Down, written by Sharon Robinson, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, and cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi and Mary Claire Cruz. (Courtesy of Scholastic Publishers)   There is a lovely scene in Ken Burns’ documentary series Jackie Robinson in which Robinson’s daughter, Sharon, remembers […]

While Charlie Chaplin went into the boxing ring in City Lights (1931), the Marx Brothers played football in Horse Feathers (1932), Curly Howard wrestled his opponent to the mat in Grips, Grunts and Groans (1937), and W.C. Fields almost played golf in The Golf Specialist (1930), the true sport of the great movie comedians is […]

Note: All statistics are current through the 2016 season.   Bruce Froemming, who umpired in the major leagues from 1971 through 2007, was on the field for the most no-hitters ever — 11. Froemming was the home-plate umpire four times for a no-no. He called Milt Pappas’s in 1972, Ed Halicki’s in 1975, Nolan Ryan’s […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the April 2018 edition of the SABR Deadball Era Committee newsletter. One of the great and enduring achievements of the latter part of the Deadball Era was, in fact, literary: the 1916 publication of “You Know Me Al” by Ring Lardner. The book, which could today be […]