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The Black Sox Scandal shocked the sporting public and led to fundamental changes in the governance of professional baseball. Central to this astonishing fix were eight Chicago White Sox ballplayers, including star center-fielder Oscar “Happy” Felsch. An unpretentious Milwaukee native, the “Pride of Teutonia Avenue” only left his hometown to play ball. Felsch, one of […]

Hooty Phillips, father of Lefty Phillips. (Courtesy of the Nashville Metro Archives)   The John William “Lefty” Phillips story begins with another ballplayer, his father, John “Hooty” Phillips.1 Father and son played for their hometown Nashville Elite Giants, among other teams. Neither Hooty nor Lefty Phillips is especially well-known, although Hooty Phillips had a longer […]

“That McKinnis is one of the best pitchers I have ever seen,” said future Hall of Famer Alex Pompez, owner of the New York Cubans, in mid-1943. Pompez had experience dating back to 1916, and the Hall of Fame describes him as an “adroit talent evaluator.”1 Therefore, his was high praise indeed for 29-year-old lefty […]

At age 24, Johnny Broaca had seemingly limitless potential. His multiple athletic skills and academic prowess had lifted him from first-generation American working-class beginnings through a prestigious preparatory school to a Yale degree and a vital spot on the Ruth-Gehrig Yankees’ pitching staff. But a defiant, self-destructive temperament, more than a year voluntarily absent from […]

“Harvey” McClellan didn’t get much respect — especially from the press. Often characterized as a good-field, no-hit infielder, he managed to last six seasons with the Chicago White Sox despite often being derided in the press. Worse, Harvey wasn’t his first name or even his nickname. It was a simple misspelling by the press. Because […]

Blaine M. Thomas was born in August 1888, in Glendora, California — but no one has yet been able to turn up the date of his birth. His debut is easy to pin down, though. He started the second game of a doubleheader for the Boston Red Sox in St. Louis on August 25, 1911, […]

On May 6, 1887, the American Cornet Band led a parade down the streets of Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, to Recreation Park, home of the Alleghenies ball club of the National League.1 Two teams, neither of which belonged to the Senior Circuit, took the diamond that day. The Pittsburgh Keystones—a squad entirely made up of Black […]

Tom Hayes is a footnote in baseball history. To the extent that he is remembered at all, it is for selling 19-year-old Willie Mays to the New York Giants and setting him on his path to immortality. However, in his time, this shrewd, gruff man was a towering figure, a pioneer whose impact in the […]

John Fowler was one of the true pioneers of American baseball, one overlooked by the National Baseball Hall of Fame for more than a century after his death until he was elected in 2022 to Cooperstown — the same village where he had grown up as a teenager. In Black baseball history, he is the […]

The 1890 season was perhaps the most turbulent in baseball history. Conflict between owners and players over a salary cap and the reserve clause sparked the creation of a third major league. The Players League would compete with the two established leagues for players and fans. Although the addition of eight new major league teams […]

Frank Warfield may be one of the least understood and appreciated stars of the Negro Leagues, and possibly one of the most unjustly maligned. He stood just 5-feet-7-inches tall and was slight in stature, but he was feisty, fast, and, some would say, furious. Yet few player-managers in the Negro Leagues achieved as much as […]

Pitcher Mike Prendergast toiled over 600 innings in back-to-back seasons with Peoria in the Illinois-Iowa-Indiana League. He followed that up with a 180-game major-league career. His work ethic earned him the nickname “Iron Mike,” but he would likely be long forgotten had he not been included in the Chicago Cubs-Philadelphia Phillies trade that sent Pete […]

Jim Gilliam’s career was marked by a relentless, intelligent approach to the game and an extraordinary versatility. Although he was not a perennial All-Star or Hall of Fame candidate, his exceptional attributes can’t help but intrigue a thinking baseball fan. He went about his business in a studious way, a craftsman who never stopped refining […]

Game Five of the 1918 World Series was an elimination game for the Chicago Cubs. The Boston Red Sox held a three-games-to-one lead. Should the Red Sox win Game Five, they would win the World Series. There was, though, the possibility that the players would decline to play. The players were looking to ensure, among […]

As the resurgence of the Brooklyn Dodgers as a pennant-contending team in the 1940s moved into the next decade, there is one thing that scorekeeping fans could count on since 1949. Campy, Gil, Jackie, Pee Wee, Billy, Duke, and Skoonj. For the radio broadcast, you could pencil in their names into the lineup on your […]

Fledging leagues need paying customers to survive, but sometimes owners have to give away free samples to entice potential consumers to pay for products. This kind of thinking led to Fans’ Day, when, “[f]or the first time in many years admission to a big league game was free”1 as the Federal League’s Brooklyn entry’s “gates […]

For the two major-league baseball teams that called the Bronx home, the 1925 regular season was dreadful. The American League’s New York Yankees suffered their worst season in over a decade, finishing in seventh place, 16 games under .500. The Lincoln Giants won only 7 of their 50 games in the Eastern Colored League and […]

Chicago was saturated with rain. Newspaper boys peddled local dailies announcing eight White Sox acquitted on nine counts of conspiracy to fix the 1919 World Series.1 Cubs manager Johnny Evers was ill, “absent from the ball park,” giving “rise to reports that he had resigned.”2 Team President William Veeck “denied that [Evers] was to be […]

Pumpsie Green’s successful Millers debut was nearly set back when the car in which he was riding in a morning parade down Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis ran out of gas.1 The parade was the idea of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce as a way to introduce fans to an entirely new 1958 Millers team. […]

The summer of 1934 was one of the hottest on record in Chicago. Although the heat was nothing out of the ordinary for Negro League All-Stars like Alex Radcliff and Satchel Paige, who both grew up in Mobile, Alabama, it was still fortunate for them, and for the fans attending the matchup of the best […]

A teenage Willie Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons. Mays’ father did not allow him to join the Black Barons full-time in 1948 until school was over at the end of May. (Courtesy of Memphis Public Library)   The 1948 Negro League World Series was both an ending and a beginning. It was the last […]

On July 13, 1953, officials from the Cotton States League and its eight teams were enjoying cocktails and dinner at the Willow Room in Hot Springs, Arkansas, prior to the annual all-star game scheduled for that evening. The festive occasion was interrupted when a United States marshal arrived to serve papers in a $50,000 civil […]

This article appears in SABR’s “When the Monarchs Reigned: Kansas City’s 1942 Negro League Champions” (2021), edited by Frederick C. Bush and Bill Nowlin.   The year 1941 marked the beginning of an unforgettable period in American history. While some US soldiers basked in the comfortable confines of a Hawaiian breeze, half a world away […]

This article appears in SABR’s Baltimore Baseball (2021), edited by Bill Nowlin.   Baseball came to Baltimore in 1858 and grew in popularity over the next few years to become a genuine sensation. By the end of the Civil War, Baltimore had over 25,000 free African American residents, and therefore logical to believe that there […]