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Fat Cats catcher Eitan Maoz leaps for a ball. (Michael Gauthier, Freedom Photography)   Professional baseball in Ottawa has had a turbulent existence and at times, a bitter heritage. From 1898 to the present, Ottawa professional baseball has been a race between sporadic success and crashing failures, featuring eight professional franchises.1 As a semiprofessional team, […]

“You could not possibly train a baseball squad in Havana. The distractions are too great. … The after-dark program down there would kill a team before it ever had a chance to appear in National League competition. …” So opined baseball legend John McGraw when asked why he never took his New York Giants to […]

Here is the appendix for Todd Peterson’s “May The Best Man Win: The Black Ball Championships 1866–1923” from the Spring 2013 Baseball Research Journal.   Black Ball Champions and Championship Games, 1866-1923 KEY: E= East; W= West; S= South; SLCB= Southern League of Colored Baseballists; MSL= Middle States Base Ball League; EISL= Eastern Inter-State League; […]

In recent years there has been a rather surprising emphasis on religion in baseball. This “born again” movement is based largely on the establishment of the Baseball Chapel Program, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Danny Thompson Award for exemplary Christian spirit in baseball. Major League baseball has had a number of players — […]

Historians and scholars of the Big Fix and the Black Sox Scandal often bemoan the endurance of myths about the 1919 World Series and its aftermath.1 Thanks to a complicated interplay between evolving literary representations of the events of 1919-20 and popular films like Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams, mention of “the Black […]

With the rapid spread in popularity of baseball across North America after the Civil War, St. Thomas, Ontario, was among the many burgeoning communities to use the game as a prominent civic community and promotional enterprise. The seat of Elgin County grew slowly until the arrival of the Canadian Southern and the Great Western railroads […]

It is hard to imagine a more polarizing figure in Philadelphia sports history than Dick Allen. Countless gallons of ink have been spilled in furtherance of trying to capture and explain Allen’s stormy relationship with the Phillies and the city of Philadelphia during his 1963-69 tenure with the club. Much less focus has been given, […]

On September 5, 1929, Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees played an exhibition game against the Mutual Welfare League team inside the walls of Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. “I hear we’re going to Sing Sing next Thursday,” Yankees catcher Ben Bengough announced in the Yankee Stadium dugout. “Yeh,”said Babe Ruth, […]

“Crack! The ball hits the bat. Smack! That ball hits Edith Houghton’s waiting glove at short who quickly throws to first to get the batter and all in a twinkling of an eye. These women play the game in a manner that would no doubt delight the heart of many a manager who ever saw […]

Barack Obama’s election last fall to the presidency of the United States is generally regarded as a culmination of the civil-rights movement in this country. Looking backward toward the beginnings of that movement, the eye falls on events in New York City just after the end of World War II and particularly on the career […]

Psychologists have long known that perceptions impact the way humans interact with each other. Stereotypical beliefs are attempts to organize the world and classify individuals into neat, predictable groups. For example, there is a tendency to generalize college professors as liberals and construction workers as conservatives. Of course, these far- sweeping generalizations may or may […]

In the baseball fantasy Field of Dreams, the spirits of various diamond greats come to play ball on a field rising magically out of Midwestern corn stalks. “Ty Cobb wanted to play,” chuckles Shoeless Joe Jackson. “But no one could stand the son-of-a-bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it.” In […]

  Numerous talents from the Negro Leagues made their way into the employ of the American and National League franchises in Chicago. Integration did not come to these clubs until four seasons after the debut of Jackie Robinson with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947, and even then, the pace of integration was frightfully slow. […]

SABR’s phenomenal membership rise is indeed a testimony to the burgeoning numbers of dedicated baseball researchers about the land. However, a menacing schism, one pitting baseball historians against baseball statisticians, bids foul to disturb the tribal unity. As a precipitating cause of this fratricidal struggle, baseball historians point to the distortion of historical records done […]

Editor’s Note: On this page, Parts One and Two, which were published separately in the Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 issues of the Baseball Research Journal, are combined into one article as the author intended. Sandy Koufax (SABR-Rucker Archive)   American Jews have long had a love affair with baseball. They have played baseball since […]

Gardner Park, Dallas Texas (Dallas Morning News)   The Armistice of November 11, 1918, ended the fighting in World War I, but for Black soldiers like O’Neal Pullen—a professional baseball player from Texas who served in the segregated 509th Engineer unit in France—the fight for freedom continued at home.1 Returning to a nation gripped by […]

Bent for Blood at Ebbets Field Do you remember when a gun for hire almost shot Jackie Robinson at Ebbets Field from behind the dugout on the first-base line? Of course, you do. How could you forget a moment like that? Everybody was there: Dixie Walker, Ralph Branca, Clyde Sukeforth, Eddie Stanky, Pee Wee Reese, […]

President Warren G. Harding shaking hands with  New York Yankee Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. April 25, 1923.  (Leslie Jones photo, courtesy of the Boston Public Library.)   In the wake of the 1919-20 Black Sox scandal, baseball got lucky. Luck’s name was George Herman Ruth, who entered our vernacular in a long-ball way and […]

Granted, numerous screen biopics have charted the lives of ballplayers from Hall of Famers to major leaguers with unusual, marketable life stories.1 One legend – Lou Gehrig – has been portrayed twice, in 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees and A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story, a 1977 made-for-television movie. Another – […]

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 […]

“Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on earth.” – Roberto Clemente1 Even at the field, Roberto Clemente took time for the fans. (Les Banos photograph courtesy of The Clemente Museum.)   Death comes to us all. It may happen […]

Star shortstop Dick Lundy was on the Hilldale team that played against the Boston Red Sox on September 14, 1918, just a week after the World Series ended. (HELMAR ART CARDS)   “Every one of the 16 Major League franchises that operated between 1901 and 1960 faced a black team at some point in their […]

Johnny Ritchey broke the Pacific Coast League’s color barrier with the San Diego Padres in 1948. (COURTESY OF BILL SWANK)   On March 30, 2005, the Padres unveiled a bust of Johnny Ritchey at the recently opened Petco Park, two years after his death. On February 21, 2017, Ritchey was inducted into the Breitbard Hall […]

New York Giants stalwarts Christy Mathewson and John McGraw. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)   They open the door. They’re opening thirty doors at once, but I can only talk about mine. Air from 2040 goes out, and air from 1905 comes in. The first thing I do is cough. It smells like horseshit and coal smoke […]