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There was no reason to expect St. Louis Cardinals catcher Glenn Brummer to play a significant role in the team’s Sunday afternoon game against the San Francisco Giants on August 22, 1982. Though manager Whitey Herzog called Brummer “the best third-string catcher I’ve ever seen,”1 that was more a reference to his willingness to work […]

Using an apparatus they’d devised themselves, industrious J. Wallace Page and his younger cousin, Charles Lamb, began manufacturing woven wire fencing in the 1880s as a low-cost, livestock-friendly alternative to barbed wire.1 By 1894 their business had grown into a thriving enterprise, the Page Woven Wire Fence Company, with 100 employees manufacturing fencing for farms […]

It’s not so much what Ernie Banks did on Thursday, September 17, 1953. Rather, it’s what the game meant to the Chicago Cubs’ franchise and major league baseball in general. The 22-year-old Dallas, Texas, native went hitless in three at-bats, scored one run, and made an error at shortstop in his major league debut. The […]

Wednesday, September 20, 1961, offered the last chance for Roger Maris to pass Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs within Commissioner Ford Frick’s 154-game deadline for being credited with breaking The Babe’s sacrosanct mark.1 Maris came into the game with 58 home runs. To beat Ruth’s mark, he would have to do something he […]

After starting their 1967 season with a loss, just as they had for the previous six years, the New York Mets sent their newest young star, Tom Seaver, to the mound for the second game of their season-opening series against the Pittsburgh Pirates.1 An audience of 5,005 “polar bears,” among them movie director Alfred Hitchcock, […]

Few prospects have fallen to earth quite as dramatically as pitcher Brien Taylor, the number-one pick by the New York Yankees in the June 1991 amateur draft. Signing a record $1.55 million contract negotiated by agent Scott Boras and Taylor’s mother, Bettie,1 the hard-throwing North Carolina high schooler became one of baseball’s top-rated, most-anticipated prospects.2 […]

“We play the game the right way” is a phrase commonly bandied about in baseball. But baseball players are judged and rewarded based on their personal performances. What happens when these two sometimes disparate philosophies collide? Such was the case on September 26, 2019, at Globe Life Park, where the Texas Rangers beat the Boston […]

Federal League Park in Indianapolis struck fear into the hearts of pitchers – and it wasn’t just because the park was built on top of a former burial ground.1 The spanking-new facility, constructed specifically for the city’s Federal League entry, was the most hitter-friendly ballpark in the majors.2 Its dimensions were 365 feet down the […]

Like thousands of youth pitchers, Frank Castillo dreamed of winning a game in the major leagues. He was drafted out of Eastwood High School in El Paso, Texas, in the sixth round of the June 1987 amateur draft by the Chicago Cubs and progressed quickly through the minors. After reaching Triple-A Iowa to start the […]

Tommy McCarthy of the Boston Beaneaters was one of the smartest players in baseball. The outfielder with the “smooth face and boyish smile” was quick thinking, “fast on his feet,” and “game to the core.”1 The Pittsburgh Pirates were victims of his astute play on Wednesday, August 15, 1894, at the South End Grounds in […]

Almost every scout considered him too short (5-feet-6½) to be a major-league pitching prospect. One scout was not deterred, however, and dared to sign the left-hander, setting off Bobby Shantz on a 16-year odyssey in the major leagues. Shantz reached the heights of success early in his career by winning the American League’s Most Valuable […]

Del Pratt was arguably the second-best second baseman of the second decade of the 20th century. And his argumentative nature led The New York Times’ John Kieran to call him “the greatest clubhouse lawyer baseball ever knew.” Pratt was born into a well-off family on January 10, 1888, in Walhalla, South Carolina, near the Georgia-North […]

Baseball is a game of numbers, so it is fitting to begin this story with the number Four Thousand Two Hundred Seventy-Two. No one had ever taken longer to get to the World Series – 4,272 major-league games as player and manager before his first Series game in 1996. As Joe Torre stated in Chasing […]

With a competitive, sometimes combative, spirit and a devastating split-fingered fastball, Jack Morris became the pitcher of the 1980s and continued his dominance into the early 1990s. His 162 victories in the 1980s were 22 more than runner-up Dave Stieb of Toronto. Four times he was a member of a world-championship team, including a one-year […]

One could make a strong case for Joe McGinnity being the most durable pitcher in baseball history. In just 10 seasons in the major leagues, “Iron Man” McGinnity worked 3,441 innings and won 246 games. During the month of August in 1903, he pitched and won both ends of a doubleheader three times; he accomplished […]

Even before he was born into this world, Mickey Mantle was being prepared for life as a future big-league baseball player. His father, Elvin “Mutt” Mantle, a former semipro player and a lifelong baseball fanatic, proclaimed that if his first child turned out to be a boy, he would name him Mickey, in honor of […]

Rich “Goose” Gossage was “the type of relief pitcher that has become extinct,” as Murray Chass of the New York Times put it in 2008.[1] Today’s closer typically has the mission of pitching one inning. In 1978, when the fearsome, hard-throwing righty was the mainstay of the bullpen for the World Series champion New York […]

It must have been difficult living in the shadows of two older brothers: Harry, hailed as “The Father of Professional Baseball,” and George, a baseball legend, top cricket player, successful sporting goods businessman, and a pioneer who helped bring golf and tennis to the United States. It is not surprising that what we know of […]

Joe Heving was born four years later than his brother Johnnie, but made his major league debut 10 years afterwards. John was a catcher who played professional ball from 1919 to 1946, including five years with the Red Sox from 1924-1930. Joe Heving heaved for a living – he was a right-handed pitcher, an early relief specialist […]

Charlie French led off for the White Sox in the very first game played at the original Comiskey Park, on July 1, 1910. He played in 105 games for two Sox teams, Boston and Chicago, in 1909 and 1910, and then returned back to the minor leagues. French’s family background was England, not France. His […]

“Oh, Gertrude, when sorrows come they come not as single spies but in battalions.” – Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5, a favorite quote of Ned Martin when the Red Sox were having a particularly bad day   “With this back and these knees? Mercy,” Ned Martin asked rhetorically, using his trademark exclamation when asked if […]

One week in June 1988. Zach Crouch’s major league debut was on June 4, 1988. The young pitcher came into a game at Fenway Park, with the Toronto Blue Jays leading the Red Sox, 7-2, in the top of the ninth. The Jays had already scored four runs in the inning, off ace reliever Lee […]

Jocko Conlan always wanted to be a ballplayer. He never dreamed about becoming an umpire until the opportunity presented itself by accident. He parlayed that chance into a Hall of Fame career that spanned 25 big-league seasons. A Sporting News book once wrote of Conlan, “He was a master psychologist in the charged-up world of […]

Many players played for National and American League teams in Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia or St. Louis. Just a dozen men played for Washington teams in both leagues. Some of the best known are John Anderson, Jack Doyle, Win Mercer and Kip Selbach. Most of the rest are recognizable to fans of Deadball Era […]