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If the business of baseball seemed bleak following the previous season, the 1893-1894 offseason started from a different place in attitudes toward the business of baseball. Following the upheaval of recent seasons, Sporting Life proclaimed, “Both artistically and financially the season was the most successful since 1889.”1 Just as the negative outlook following the 1892 […]

It could be compared, in a way, to a romance novel — first they hate each other, then they start to learn more about each other to where they like each other, and finally they fall in love and get married. Unlike the two protagonists in this popular style of fiction, though, the National and […]

Willie Mays’ skills had diminished by the time the New York Mets traded for him in May 1972. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   After almost 20 years as a Giant, Willie Mays was traded from San Francisco to the New York Mets in May 1972. It was a shock to the baseball world, since Horace Stoneham, old-fashioned […]

In the baseball season of 1932, Jimmie Foxx—known then and now as Double X—made a concerted assault on Babe Ruth’s home-run record of 60 in a season. The Philadelphia A’s strong boy came up two short, ending his season with a total of 58. There is a persistent legend that Foxx would have broken Ruth’s […]

Speaking before a banquet of baseball aficionados in Philadelphia at the turn of the century, editor Francis Richter of Sporting Life extolled the “steady progress” baseball had made as business and sport since the inception of the National League. “Every patron of the sport,” he began, “knows that baseball is a fixed and stable-business which […]

Baseball is called America’s national pastime, but in Cuba baseball is a way of life. In the late 1890s during the war of independence, baseball unified the Cuban people in opposition to Spaniards, who looked down on the sport and preferred traditional European bullfighting. Sixty years later when Fidel Castro came to power, he knew […]

Only one tripleheader has been played in the majors in this century and that was 60 years ago. Considering that, in this Age of Television, nine innings may take three or more hours to play, it is unlikely that we shall soon see another one. The last tripleheader was played on October 2, in the […]

It could be argued that the most famous sentence ever written by a Canadian author is W.P. Kinsella’s, “If you build it, he will come.” That ghostly utterance may only be matched by Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson’s equally phantomic line about Pierre Trudeau: “he haunts us still.” Being interested in both political and baseball […]

This article was originally published in “Above the Fruited Plain,” the 2003 SABR convention journal.   Since opening in April of 1995, Denver’s Coors Field has received accolades for its architectural design and downtown location. The ball park echoes the scale and materials of adjacent brick warehouses and replicates the urban accessibility found in early […]

Lobby card for “Kill the Umpire” (1950) starring William Bendix. (Author’s collection)   Most baseball fans would agree that the best umpire is the invisible umpire. Sure, the umps on the field ensure that the rules of the game are followed. They call balls and strikes. They determine if the fielder who dives for the […]

Forfeits were relatively commonplace in the early days of baseball. There was at least one forfeit in the major leagues every year from 1883 to 1907, including 13 in 1884. A review of the reasons for these forfeits reveals how ”bush league” the major leagues still were. In 1889, St. Louis’s American Association team failed […]

Little serious statistical or analytical research has been done on baseball prior to 1871, the year that the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players started, in large part because there was no organized record-keeping of games. Several very good general histories of the period have been published, notably John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden […]

In reading accounts of the 1903 World Series, I so often came across the team name “Boston Pilgrims” that I accepted this on faith as one of the names by which the team was known. I even used it myself, presenting it as fact (see page 1 of Tales from the Red Sox Dugout). I […]

Nelson Rockefeller stands with Jackie Robinson, who served as a special assistant on community affairs for the New York Governor in the 1960s.   Between 1960 and 1968, Jackie Robinson was widely regarded as the most famous Black Republican in the country. Following his announced retirement from baseball in January 1957, and in remarkably short […]

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president, ushering in an era of political comity and refreshed vision. Not to be outdone, the major-league owners were busily ushering in their own visionary plans, culminating in the historic Winter Meetings of 1960. On December 7, the final day of the meetings at the Park […]

Carl Daniel Erskine, born and raised in Anderson, Indiana, but famed for his twelve seasons as a stellar right hander for the Brooklyn Dodgers in baseball’s postwar era, proved not only to be talented pitcher but also an exceptional teammate and person. One of the Dodgers of 1952-53 portrayed in Roger Kahn’s 1971 baseball classic, […]

The end of the 1951 National League pennant race is legendary and well known even to casual baseball fans. The final game of the playoff series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants is arguably the most famous baseball game ever played. In fact its significance goes even further, as it has been the […]

Albert Spalding lived an extraordinary life as one of baseball’s most important figures. This article focuses on his San Diego years, during which he helped develop San Diego into the city it is today, as well as key connections in his early life that set up his grand finale. The Rockford Files Rockford, Illinois, is […]

The World Series is the capstone of each baseball season. It ties up the annual package that was the pennant races, crowning an ultimate champion and providing fans with memories and associations that continue to live: the Called Shot, Al Gionfriddo, Bill Mazeroski. The special events of the World Series have a parallel in the […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Deadball Era Committee’s November 2016 newsletter. Click here to read more newsletters from the Deadball Era Committee. Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg are among the Deadball Era Committee’s most accomplished members. Baseball historians and authors, they have not only garnered recognition in their own rights, but collaborated […]

Leo Durocher, who is said to have said “nice guys finish last”—also the title of his autobiography—plausibly could have asked, “who said cheaters never prosper?” I refer, of course, to the revelation by Joshua Prager—first in a 2001 Wall Street Journal article and then his book, The Echoing Green—that in 1951 the New York Giants […]

With the rapid spread in popularity of baseball across North America after the Civil War, St. Thomas, Ontario, was among the many burgeoning communities to use the game as a prominent civic community and promotional enterprise. The seat of Elgin County grew slowly until the arrival of the Canadian Southern and the Great Western railroads […]

The late Ed Linn, coauthor of Veeck—As in Wreck, later wrote in The Great Rivalry (1991), “I don’t care what anybody says, there is no rivalry on the face of the earth that can compare with the Yankees and Red Sox.”1 Linn, who died in 2000, might have been able to justify that statement more […]

Wow! Look at all those bright colors. The baseball field at the Astrodome suddenly resembled a Tequila Sunrise. Yellow, red, and orange floated over jade green Astroturf as the players took their positions. Perplexed fanatics couldn’t take their eyes off the gaudy new 1975 uniforms on the backs of their Houston Astros. Thankfully, the back […]