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Best known as the president of the National Football League from 1921 to 1939, Joe Carr also worked many years in a variety of executive positions in minor-league baseball.1 He was an officer of the Ohio State League (1910-1916), president of the Columbus team in the American Association (1926-1931), and promotional director of minor-league baseball […]

In averaging 27 homers a year from 1964 through 1968 to become one of the more feared power hitters on the San Francisco Giants, Jim Ray Hart first had to learn how to avoid getting clobbered at the plate. In his second game as a major leaguer, on July 7, 1963, Hart’s shoulder blade was […]

Fern Shollenberger was the third baseman on the All-Star team in six of her nine seasons in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. She first evidenced her talents on the family ball field in Hamburg, Pennsylvania. This small town is in a rural area of Berks County, 17 miles north of Reading. Fern’s father, Alvas R. […]

Ben Douglas Junior of Middletown, Connecticut is a forgotten pioneer of early baseball. Of the six New England cities which have had major league baseball teams, Ben Douglas Junior started the original team in half of them. In 1848, Ben became the third of four sons born to wealthy industrialist Benjamin Douglas Sr. and his […]

Imagine being able to say you’d seen the big-league debuts of Ernie Banks, Roberto Clemente, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Bill Mazeroski1 – not to mention an All-Star Game, a no-hitter, a four-homer game, and a batter hitting for the cycle. Some baseball lovers spend a lifetime hoping to see those kinds of milestones. Bill […]

As has always been the case, mining can be a dangerous occupation. Bob Duliba lost his father when he was just 9 years old. “He worked in the mines like everybody else in them days. He died when he was 50 – he had already worked 40 years in the mines. He was a slate […]

A right-handed-throwing, switch-hitting outfielder who had much more success from the left side because of his ability to “swing-and-run” and beat out slap base hits, Miguel Diloné was perhaps the quintessential journeyman. He played for seven teams (including two stints with the Pirates) over a 12-year career and had more than 400 plate appearances in […]

Throughout baseball history, careers have often been defined by a specific play or events. Joe DiMaggio is recalled for his 56-game hitting streak; Willie Mays for his catch in the 1954 World Series. Likewise, players can be maligned for ineptitude, real or perceived. Fred Merkle’s race-altering baserunning gaffe in 1908 and Bill Buckner’s inability to […]

In the Roaring Twenties a new breed of coed sprouted on college campuses across the nation. She smoked, drank, and danced the night away at fraternity parties. She cut her hair, wore make-up, and was a gleeful participant in panty raids. She was giddy, was often called a flapper, and could be persuaded to engage […]

“What other player is there who bats like [Carl] East, fields like East, throws like East from right field and then can pitch the kind of a game that Carl did yesterday?” — Wichita Beacon, July 6, 19211   Carl East was a pitcher and an outfielder in the minor leagues. Like Babe Ruth, he […]

For a pitcher who appeared in exactly one major-league game, at the tail end of the sixth-place New York Yankees 1917 season, pitcher Jack Enright certainly crossed paths with some of the game’s elite. He played in a local Fort Worth, Texas, city league with Rogers Hornsby; followed Tris Speaker on the baseball team at […]

Speedy outfielder Morris Nettles played parts of just two seasons in the majors: 1974 and 1975 with the California Angels. He was only 23 when he played his last big-league game, though he hung on through 1982 in Mexico. Yet several decades later his remarkable skills and rapid rise from obscurity to the big leagues […]

While he made one hit in his only major-league at-bat in 1963, Roy Gleason is better known for the unfortunate one hit of shrapnel he incurred in 1968 from an enemy bomb explosion while serving in the US Army during the Vietnam War. Gleason, who had played five years in the minor leagues before he […]

The long, record-setting, and sometimes turbulent career of umpire Joe West began about as quietly as could be imagined, in front of fewer than 1,000 paying customers on a rainy Tuesday evening in Atlanta on September 14, 1976. At age 23, West umpired his first big-league game in the first half of a doubleheader between […]

It was a battle for the American Association pennant, but “not a good game from a scientific standpoint,” opined the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.1 The first-place Philadelphia Athletics (63-28) arrived in the Gateway City to kick off a pivotal three-game series with the second-place St. Louis Browns (61-31). On a season-ending 13-game road swing, the Athletics […]

The Washington Nationals, and their fans, could well be described as “down in the dumps.” After a surprising 2012 season in which they won the NL East Division, expectations were high for 2013.1 Now with the team sitting at 49-54, 8½ games back of the Atlanta Braves, those expectations were going unfulfilled. In the first […]

The New York Yankees had entered the 1964 World Series as favorites to extend their record number of championships to 21, but they had blown a Game One lead and found themselves in an early hole. Though it was true that this Yankees squad carried no “superman aura, either by their manner or in the […]

Even after the game, the 1,500 people who watched a meaningless late-season contest between the Red Sox and the Yankees in the last week of the 1914 American League season would have had no idea that they had witnessed a historic hit by a rookie off a reliever nearing the end of his career. In […]

The sickening sound—a sharp crack—could be heard above the din of the 31,027 fans who filled Fenway Park that Friday night. On August 18, 1967, in the midst of what would become to be known as the Boston Red Sox’ “Impossible Dream” year, a brilliant career was derailed and a life nearly taken when favorite […]

The 2007 and 2008 seasons had ended in disappointment when the New York Mets missed the playoffs on the final day of each season. In 2008 the team also bade goodbye to Shea Stadium, its home for 45 seasons. It was hoped the opening of the Mets’ new ballpark would bring better days in 2009. […]

In the first minutes of Tuesday, July 13, 1976, police in the central New York State village of Newark responded to a report of a fight. They found the body of a teenage boy, shot dead, on the village’s Norton Street. The victim, 17-year-old1 Daniel Monzon,2 had come to the small town from Puerto Rico […]

New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin in the late 1970s (SABR-Rucker Archive)   When major-league baseball added four franchises for the 1969 season – the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres in the National League and the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots in the American League – it also expanded […]

The Polo Grounds, an odd name for an odd stadium, was home to several baseball teams, most notably the New York Giants until the team moved to San Francisco following the 1957 season. Its horseshoe-shaped grandstand and elongated playing area provided for ridiculously short distances down the foul lines and equally ridiculous long distances to […]

Near Boston Common and downstairs from Melville’s Seafood Restaurant,1 former Red Sox pitcher, reformed alcoholic, and unreformed ladies’ man Sam “Mayday” Malone ran a sports bar2 at 112½ Beacon Street — Cheers.3 The building that housed Melville’s and Cheers had once been a private home.4 Malone pitched five years for the Red Sox in the […]