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Al Smith was an accomplished ballplayer whose major-league career spanned 12 seasons with four American League teams. Primarily an outfielder, he played six positions as a major leaguer and was a fine defender with a strong arm and good speed. Smith finished with a .272 lifetime batting average, hit 164 home runs, and reached base […]

Helen Dettweiler was “The Girl of Summer” in 1938 when she became the first woman to broadcast professional baseball, according to The Sporting News. A promotional stunt for a radio sponsor, it was just one stop in a life of adventure. She served as a World War II code-breaker and military pilot, and was one […]

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 […]

With a career batting average of .264 and the second-highest home run total of any Iowan who ever played major league baseball (after Hal Trosky), it goes without saying that Casey Blake could hit. He also was a good fielder, whether he was playing his natural position of third base or filling in at first […]

On Monday evening, September 22, 1947, the “sizzling steaks [were] on the house . . . [and] free gravy down the shirt front” was de rigueur at 600 Flatbush Avenue.1 Pitcher Hugh Casey, proprietor of Hugh Casey’s Steak and Chop House, was optimistically throwing a victory dinner party for his Dodgers teammates. Brooklyn’s beloved “Bums” […]

America loves an underdog. It favors stories of players who weren’t given a chance because they were too small or didn’t have a traditional background, but they pushed and persevered and in the end made the team. Wayne LaMaster’s baseball career isn’t widely remembered today, but it is the classic underdog story of a player […]

What Tommy Davis accomplished as a major leaguer on one good leg, most players would be proud to do on two. Not that this sums up his athletic career, but it is an important backdrop to his improbable baseball odyssey. Davis seemed ready to have his ticket punched for Cooperstown as he entered his ball-playing […]

Former major league player and scout Lenny Yochim once said in a New Orleans Times-Picayune interview, “I had a good life doing something I love.”1 From his teenage days in the Crescent City in the 1940s until his retirement in 2002, Yochim spent practically every summer participating in some aspect of the sport to which […]

Ron Luciano was a football All-American, baseball umpire, TV broadcaster, and best-selling author. He barged through the world like a gnu amid a herd of Shetland ponies, entertaining many, offending a few, and hiding behind a cheerful and outrageous persona until life somehow proved unbearable. Everyone knew him, but nobody did. He was born June […]

Darrell Dean Johnson worked in baseball as a catcher, a coach, a manager best known for taking the 1975 Red Sox to Game Seven of the World Series, and as a scout. He was born in the small community of Horace, Nebraska, on August 25, 1928, but grew up on the West Coast, so much […]

In three different seasons — 1939, 1941, and 1944 — Frank McCormick hit home runs more often than he struck out. In his entire 13-year career, encompassing 5,723 at-bats and more than 6,200 plate appearances, the slugging first baseman had just 189 strikeouts — 10 fewer whiffs than Ryan Howard achieved in only 529 at-bats […]

At times, it looked like José “Coco” Laboy would never get a shot in the majors. When he finally did, ten years after his professional career began, his rookie year made many wonder why it took so long. On his way up, no one would have ever accused Coco Laboy of having it easy. He […]

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 […]

First baseman Gus Suhr is best known for playing in a then-record 822 consecutive National League games (1931-37). Yet he also achieved recognition for his extensive offensive and defensive contributions in a commendable big-league career of 11 years, 10 of which were spent with the Pittsburgh Pirates. August Richard Suhr was born on January 3, […]

The Joe Vosmik story is the classic American tale in which the scion of an immigrant family falls in love with the national game of the family’s adopted country. Vosmik’s tale has all the required elements: precocious skills, early passion, an indulgent father, a disapproving mother who later relents and shares her son’s ardor, obsession, […]

Elburt Fletcher was an 18-year-old minor leaguer when he shared a spring training dugout with Babe Ruth. “He still had that marvelous swing, and what a follow-through, just beautiful, like a great golfer. But he was forty years old. He couldn’t run, he could hardly bend down for a ball, and of course he couldn’t […]

David Ortiz addresses the crowd at Fenway Park on April 20, 2013. (MICHAEL IVINS / BOSTON RED SOX)   Monday, April 15, 2013, was Patriots Day in Massachusetts, a state holiday commemorating the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Patriots Day is famous for two sporting events — the Boston Marathon, and the morning Boston Red […]

Kevin McReynolds and Rich “Goose” Gossage were teammates for three years with the San Diego Padres and were major contributors to a Padres team that played in the 1984 World Series. After McReynolds was traded to the New York Mets during the 1986-87 offseason, Gossage had some unkind words for his former teammate. The outspoken […]

The Brooklyn Dodgers, who had won 11 in a row between May 5 and May 16, 1945, had fallen on hard times. They went on a six-game losing streak, the last three of which were the first three games of the four-game set in St. Louis. The Dodgers’ futility at the Cardinals’ home field had […]

Sunday, September 30 was supposed to be the last day of the most memorable 1951 National League season. The New York Giants, 13 ½ games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers on August 26, had come roaring back to tie the Dodgers for the lead heading into that last day. They were playing the Braves in Boston […]

What happens when the worst team in the American League meets the worst team in the Class B Interstate League for a late-season offday exhibition game? Only 956 people could have told you firsthand, because that was the paltry reported crowd on the night of September 7, 1943, when the Philadelphia Athletics (44-84, 35½ games […]

The New York Mets came into existence in 1962 and were one of the worst teams in baseball history, losing 120 games. The 1963 season was much of the same for Casey Stengel’s Mets. They lost 111 games and finished last for the second straight year. The Mets of that era were lovable losers, with […]

Black baseball pioneer and 2022 Hall of Famer Bud Fowler played for at least 15 minor-league teams from 1878 to 1895, and he’s considered the first acknowledged African American professional baseball player.1 One stop on his journey was with the Montpelier Capital Citys of the 1887 Northeastern League. Throughout his historic career, Fowler was the […]

On September 30, 1967, a Saturday afternoon, the Minnesota Twins played the first of a two-game season-ending series against the Red Sox at Boston’s Fenway Park. The Twins led the Red Sox and the Tigers (who had to play two doubleheaders) by a single game. A Twins victory would eliminate the Red Sox, while the […]