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Babe Ruth is considered by many, if not most, baseball fans, as the greatest player ever. The Great Bambino is noted for his magnificent clouts and overwhelmingly charismatic personality. Before he became baseball’s home run king, he was a tremendous pitcher, winning 94 games in his career. His enormous appetite for everything that life had […]

There are many middle infielders who are tagged by scouts as “good field, no hit.” For the most part, these players are steady performers in the field. They make all of the routine plays with ease and the more challenging ones seem as if nothing is out of the ordinary. Their offensive contributions are minimal; […]

Twenty-one-year-old Mickey Mantle received the Art Griggs Memorial Award in 1953, as “the Oklahoma baseball player who has brought the state the most distinction with his past year’s performance.”1 Mantle may have wondered who was Art Griggs. A natural hitter, Griggs distinguished himself in the minor leagues as a slugging first baseman, and as an […]

Ray Herbert entered professional baseball at the age of 19 with the sinking fastball that major-league franchises dream of, but lacked the knowledge and skill to convert his great “stuff” into immediate success. For 11 years he toiled with mostly second-division teams, both in the majors and minors, rarely winning more than he lost, surrounded […]

Almost every kid who has ever played baseball fantasizes coming up in the bottom of the ninth inning during the seventh game of the World Series and hitting a home run to win it. Only one person has ever accomplished this. It occurred on October 13, 1960, at 3:36 p.m. That was when the Pittsburgh […]

“There is no baseball off-season in Cuba,” declares Sigfredo Barros Segrera, long-time sports journalist for the Cuban Communist Party news service Granma, available in print, in Cuba, and online versions for the rest of the world. Barros was born on November 14, 1945 in the provincial capital city of Santiago de Cuba, the second largest […]

Bob Friend was one of baseball’s more consistent starting pitchers during his era and a workhorse for the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates. That year the right-hander led the team in games started and innings pitched while posting an 18-12 record and 3.00 earned-run average in a major comeback from a disappointing 1959 campaign. Durable at 6-feet […]

Everyone has his baseball dream when growing up, but few get the opportunity to realize that one special moment. On October 12, 1956, the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers played the seventh game of the World Series. The Yankees had lost the first two games but had come back to win the next […]

[With research assistance from John Leidy] Ray Fisher has been justly honored for his 38 seasons as head baseball coach at the University of Michigan. He was elected to Michigan’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1959, the American Association of College Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame in 1966, and the University of Michigan Hall of […]

From his birth in 1905, in West Springfield, Massachusetts, to his death in 1991, in Palm Springs, California, Leo Durocher witnessed a great deal of social, political, and international change, some of which he helped bring about. Durocher played an important supporting role in the integration of major-league baseball. His frank assessment of African American […]

Young Orioles first basemen in the late 1970s faced mighty obstacles. It even took Hall of Famer Eddie Murray a year to make the job his own – but once he did, there were only crumbs left on the table. Lee May became the primary designated hitter after Murray replaced him at first, and with […]

The telegram was brash and a bit disrespectful. Simply stated, it read “DEAR MOOSE: TOLD YOU SO. JOE PEP.”1 The New York Yankees needed pitching help—specifically a boost to their rotation—following the 1962 season. They set their sights on Stan Williams, a right-handed twirler for the Los Angeles Dodgers who had won 14, 15, and […]

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 […]

A strong, quiet, and athletic 205-pounder who stood 6-feet-2, wore glasses, batted from the left side, and threw right-handed, Norm Siebern split time between first base and the outfield for six major-league teams. Originally a Yankee, he played in two World Series for New York, and was part of the package the Yankees sent to […]

June 15, 1977 is a black day in the history of the New York Mets. On that date, in what came to be known as The Midnight Massacre, M. Donald Grant, the team’s chairman of the board, traded away Tom Seaver, a/k/a “The Franchise,” to the Cincinnati Reds for Pat Zachry, Doug Flynn, Dan Norman, […]

In June 1970 Ted Williams, then managing the Washington Senators, reminisced for a reporter about the first time Williams had ever seen Dick Hall pitch. Hall, Williams recalled, “was taking his warmup throws, having come in to relieve somebody. I was kneeling in the on-deck circle and I thought to myself, ‘Oh, boy, he’ll be […]

Any list of the greatest players ever to don a Milwaukee Brewers uniform has to include Don Money. He is a four-time All-Star and a Brewers’ Walk of Fame member who holds major-league records as a third baseman. Money was an infield specialist who amassed a .975 fielding percentage over 16 seasons from 1968 to […]

A vital part of the Boston Red Sox teams of the 1950s and early 1960s, Ivan Martin “Ike” Delock, a gritty right-handed pitcher, was born, in Highland Park, Michigan. A Marine Corps veteran, he compiled an 84-75 record in a career which, with the exception of a one-month stint with the Baltimore Orioles in 1963, […]

Their 6-5 loss in Game One was disappointing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Once again they let the Yankees grab the lead in a World Series, something that happened in all but one of the times the teams met in the fall classic. Now they would have to play catch-up in the second game against left-hander […]

Cincinnati’s roots in professional baseball date to 1876, and the Queen City has seen a lot of baseball history—including the first major-league game to feature three members of the 500-home-run club. It happened on June 10, 2005, when Ken Griffey Jr. and the Cincinnati Reds hosted Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and the Baltimore Orioles in […]

The 1985 All-Star Game – a 6-1 National League win at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis – lacked drama. For the crowd of 54,960, that may have been disappointing. But for members of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, which operated the stadium, it was a relief. In its fourth season as home of […]

The 1959 New York Yankees (79-75) posted the franchise’s lowest win total since 1925, finishing a distant third behind the first-place Chicago White Sox (94-60) and the second-place Cleveland Indians (89-65). It was a significant dip in the Yankees’ fortunes after 10 American League pennants and 8 World Series titles in the previous 12 seasons. […]

On the Saturday before graduating from high school in June 1961, 18-year-old Lew Krausse Jr. watched from a box seat at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC, as hurler Norm Bass tossed the Kansas City A’s first shutout of the season.1 Sitting with Krausse was his father, former major-league pitcher Lew Krausse Sr., and their host, […]

On April 10, 1963, the US nuclear submarine USS Thresher sank in the Atlantic Ocean during a test dive about 220 miles east of Boston, with a loss of 112 sailors and 17 civilian technicians, scientists, and observers. Eighty-six of those lost were reportedly New England residents.1 The men aboard the Thresher left behind 187 […]