Search Results

Serious baseball research has refuted the earlier contention that Abner Doubleday laid out the first baseball diamond at Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1839 while a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy. But this should not diminish the relationship that developed between baseball and the military over the last century. Both the effort to credit General Doubleday […]

In 1905, Tokyo’s Waseda University became the first Japanese ballclub to play on American soil. Under the visionary leadership of Isoo Abe, the man now celebrated as “the Father of Japanese Baseball,” Waseda played 26 games against American colleges and semi-pro teams, finishing with a 7–19 record (.269 winning average).1 In 1911, Waseda returned to […]

The 1911 winter meetings played out in the press as well as in the meeting rooms. Two days before the start of the 1911 World Series, which matched the New York Giants against the Philadelphia Athletics, the newspapers in both cities noticed that large blocks of World Series tickets had fallen into the hands of […]

Freddie Fitzsimmons of the New York Giants gives a pitching clinic for the All-Japan team. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Giants)   On the morning of June 29, 1953, readers of the Globe Gazette in Mason City, Iowa, were greeted by a headline on page 13: “New York Giants Invited to Tour Japan This Fall.”1 […]

Frank Shaughnessy (middle, second row) guided the 1913 Ottawa Senators to their second straight Canadian League title, nosing out the London Tecumsehs by a single game. First baseman “Cozy” Dolan (top row, third from left) led the Senators with a .358 batting average. (Alfred Pittaway of Pittaway & Jarvis Photographers, Ottawa)   For Frank Shaughnessy, […]

This article was published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 34 (2005).   As a baseball artifact, it’s pretty special as it is. It’s a scorecard from August 5, 1891 — a day when Buck Ewing drove in four runs off Cy Young and the New York Giants managed to hold off the Cleveland Spiders, […]

Cecil Fielder on the Hanshin Tigers (Robert Fitts Collection)   In the mid- to late 1980s, tensions between the United States and Japan rose to a level not seen since World War II.1 Americans were frightened at the rising strength of the Japanese economy. Japanese imports, especially automobiles and electronics, seemed to be taking over […]

The baseball community met at the Galt House hotel in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, December 3-9, 1992. Reportedly, 1,800 to 1,900 people registered for the annual meeting, with vendors increasing the size of the meeting to about 2,500. By most accounts, the 1992 Winter Meeting was especially eventful, highlighted by a number of prominent free-agent signings […]

This article was originally published in “From McGillicuddy to McGwire: Baseball in Florida and the Caribbean,” the 2000 SABR convention journal.   It was 1947, and Branch Rickey had two spring training problems, both of his own making. Bud Holman had one, but it loomed large for him. It took Rickey and Holman a while […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1987 (Vol. 6, No. 1). During the summer of 1895, John Peter Wagner — not yet known as “Honus” or “Hans,” nor yet as a shortstop — played at least 79 games for teams at Steubenville, Akron, and Mansfield, Ohio; Adrian, Michigan; and Warren, […]

On the eve of the 1943 season, Boston Red Sox manager Joe Cronin faced a daunting task: replacing Ted Williams and Dom DiMaggio in his outfield. The two All-Stars were serving their country as World War II raged across Europe and the Pacific. Sensing Cronin’s predicament, Associated Press features sports editor Dillon Graham shared a […]

Mickey Mantle’s wife, Merlyn, and eldest son Mickey, Jr. attended the first Mickey Mantle Day on September 18, 1965. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Mickey Mantle stepped up to the microphone not far from where he had stepped up to the plate for 18 seasons, but it was no use. The 60,096 adoring spectators who had gathered […]

He spent 20 years as a professional umpire, baseball’s loneliest profession, passing judgment on the performances of the game’s great athletes and egos. Many people have pursued this particular job, but Emmett Ashford had the added burden of breaking racial barriers throughout his career, as a black man whose job required maintaining authority over white […]

What a difference a year makes. When an estimated 1,200 baseball owners, executives, and club representative convened at the Los Angeles Hilton in December 1976 to conduct the 75th annual Winter Meetings, professional baseball had experienced dramatic and history-altering changes in the preceding 12 months. Sportswriter Joseph Durso suggested that the meeting “couldn’t have come […]

Major League Baseball implemented a package of rule changes for the 2023 season designed to address complaints that the game had become tedious to watch.1 Those complaints centered on pace of play and lack of action, with fans and media noting fewer balls in play and stolen bases and more strikeouts and home runs.2 Some […]

Major League Baseball has always been a for-profit business.  It emerged from the Roaring Twenties and survived the Great Depression to emerge firmly entrenched as “The National Pastime,” but despite the reverence held for the game the primary objective of the owners was to fill the stadiums and keep costs to a minimum, maximizing their […]

The 1922 All-American team (Rob Fitts Collection)   THE PLOT The Polo Grounds. New York’s National League champs were on the verge of beating the mighty Yankees for the second year in a row. The 1922 World Series was once again a series in one park, as each game for the past two years had […]

Introduction and Context With the inauguration of free agency in 1976 and the introduction of a second interleague trading period in 1977, the baseball winter meetings had become agonizing to attend. The traditional exchange of players between teams became more limited now that players could bargain for long-term contracts and no-trade clauses. However, the 1980 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt of an article that appeared in the January 1985 issue of Baseball Gold.   San Diego, with a population of 2,000, wasn’t much more than a speck on the map in 1876, the year the National League was organized. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and Father Junipero Serra had set foot […]

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 […]