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This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1987 (Vol. 6, No. 1).   Several members of the Texas pitching staff were sitting in the clubhouse one afternoon discussing the importance of fielding. They were quick to agree with Los Angeles manager Tommy Lasorda’s assertion that a good­fielding pitcher can help himself […]

This article was published in Dominionball: Baseball Above the 49th (2005), the SABR 35 convention journal.   There have now been approximately 200 major leaguers born in Canada. The necessity of using the word “approximately” would seem to imply a lack of research on the subject. In fact, it is precisely because there has been […]

This is the online appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s article, “Bobby Layne, 28-0: Hall of Fame Caliber Pitcher for the Texas Longhorns,” in SABR’s The National Pastime: Baseball in Texas and Beyond (2025).   Click on a link below to scroll down: APPENDIX A: Brief Summaries of Each Game Pitched by Bobby Layne for the Texas […]

Introduction The 2013 Baseball Winter Meetings were held December 9-12 at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort, in Orlando, Florida. The meetings came only 40 days after the Boston Red Sox’ Koji Uehara pitched a perfect ninth inning in Game Six of the World Series, striking out Matt Carpenter of the St. Louis […]

U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax at the Jewish American Heritage Month reception at the White House. Next to Koufax are his wife Jane Clarke Koufax and entertainer Theodore Bikel. May 27, 2010. (Photograph by White House photographer Alex Wong.)   On May 27, 2010, President Barack […]

This paper examines competitive balance in the free agent era by comparing the old reserve clause system versus the modern collectively bargained system. Baseball’s reserve system began modestly on September 29, 1879, when the National League owners introduced a new rule that would eventually be incorporated into every player contract and would allow each franchise […]

In my 40 years working at the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum in Baltimore, my primary focus has been preserving and celebrating the life and legacy of George Herman “Babe” Ruth. But during my tenure, the museum also expanded its mission to chronicle the rich heritage of area sports, including serving as the official archives of […]

The mythical baseball championship of the Northwest was the focal point of sporting interests in the Yukon summer of 1904. Over 400 Alaskan supporters joined the Skagway nine in traveling to Whitehorse on the Queen’s Birthday. The Americans were favored by the gamblers. No doubt one factor was Skagway’s reputation as a lawless point of […]

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 […]

Not all fans attend the ballpark on a regular basis, but that doesn’t diminish their fandom. Take Kathryn Gemme, interviewed by this author at age 109. The paragraphs that follow were written in midsummer 2003 and are, in places, obviously dated — given the fact of the 2004 and 2007 World Championships. Red Sox fans […]

On the southwest side of Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, lies a plain granite marker with a slightly misspelled inscription, the gravesite pathetically guarded by a twisted sweet-bay magnolia tree. Buried there in lot #549 is Louis Rogers “Pete” Browning, whose occupation at the time of his death on September 10, 1905, at age […]

This article was originally published in the November 2018 edition of “The Inside Game,” the SABR Deadball Era Committee newsletter. Since February 2015, The Inside Game has had the privilege of publishing Herm Krabbenhoft’s record-revising research into the accuracy of Deadball Era statistics. Herm’s work on stats long predates his association with the newsletter, and […]

South Florida is notoriously hot in the summer, but conditions heated up another notch in 1952 when the Miami Sun Sox and the Miami Beach Flamingos fought it out in one of the great pennant races of minor league baseball. The 1952 dash for the pennant involved two colorful managers: the contentious Johnny “Pepper” Martin […]

“BASEBALL is America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere – belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws …” — Walt Whitman   Just what is the Baseball Reliquary, anyway? There are as many answers to that question as there are multitudes contained by […]

Curt Flood, Gene Conley, and Danny Ainge had nothing on Baltimore native Peck Lerian, who challenged the reserve clause and earned fame on both the basketball court and the baseball diamond. Showing great promise as the leading member of the Philadelphia Phillies’ young receiving corps at the close of the 1920s, he also stood out […]

In a sport now dominated by teams from sunnier climates, the University of Minnesota baseball program has generated its share of warm memories in the Upper Midwest. The Golden Gophers have captured three College World Series (CWS) championships, finished third once and placed sixth once in 30 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament appearances, the […]

Before finding enormous success as an author of Western novels—more than 100 million copies sold, more than 110 cowboy movies spawned—Zane Grey, son of a Zanesville, Ohio, dentist, wrote a number of stories about his first love, baseball. Grey himself had played at the University of Pennsylvania and had kicked around low-level professional circuits like […]

Editor’s note: Justice Samuel Alito delivered this speech as the Supreme Court Historical Society’s 2008 Annual Lecture. It was published originally in the “Journal of Supreme Court History 34,” no. 2 (July 2009): 183–95, and republished in SABR’s law-themed Fall 2009 issue of the Baseball Research Journal. The Justice expresses his gratitude to James Hunter, […]

In 1938 the Baltimore Elite Giants had taken part in the Negro National League II playoffs and were looking forward to the 1939 season under a new manager. George Scales had led the team in 1938, when the Elite Giants finished third in the seven-team league, with a NNL II record of 26-23 but winning […]