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Rachel Balkovec shattered a glass ceiling when she became the first woman to manage in affiliated baseball for the Tampa Tarpons. (Photo by Mark LoMoglio/ Tampa Tarpons)   Rachel Balkovec’s résumé includes several firsts: the first woman to serve as a strength and conditioning coordinator in affiliated baseball; the first woman to do so for […]

Six of the eight most populous cities in the United States were not represented in the National League for the baseball season of 1881. New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Cincinnati were not members of the League, which included only two charter members (Chicago and Boston) and teams from the smaller cities of […]

Many of us who read Richard D. Cramer’s article “Average Batting Skill Through Major League History” in BRJ 1980 (pp. 167-72) regard it as one of the most important, impressive, and fascinating articles which SABR has ever published. Its implications — which are not spelled out by Mr. Cramer — are so amazing that they […]

In April 1985, Ozzie Smith signed a contract which called for a base salary of $2,200,000 a year in 1988 and 1989. This probably caused more derisive comment from both press and fans than any other baseball contract. The focus of all this derision was Smith’s batting statistics – the fact that his lifetime batting […]

In the early 1960s, each of the recent expansion cities played host to the MLB All-Star Game, New York in 1964, Anaheim in 1967, Houston in 1968, and Washington DC in 1969. The 1968 baseball season took place against a backdrop of racial violence. The late 1960s trembled with social and political turbulence, with the […]

Richard Nixon may have been the greatest baseball student to occupy the presidency. In 1936 Nixon, 23, saw his first big-league game. “I don’t remember much about it,” he said, “except that the date was July 4, the Washington Senators lost a doubleheader at Griffith Stadium, and a rookie named DiMaggio put one in the […]

The dictionary defines the word “Elysian” as “something blissful; delightful,”1 and for ballplayers, such a place has existed for 140 years in the city of New York. Brooklyn is one of the five boroughs of New York City and if considered as a separate entity would rank fourth in the country in sending players to […]

A look at the 1935 Detroit Tigers’ opponents in the World Series. Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley and first baseman Charley Grimm pose in 1934 with … a goat. If only they had known. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)   In 1935 the Chicago Cubs celebrated their 20th season playing in Wrigley Field […]

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 […]

In 1969, the New York Mets became the first 1960s-era expansion team to win a World Series. En route to that championship, after overcoming a 9½ game mid-August Chicago Cubs lead, Gil Hodges managed his “Miracle Mets” to the National League East title over Leo Durocher’s Cubs. In Chicago, that season has been called the […]

In February 1933 – when Jackie Robinson was 14 years old – Heywood Broun, a syndicated columnist at the New York World-Telegram, addressed the annual dinner of the all-White New York Baseball Writers Association. If Black athletes were good enough to represent the United States at the 1932 Olympic Games, Broun said, “it seems a […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]