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Whitey Witt batted .301 as a Yankee, from 1922-1925. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   It was long before the days when the elegant voice of Bob Sheppard introduced the starting lineup at Yankee Stadium. However, if there was a public-address announcer at the Bronx ballpark on the day it opened on April 18, […]

Fred Girard Haney touched all the bases in a 65-year baseball career that led him from athletic stardom in high school to the general manager’s office of the Los Angeles Angels.

The 1965 Winter Meetings took place in Florida, with meeting venues in both Miami and Fort Lauderdale. It was the finale of an exciting year that marked the first free-agent draft (limited to players who were United States residents); the sudden end of the four-decade New York Yankees dynasty; the opening of baseball’s first indoor […]

Through Major League Baseball’s first 134 years, 1876–2009, some of its most interesting and uncommon events have been the 260 no-hitters (18 of which have been perfect games).1 In 2010, pitchers threw six no-hitters, two of which (and almost a third) were perfect. In this paper, we investigate whether simple mathematical models can explain the […]

I don’t know how he got hold of me. Probably it was through my membership in the Society for American Baseball Research, which has “New York/San Francisco Giants” and “New York Yankees” listed as my interests. It might have been from Alan Blumkin, the SABR trivia king. But sometime in 1998 or 1999, I got […]

Mid-game refreshment break for Cuban umpires. Mártires de Barbados Stadium, Granma, March 4, 2015.   Perhaps one of the most difficult umpiring jobs in the world is the one carried out in Cuba, where verbal abuse can come from the stands when a call is blown, or when a close play that has been called […]

One game for the pennant: winner takes the flag. Tiebreaker playoffs have produced drama—rookie Gene Bearden shutting down the Red Sox on one day’s rest in 1948 and Bobby Thomson hitting the most famous homer ever three years later—but these were the result of a tie at the end of the regularly scheduled season. A […]

On September 20, 2002, the Los Angeles Dodgers played a doubleheader against the Arizona Diamondbacks and scored five runs in the eighth inning to come back and take game one 6-5. This gave the Dodgers a season record of 103-44, a .700 winning percentage (briefly, as they lost game two), a feat rarely accomplished in […]

“Boys,” recalled the oldest living former ballplayer, “I got the best hit I ever had off Walter Johnson. It was in the late innings of a close game, and I was on deck. Johnson wanted to walk the guy ahead of me, but the manager said ‘pitch to him; the next man (meaning me) is […]

Beyond the outfield walls at Crosley Field, across Western Avenue in center field, and across York Street in left field, were brick industrial buildings, a part of the fabric of the neighborhood that enveloped the ballpark. Spectators sometimes grabbed glimpses of games from the windows of these buildings, and advertisers placed large signs on the […]

When Bill Veeck and Hank Greenberg arrived at Comiskey Park on March 11, 1959, as the new owners of the White Sox, Chuck Comiskey raced away in his Cadillac. Greenberg waved, but Comiskey did not return the gesture.1 It was as if Chuck, whose grandfather Charles had brought the White Sox to town in 1900, […]

Since the dawn of free agency, there has been increasing affection paid to players who spend their entire career with the same team. From the ballpark statues of Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn to the retired numbers of Robin Yount and George Brett, baseball fans in recent years have celebrated star players who rose through […]

In 1877, an auburn-haired 20-year-old from St. Louis, Missouri, took the field for George McManus’s St. Louis Brown Stockings. The career of baseballist Thomas Joseph “Tom” Loftus parallels the story of the first 35 years of pro ball. Born on November 15, 1856, Loftus was a minor- and major-league baseball player, team captain, scout, manager, […]

The last official game of the 1871 National Association season took place on Monday, October 30, at the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, New York. The Chicago White Stockings, temporary nomads since the destruction of their home park in the Great Chicago Fire three weeks earlier, were the nominal “home team” on the occasion, but it […]

There have been many great teams in the majors over the past century. The 1927 Yankees, the 1906 Cubs, and the 1930-31 Athletics are a few which come to mind. But equally memorable, in their way, are those teams at the other end of the scale who lost almost everything in sight, stumbling through a […]

Statcast will be 25 years old in 2040. The oldest Millennials will be 59 and the oldest Generation Z’s will be 43. These generations were raised on technology and, according to the Pew Research Center, over 81 % of them actively use and engage in social media in 2021.1 Their shopping and media consumption habits […]

A look at the Dodger way of scouting, tracing its roots back to Branch Rickey. 

COLLABORATOR’S NOTE: My friendship with James Fargo (Jimmy) Lanier went back approximately eighteen years, to a time when I helped organize a local baseball conference and learned that the man who had been Ty Cobb’s batboy and then lived in the Atlanta area. I contacted him, and he agreed to participate in the conference. We […]

One of baseball’s most highly-regarded accomplishments by an individual player is hitting for the cycle: collecting at least one of each of the four types of safe hits (single, double, triple, and home run) in the same game. While recognized as a rare and remarkable feat, the cycle has been achieved 286 times during the […]

Author’s note: I met Joe Wood in the early 1980s after I called and said I’d like to interview him. His daughter invited me over. Joe and I spent a lot of time together, often watching Red Sox games on television and comparing players from different eras. All this was before a taped interview, which […]

Cy Young said he didn’t have the speed he once had but could still “lob a hook up there.” (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   The reader probably knows that Cy Young is baseball’s all-time winningest pitcher with 511 victories and that his 22-year career ranks as one of the greatest in baseball history. […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).   When a team of Japanese collegians defeated their American counterparts to claim the 1984 Olympic gold medal for baseball, stunned American fans realized what the Japanese have felt for years: Baseball is as truly theirs as ours. Japan’s […]

The baseball season of 1868 ended with the National Association crown changing hands twice in the final month. The 1867 champs, the Unions of Morrisania, maintained their status for most of the season, thanks to playing weaker Eastern clubs during the early months and then taking an extensive Western tour in July and August. When […]

During the first years of the twentieth century many of the most celebrated—and marketable— major leaguers supplemented their incomes by headlining in vaudeville or touring in legitimate plays during the off-season. A few even appeared in motion pictures: a new medium that was revolutionizing the way in which Americans passed their leisure hours. And so, […]