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This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1987 (Vol. 6, No. 1).   Jiminy Christmas! By the great heavenly stars! Was Rickey Henderson born to steal bases? You bet your sweet ephemeris he was. Henderson was born Christmas Day 1958, a good day to be born if you want to grow […]

Baseball fans planning to attend the game at Island Park in Wichita, Kansas, on June 21, 1925, were advised by the Wichita Beacon, the afternoon newspaper, that “strangle holds, razors, horsewhips, and other violent implements of argument” would be barred at the gate.1 The fear was not of unrest that might somehow be provoked by […]

All baseball fans can attest to the truism that baseball is a game that hinges on timing and inches. To the fans of a team eclipsing 100 victories, a season feels joyous and swift. Other seasons are made interminable by loss after loss. Line drives either just clip the foul line or miss wide by […]

  1935 Paducah Red Birds B.B. Hook, Jr. is the child in the very front. Front row (L–R): Joe Grace, Floyd Perryman, Venable Satterfield, and Louis Perryman. Middle row (L–R): Lowell Green, Mel Ivy, E.R. Jones (more behind the row than in it), Robert Brown, Benny Sanders, and an unnamed child listed as “mascot.” Back […]

October 16, 1958 Robert Hyland, General Manager, KMOX Radio In my opinion, there is no more effective way of strengthening mutual understanding among nations than through the people to people approach, and I am convinced that international sports engagements are playing a very important role in building international friendship and good will. For that reason, […]

It’s often said that there are no ties in baseball. If a game is deadlocked after nine innings,1 you keep playing until someone wins.2 That’s the general rule, to be sure, but tie games have occurred in the past, for all sorts of special reasons.3 And the neck tie, the real subject of this essay […]

In 2018, a country auction in Maine handling the estate of major leaguer Harry Lord put a photograph up for bid they touted as the “First Ever All-Star Game.”1 The 1910 photo pictured an American League team of Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Tris Speaker, Big Ed Walsh, and ten others including Lord, the former Red […]

The annals of baseball prose include several memoirs and biographies from and about major-, minor-, and amateur-league umpires, well stocked with entertaining war stories from the diamond front, as well as numerous how-to-manuals for those pondering careers in this noble and unappreciated profession; and books inviting fans to offer their own interpretation of baseball’s knottier […]

The annual meetings of the National League and the American Association after the 1888 season took place in the unusual context of “the great event in the modern history of athletic sports,” as the famous baseball journalist Henry Chadwick dubbed it. He was referring to the six-month world tour by the Chicago White Stockings and […]

Here is the appendix for Pete Palmer’s article “Stolen Bases and Caught Stealing by Catchers” in the Spring 2014 Baseball Research Journal.

Sandy Koufax posted a career-low 1.73 ERA and struck out 317 batters in his final season with the Dodgers in 1966. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   The fact that Sandy Koufax had arthritis in his left elbow was well known for the final two years of his career. He woke up after a spring-training game in 1965 […]

  The career of left-handed reliever Ron Perranoski (1961–73) mainly featured successes in two cities: Los Angeles and Minneapolis[-St.Paul].1 Unlike Hall of Fame reliever Mariano Rivera, who spent his entire career with the Yankees (1995–2013), typically relievers pitch for more than one team. The seven other HOF relievers through 2024 each toiled for at least […]

As 1945 dawned, World War II was winding down toward its conclusion – even if that wasn’t apparent as the year began. After repelling the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, Allied troops were moving through Europe, making their way toward Berlin – and presenting the question of how to defeat the Japanese in […]

Springfield Cubs official scorecard, 1950. (Courtesy Wood Museum of Springfield History)   On Monday evening, February 6, 1950, a cold winter night laced with thoughts of Opening Day two months away, Municipal Auditorium in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, was filled with fans whooping and hollering as the newest baseball team, the Springfield Cubs, was introduced. Sponsored […]

The glossy, color print advertisement for the 2002 All-Star Japan Series features an exterior shot of a terminal at Tokyo Narita airport. But instead of planes pulling up to the gates, giant baseball bats of various makes and models encircle the building, as if preparing to disgorge passengers. Below the image the ad copy reads […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (McFarland & Co., Fall 2008). Premise By the late 1930s, and particularly during the years of US involvement in World War II, segregation in sport and society was a topic of increasing public interest. Nationalism had at least […]

When a group of major-league baseball all-stars traveled to Japan in November 1979 for a series of games, it represented a shift, of sorts. Since the end of World War II, most baseball tours of Japan had been by single teams. A US all-star team had not played in Japan since the Eddie Lopat All-Stars […]

The 2007 Old-Timers Day included Whitey Ford (16), Yogi Berra (8), Reggie Jackson (44), Don Mattingly (23), Ron Guidry (49), Moose Skowron (14), Don Larsen (18), Graig Nettles (9), Bobby Murcer (1), Goose Gossage (54), Paul O’Neill (21), Scott Brosius (18), Joe Pepitone (25), and Chris Chambliss (10). (Jerry Coli/Dreamstime)   The original Yankee Stadium, […]

One of America’s oldest commercialized sports spectaculars, major league baseball has adjusted repeatedly and dramatically to significant ideological and technological changes. Indeed, so cumulative have been these forces of change that each passing decade of baseball history reveals profound changes in the game’s social organization and in the behavior of the players. Thus, to scrutinize […]

Your team clings to a lead in the late innings and is trying to get out of a first-and-third, one-out jam. Your pitcher gives up a long fly to right-center, and both runners take off. But your fleet center fielder seemingly saves the day. She sprints, leaps, extends, dives, and snags the drive inches off […]