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Dominican infielder Luis Ortiz forged a life in baseball. He began his career in pro ball in 1991 with the Boston Red Sox organization and made it to the top level with Boston in 1993. He got into 60 big-league games for the Red Sox and Texas Rangers from 1993 through 1996. Then after a […]

Frank Skaff’s big-league playing career spanned a mere 38 games and 75 at-bats in 1935 and 1943. That was far fewer than observers projected when the talented athlete emerged on the stage. However, Skaff spent six decades in Organized Baseball as a player, coach, manager – including 79 games with the 1966 Detroit Tigers – […]

Dave Danforth (1890-1970) is one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the history of the national pastime. He was “the icicle of the swirling vortex” for most of his career, and the mystery of what he threw and how he pitched has never been resolved.1 “Danforth, if you believe the boys in the […]

Mothers will do anything for their children. If you were Patty Kendall, those selfless duties would have included hitting ground balls to your son Jason, sometimes for hours on end, until he missed one. “That was the deal,” said Patty. “If he missed one, I went in. He used to keep me out there for […]

Andy Coakley is remembered most as “Lou Gehrig’s coach” in his 37 years as head of Columbia University’s baseball program. But this overlooks his extensive influence on the game. Once a promising right-hander with Connie Mack’s Athletics in the early 20th century, Coakley was also a labor pioneer, a forward-thinking league organizer, a team owner, […]

Throughout his 14-year major league career, John Anderson became accustomed to change. As one of the era’s few switch-hitters, one might say he even had a knack for it. From 1894 to 1908, Anderson played for six different franchises in seven different cities. He played for winners, such as the pennant winning 1899 Brooklyn Superbas […]

A big man with a famous scowl and a name that felt ripped from a James Bond film, Mo Vaughn was a hulking 6-foot-1, 225-pound lefty hitter whose frame dangled over home plate. Baseballs seemed to disintegrate on impact when he exploded out of his crouched stance, extending one arm to the sky on his […]

Midre Cummings is the ninth of 14 major leaguers (as of 2016) from the U.S. Virgin Islands. He may be as close to a complete player as the territory has ever produced. Thus he was saddled with high expectations as a prospect in the early ’90s. But the young Midre displayed only tantalizing glimpses of […]

Ornery, rambunctious, and immensely talented, Leslie Nunamaker became one of baseball’s stoutest hitting and best throwing catchers during the last decade of the Deadball Era—and one of the game’s colorful personalities. Cut from the same temperamental cloth as contemporaries Ty Cobb and John McGraw, Nunamaker was prone to explosive on-field behavior that resulted in an […]

Gregg Olson, the only son of a highly successful high-school baseball coach, distinguished himself on the diamond at Omaha’s Northwest High School and went on to “pioneer the position of late inning college closer at a time when no one put their most talented pitcher in the bullpen.”1 That talent made him a first-round draft […]

When you review how professional baseball integrated, it is easy to begin and end with the story of Jackie Robinson’s struggles. Scant attention is given the fact that African Americans faced tremendous resistance to their presence throughout the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the Deep South. One such player who experienced this was Blue Moon […]

Dwain Anderson was a utility infielder who played in 149 major-league games over the course of four seasons between 1971 and 1974.  He threw and batted right-handed and was a versatile infielder, playing second base, third base, and shortstop over a ten-year career in professional baseball.  Frequently included in early 1970s trades, Anderson played for […]

Fred Heimach’s grandfather was a house painter from Pennsylvania. Edward and Margaret Heimach both came from the Quaker State, but had been living across the river in Camden, New Jersey, since the 1880s.  Their son George was Fred’s father, but he and his wife had separated early, and the young Frederick Amos Heimach was raised […]

Bottom of the 11th. Runners at first and third. One out. Edwin Encarnacion digs in at the plate,1 ready to have one of the most memorable plate appearances of his career. Ubaldo Jimenez takes a deep breath and looks at catcher Matt Wieters for the sign as 49,934 people inside a cramped Rogers Centre create […]

For the Washington Nationals, the drama of the 2008 season came at the very beginning of the season and at the very end. The grind of the in-between was punctuated by two losing streaks of nine games each, a 12-game losing streak, and a season-ending stretch of nine loses in 10 games. On opening night […]

Against a Pittsburgh Pirates lineup whose first three batters were each hitting .300 or above (Maury Wills at .300, Matty Alou at .303, and Roberto Clemente at .344), New York Mets rookie Tom Seaver pitched his first major-league shutout in the first game of a doubleheader on August 13, 1967. New York’s 3-0 win was […]

This article appears in SABR’s “Bittersweet Goodbye: The Black Barons, the Grays, and the 1948 Negro League World Series” (2017), edited by Frederick C. Bush and Bill Nowlin.   To people familiar with the historical relationship between the cities of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Birmingham, Alabama, it must seem appropriate that the last Negro League World […]