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Willie Mays: Five Tools Edited by Bill Nowlin and Glen Sparks Publication Date: May 3, 2023 Associate editors: Len Levin and Carl Riechers ISBN (ebook): 978-1-960819-02-4, $9.99 ISBN (paperback): 978-1-960819-03-1, $29.95 8.5″ x 11″, 307 pages Willie Mays thrilled baseball fans for more than two decades. He could do it all—in the outfield, at bat, […]

Sox Bid Curse Farewell: The 2004 Boston Red Sox Edited by Bill Nowlin Publication Date: March 26, 2024 Associate editors: Len Levin and Carl Riechers ISBN (ebook): 978-1-960819-18-5, $9.99 ISBN (paperback): 978-1-960819-19-2, $34.95 In 2004, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in historic fashion. This SABR Digital Library book, published on the 20th […]

The 1884 New York Gothams, featuring catcher Jack Humphries (front row, far right). Humphries’ improbably journey took him from the hamlet of North Gower, outside Ottawa, to Cornell for Latin and Greek, then to New York to catch Mickey Welch and Tip O’Neill. (COURTESY OF DAVID McDONALD)   On September 6, 1993, Denis Boucher pitched […]

By 1951 the Browns were decidedly moribund. They had been last in the American League in attendance every year since 1946 and the usual question one asked before the start of the season was whether they might finish in seventh or eighth place. Underfinanced, Charles and William DeWitt wanted out of what they saw as […]

  The fiftieth anniversary of the passage of Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments of 1972 gives us an opportunity to reflect on its impact on women’s sports as a whole and on specific sports such as baseball. Women’s participation has been overlooked and marginalized in most publications and general discussions about the sport. […]

The San Diego Padres have retired the uniform numbers of five of their players. Three are Hall of Famers: Tony Gwynn (number 19), Dave Winfield (31), and Trevor Hoffman (51). The fourth was the franchise’s first star player and a fan favorite, Cy Young Award winner Randy Jones (35). The fifth? He played only four […]

This is (roughly) the tenth anniversary of the transfer of a unique and valuable baseball property. On September 6, 2000, Major League Baseball and Morgan, Lewis and Bockius LLP (a very big and very prominent Philadelphia-based international law firm)1 issued a joint press release announcing “that the law firm has transferred its domain name—mlb.com—to Major […]

On August 9, 2006, the first-place New York Mets were hosting the San Diego Padres at Shea Stadium. The Mets were headed toward their first division title since 1988 and first playoff berth since 2000. It was an ordinary late summer series against an out-of-division team as the Mets held a big 13.5 game lead […]

As a franchise that began 130 years ago, the Philadelphia Phillies have made an indelible mark not only on the city where they play but also on the whole sport of baseball. This is a team that has maintained the same name longer than any other team in professional sports. And with some of the […]

“War is the Province of Chance.” — Count Carl von Clausewitz   THE FOG OF WAR Even a bloodless, but nonetheless bitter “war,” such as the two-year (1914–15) battle between the outlaw Federal League and Organized Baseball proves Clausewitz’s point.1 For years, the convention has been to view the Federal League, the last challenger to […]

In addition to setting the major league single season record with his seventy home runs in 1998, Mark McGwire set a National League record with 162 bases on balls. This tied him with Ted Williams, who did it twice (1947, 1949), for second on the major league single season list behind Babe Ruth’s 170 in […]

A list of hit sequences for players who completed a cycle during the 1920-2017 period.This is the online appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s “‘When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It’: Who Took the Cycle or Quasi-Cycle?”   Click here to scroll down for Table A-2: Sequences for Players Who Completed a Quasi-Cycle […]

The .400 batting average (BA) for an individual in a single season has been the standard of hitting excellence all batting champions have sought, but few have achieved. In fact, the last time it was accomplished was in 1941 when Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox managed the feat with a .406 BA. To […]

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 […]

Manager Paul Richards, right, seen here shaking hands with New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel in 1958, is often credited with the invention of the “Waxahachie Swap,” where a pitcher changes place with a position player before returning to the mound. Richards was born in Waxahachie, Texas. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Baseball managers have platooned players […]

In an article in the 1994 Baseball Research Journal, Charles Blahous explained a system to determine the probability of various players in various seasons putting together a 56-game hitting streak. I will describe some improvements to Mr. Blahous’s method, which I believe result in probabilities that are more accurate and, in almost all cases, lower […]

“Bad trades are a part of baseball; I mean who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas for gosh sakes.” — Annie Savoy, Bull Durham   Outside of the 1919 sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, baseball trades do not often occupy a persistent niche in pop culture. As the Bull Durham quotation indicates, […]

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 […]

I was inspired to write this article by Jonah Gardner’s Sports-Reference.com post “Remembering Mike Piazza’s 8 Amazing Days with the Florida Marlins,” about Hall-of-Famer Piazza’s short 1998 Florida Marlins stint before getting traded to the New York Mets.1 New York City’s major league teams have a storied history but I was curious: how many Hall-of-Famers […]

Introduction For many in the baseball world, the 2004 season marked the end of an era. Perhaps it was the Boston Red Sox finally breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” to end their streak of futility, or the Expos playing their final games in Montreal, or Barry Bonds’ career finally beginning to wind down as […]

The 2014 major-league season ended with the San Francisco Giants winning their third World Series in five seasons, beating the Kansas City Royals in a dramatic seven-game series on the shoulders of a staggeringly dominant performance by their 25-year-old southpaw, Madison Bumgarner. The Giants had established themselves as the decade’s model franchise, the Royals emerged […]

Harry Passon, the Jewish owner of a sporting goods store, played a strategic role in promoting both black and white semi-pro baseball in Philadelphia. (Courtesy of the Passon Family)   Semi-professional baseball, black and white, flourished in Philadelphia in the first half of the twentieth century. Harry Passon (1897–1954), a Jewish owner of Philadelphia’s leading […]