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Pat Gillick once observed that it should take 10 years for an expansion team to emerge into a contender.1 The Hall of Fame executive would know; he oversaw the burgeoning of two of the 14 expansion teams. On one hand, his Astros were still a few years away from contending when he left Houston for […]

The 1911 winter meetings played out in the press as well as in the meeting rooms. Two days before the start of the 1911 World Series, which matched the New York Giants against the Philadelphia Athletics, the newspapers in both cities noticed that large blocks of World Series tickets had fallen into the hands of […]

A subject that animates baseball fans is ranking its greatest players, particularly regarding membership in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (HOF). In the past decade or two, Wins Above Replacement (WAR) has moved to the forefront of this discussion among analytically minded fans. Unlike many “traditional” stats (wins, losses, saves, runs, RBI), […]

The St. Louis Cardinals were the most successful major-league team during America’s involvement in World War II. Manager Billy Southworth led the Redbirds to three consecutive pennants and two World Series championships from 1942 through 1944, and to a second-place finish in 1945. Although they benefited from a remarkable level of continuity, especially among their […]

In 1959, ace Pittsburgh Pirates fireman Roy Face set a major-league record by winning 18 games in relief against one loss. His .947 winning average also established the record for pitchers with at least 15 decisions. Face’s incredible numbers far exceeded those of the Pirates, who went 78–76 and finished fourth, nine games behind the […]

All managers think about strategy, but one can argue that no manager this side of John McGraw changed our prevailing understanding of baseball strategy as much as Earl Weaver. In his seminal work, Weaver on Strategy, and in various quotations uttered while holding court, Weaver presented insights that may have long been implicitly understood by […]

“No sporting event so decisively enthralls the national consciousness as baseball’s annual October pageant.… There is something heroic about the pitched combat of two teams that are at once survivors and winners, meeting to decide the world championship.” – Donald Honig1 Even though the nature of postseason baseball has changed dramatically over the past 50 […]

This spring, baseball attention will be focused on Henry Aaron as he strives to reach and pass that magic number in the home run summit of fame — 714.   There is another historic home run number that is being approached and soon some one will be achieving that milestone.   That will be the 100th home […]

Social distancing restrictions were still in place for COVID-19 for this game at Dodger Stadium on May 29, 2021. (Photograph by Scott Carter.)   The Los Angeles Dodgers began the 2020 regular season – finally – on July 23. A worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with prolonged negotiations on how the games could safely be played, […]

For reporters covering the Red Sox, the 2004 baseball season started in the earliest hours of October 17, 2003. That was when Boston suffered another in four-score and five years of excruciating defeats, a 6-5 loss to the Yankees on Aaron Boone’s game-ending and series-ending – Game Seven at that – home run in the […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 2). Zane Grey possesses “no merit whatsoever either in style or in substance,” wrote Burton Rascoe, the brilliant but acerbic New York literary critic. And this was the view of another critic, Heywood Broun: “The substance of any two Zane […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in “Baseball in Pittsburgh,” the SABR 25 convention journal in 1995.   Although Philadelphia was the most prominent center of early African American baseball, the 1887 Pittsburgh Keystones produced the leadership for the era’s most successful (or least unsuccessful) Black baseball league, the League of Colored Base Ball […]

I think that no players in the majors today could conceive of going through what Negro Leaguers did for a chance at a baseball career. At the same time, however, most of the veterans of baseball’s black leagues will say that, if given the chance, they would do it all over again. A statement like […]

Connie Marrero (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   The Florida International League (FIL) existed but a brief eight and one-half years, folding in the middle of its ninth season. During those years countless exciting games were played by some of baseball’s most recognizable cast of characters. The league served as the catalyst for Havana’s […]

You can’t hit it if you can’t see it. Success in baseball requires good visual skills, including being able to see clearly. Many people need glasses or contact lenses. The most common reason for using them before age 40 is myopia (nearsightedness), which affects 20 to 30 percent of young adults in the United States.1,2 […]

Twenty years ago, an ordinary 93-year-old childless widow named Edna Crotty died in Waterford, a small upstate New York village. Somewhat later, the usual estate sale was held to dispose of all her belongings from the house and barn-mostly the normal furni­ture, decorative figurines, appliances, tools, books, maybe a few antique items. A small, very […]

AT 4:09 A.M. on Easter morning, April 19, 1981, just 51 minutes before sunrise, a hardy group of 17 freezing souls huddled in the 28-degree pre-dawn chill of McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, R.I. They had just seen their beloved PawSox close out the thirty-second inning of a 2-2 tie against the Rochester Red Wings. When […]

Chicago is a city of icons. A hotbed of popular culture, the Windy City owns a curriculum vitae rarely paralleled concerning characters, real and fictional, responsible for defining the American experience. Al Capone rose to kingpin status in Chicago’s underworld during Prohibition in the 1920s. His was a household name, a celebrity status recognizable nearly […]

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it […]

Gus Greenlee, in hat and tie, shown here with some members of his Pittsburgh Crawfords team. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   The United States Negro Baseball League is mostly known for its minor role in the Jackie Robinson story. It was famously backed by Branch Rickey in 1945, possibly for use as a cover for the Brooklyn […]

In 1974, the Oakland Athletics signed track star Herb Washington as a “designated runner,” despite his having had very little baseball experience. Keeping on the roster a player whose only purpose was to run was a new idea, but there have been many other real baseball players whose main purpose it was to pinch-run. The […]

Record books have been compiled on every game of skill and athletic endeavor that exists. Baseball, America’s national game, is, of course, the most prominent because of its long history, the long season in which it is played, the endless flow of statistics, and the broad interest it affords. Although statistical based newspaper and magazine […]

Bill James recently asserted that Dick Cramer’s famous 1977 clutch-hitting study, which purportedly demonstrated that clutch talent is a myth, was fatally flawed. James argued that the study’s finding that year-to-year clutch hitting looks random was not enough to show nonexistence. Here, the author uses statistical methods to try to determine whether James’s argument is […]