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The poet David M. Harris wrote: “No hick carpenter for Mary. Then the angel came.”1 The hick carpenter became St. Joseph, one of the most venerated figures in all Christendom. To baseball fans a different Hick Carpenter comes to mind. He is not venerated, but he is honored as probably the best left-handed third baseman […]

“Not all veteran fans remember him. Credit it to the fact that he was simply too good at what he did, which was use his voice with the range and subtlety of a concert violinist,” wrote TV Guide of Ray Scott. “CBS’s National Football League coverage didn’t make a move to any big game without […]

Gregory Winston McMichael was born on December 1, 1966, in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was the youngest of three children and a multisport athlete growing up. He always hanging around ballfields with his older brothers while they played. He enjoyed sports and competition and developed his skills as a ballplayer. McMichael’s father, Allen owned an insurance […]

When the 1952 season ended, Hank Sauer, the heavy-hitting left fielder of the Chicago Cubs, had enjoyed a career year. Even though he averaged just .213 with three homers and seven RBIs during the month of September (due to a neck injury), the 35-year-old right-handed batting slugger was tied with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Ralph Kiner […]

Prominent in the baseball circles of his time but now forgotten, Bill Watkins spent more than thirty years as a player, manager, front office executive, and team owner of various major and high minor league franchises. His playing career short-circuited by a near fatal beaning in 1884, Watkins thereafter assumed the manager’s post for the […]

Curt Simmons left the visiting dugout and was moving through the bowels of Yankee Stadium toward the visitors’ locker room when a roar erupted from the Yankee Stadium crowd. Simmons knew the third game of the 1964 World Series was over, but he had given the St. Louis Cardinals eight solid innings, allowing only four […]

Born June 19, 1949, in St. Louis and then raised there, Jerry Reuss made his major league debut for the team he cheered on as a child; and then was traded by that team because the owner didn’t like his mustache. At his next stop he was considered “the asshole of all time1” by his […]

Dick Kelley was a major-league pitcher for the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves from 1964 to 1968, and the San Diego Padres in 1969 and 1971. A nearly 6-foot-tall left-hander, Kelley pitched 520 innings in the major leagues, finishing with a record of 18-30 and an ERA of 3.39 that was just above league average. He […]

 Purchased by the Chicago White Sox from the Pacific Coast League near Labor Day of 1959, Joe Stanka was a 28-year-old journeyman in his 10th minor-league campaign. He appeared in just two games for the Go Go Sox, winning one, losing none, and compiling a 3.78 earned run average in 5⅓ innings of pitching. He […]

Left-hander Mark Buehrle pitched in 518 games, starting 493 of them, over a 15-year career. He finished his career with a 214-160 career record with a 3.81 ERA and 1,870 strikeouts in 3,283⅓ innings pitched. Buehrle was a five-time All-Star, and won four Gold Gloves and one World Series championship. He pitched two no-hitters, one […]

At age 25, after becoming the best hitter in three different minor leagues – preceded by two-years’ service as an officer in the US Navy – Frank Saucier was the St. Louis Browns’ most sought-after and anticipated post-World War II rookie since the club signed future 20-game-winning pitcher Ned Garver and slugger Roy Sievers, the […]

Dick Gyselman made it to the major leagues for 82 games with the Boston Braves in 1933-34, but his greatest achievement, arguably, is a mark he set in the lower circuits–his 2,500 games played at third base is the all-time minor league record. In a professional career that totaled nineteen seasons, the six-foot, two-inch Gyselman […]

Garry Lewis Templeton was born on March 24, 1956, in Lockney, Texas, a small town in the state’s northern Panhandle. Templeton’s father, Spiavia, played in the Negro leagues, but Garry was not aware of his father’s history until he was 12 or 13. Spiavia was a backup infielder who played with Satchel Paige (who once […]

A name can sometimes be confusing. Four years into his major-league career, Joel Edward Horlen said that though the news media and fans knew him by his proper name, Joel, “All my friends call me Joe and that’s what I go by. When I got into baseball, it became Joel somehow. I guess because that’s […]

In what may be a unique event in the annals of baseball history, Al “Zeke” Zarilla had to buy a ticket to his major-league debut. He didn’t have to buy a plane ticket or a train ticket but the brand-new baseball recruit had to buy a game ticket to the game in which he was […]

There was never an Alex Grammas question on Family Feud. However, if Richard Dawson, the late and long-time host of the popular game show, were to have asked a hundred of his contemporaries how they remembered Grammas, the survey would invariably point to three answers: flawless fielding, excellence as a third-base coach, and his Hellenic […]

Long before most teams had at least one reliever who could routinely hit 100 mph on the radar gun, the Cincinnati Reds had Rob Dibble. In his first four full seasons in the majors (1989–92), the 6-foot-4, 240-pound right-hander had a strikeout-to-walk ratio of nearly 4-to-1 while setting a record for the fewest innings (368) […]

The story of baseball in the nation’s capital is interlinked with the career of Arthur P. Gorman, a name unrecognizable to today’s fans. Long before Clark Griffith made his annual trips to the White House to present the Commander-in-Chief with his season’s pass, Gorman actually befriended and entertained the President of the United States and […]

At the baseball field in Memorial Park, in Middletown, Maryland, a rural community about fifty miles northwest of Washington, D.C., stands a monument that townspeople erected in honor of Charlie Keller. It’s a bronze plaque affixed atop a waist-high, circular concrete pillar. Beneath a raised profile of Keller is a legend: “Charlie Keller … Middletown’s […]

The 18-year-old student trainer was mortified. A 96-inch roll of cloth athletic tape unwound and rolled across the floor. The football team and adult training staff, along with the thunderstruck Mark Letendre, watched as eight yards of tape uncoiled. “What a rookie,” announced the Head Athletic Trainer. From that day forward Letendre was known as […]

Even the Detroit Tigers faithful were cheering Cleveland first baseman Bill Glynn on as he stepped into the batter’s box in the eighth inning on July 5, 1954.  Glynn was having the greatest game of his major-league career in the first game of a doubleheader at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium.  In his first three at-bats, Glynn […]

From the moment he started pitching, Steve Kealey wanted to be a starter instead of a reliever. However, once he reached professional baseball, his ability to loosen up quickly made him too valuable not to use him out of the bullpen. Despite not getting his first preference, the 6-foot, 185-pound Kealey crafted a brief yet […]

Right-hander Pedro Astacio made national news by tossing a shutout and fanning 10 in his major-league debut and proceeded to record four shutouts in just 11 starts as a midseason call-up for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1992. Never the superstar his meteoric rise might have suggested, Astacio eventually developed into a sturdy, and sometimes […]

The Chicago Cubs had their work cut out for them if they were going to repeat as World Series champions in 1908. When they left Chicago on September 9 for a grueling 24-game road trip, they were mired in third place, two games behind the red-hot New York Giants and 1½ games behind the surging […]