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Baseball tradition before the Civil War favored the selection of respected, senior members of the community as umpires, to interpret rules and resolve disputes between opponents typically grateful for their help. Interjecting themselves only now and then into the conduct of games, umpires were pampered; “given easy chairs, placed near home plate [and] provided with […]

League Park as seen from the air. Note the large bleacher section in left field. (Strongsville Public Library / Public Domain)   In 1914 and 1915, for the only time in baseball history, two baseball teams, one a major league team and the other a minor league team, played a full schedule of games in […]

Silas Kenneth Johnson was born in Danway, Illinois on Friday, October 5, 1906. He shared his strong Norwegian heritage with older brother Alvin. Their parents, Nels and Tillie Johnson, added two more male siblings—Jesse and Tilman—to the family roster soon after Si was born. The clan soon migrated to the small town of Marseilles, Illinois, […]

From the beginning of professional baseball in the nineteenth century and continuing through the first decades of the twentieth, Georgia was a popular site for major-league spring training. Between 1871 and 1953, more than 20 major-league baseball franchises from 14 cities held their spring training in the state (see table 1).[fn]In order to prepare these […]

For more than a century the World Series has been an integral part of American culture. It has become a final celebration of the more than 2,700 games that connect the early spring with the late fall. The annual ritual of the best team in the American League facing the best of the National League […]

Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement on which Jews fast, seek forgiveness from God and other people, and rehearse their deaths1 — occupies an iconic space in the annals of baseball and American Jewry. Jewish-American fans regularly contemplate and debate whether Jewish players will and should play on the holy day.2 Yom Kippur in […]

In 1974, the Oakland Athletics signed track star Herb Washington as a “designated runner,” despite his having had very little baseball experience. Keeping on the roster a player whose only purpose was to run was a new idea, but there have been many other real baseball players whose main purpose it was to pinch-run. The […]

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in  “Baseball’s Business: The Winter Meetings, 1958-2016” (SABR, 2017), was honored as a 2018 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award winner.   Negro League baseball magnates meet at the Hotel Teresa on June 20, 1946, in New York City. The owners had all attended the Joe Louis boxing bout the night […]

The pregame ceremonies before Game 3 of the 2001 World Series included a giant American flag in center field and President George W. Bush throwing out the first pitch. (Courtesy of Scott Pitoniak)   At Yankee Stadium over the weekend of September 7-9, 2001, the Yankees had swept the visiting Boston Red Sox. Boston was […]

New York Giants owner Andrew Freedman fired 13 managers between 1895 and 1902. He wasn’t the first to second-guess the actions of a manager, though he did help establish a time-honored tradition. In the years since, more than a few reputations and careers have suffered the ill-effects of the practice. Fans, owners, and journalists rightly […]

One of baseball’s highest-regarded feats is the cycle: “A single, double, triple, and home run (not necessarily in that order) hit by a player in the same game.”1 In the history of major league baseball (1876–2023) there have been 351 documented regular-season cycles, including seven in the Negro Leagues.2 The distribution of the starting defensive […]

Like raging dinosaurs in some prehistoric swamp, the Milwaukee Braves’ Warren Spahn and the San Francisco Giants’ Juan Marichal slugged it out for four hours, 10 minutes, and 16 innings, all through the night of July 2 and into the early minutes of July 3, 1963. Spahn, 42, personified an aging Tyrannosaurus rex defending his […]

Abe Saperstein created the Harlem Globetrotters and is widely credited with pioneering the three-point shot. (Dolph Briscoe Center for American History)   Abe Saperstein is best known as the founder of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, but he also was deeply involved in baseball. During the 1930s, Saperstein worked as a promoter, publicist, and agent […]

Whitey Lockman and Willie Mays made Giants manager Leo Durocher a happy man. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   The ties linking superstars and managers follow patterns often beginning as mentee-mentor before changing into relationships of equals, then deference to the player based on his status, and, finally, awkwardness as the star’s skills (but not […]

George A. “Tuck” Turner was a member of the National League and American Association for seven seasons (1893–98) and a utility outfielder for the Phillies for the first five of those big league seasons. How Tuck Turner became a major leaguer and a member of the Philadelphia Phillies is an unusual story. Bill James observed […]

In 1916, former National League President Abraham G. Mills said at a banquet celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the National League, “I cannot doubt that all true lovers of Base Ball will always cherish and honor the memory of William A. Hulbert.”2 Twenty years later the first honorees were elected to the new Baseball Hall […]

Ford Frick, president of the National League in 1947, is not the first person who comes to mind concerning Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball, though he deserves more consideration than he has been given. While no other individual rivals the role played by Branch Rickey in breaking the game’s color barrier, other than […]

From 1920 to 1958, baseball fans across the Deep South and Southwest looked forward to the annual Dixie Series, a best-of-seven postseason matchup between the playoff champions of the Southern Association and the Texas League. In 1967, after an 8-year hiatus, owners in the Double-A Texas League and the newly created Southern League resurrected the […]

Jackie Robinson playing in a spring training game vs. Havana Cubans. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)   Separated by fewer than three miles, the Hotel Los Angeles near la Habana Vieja (Old Havana) and the Hotel Nacional in the city’s Vedado district were worlds apart. Sitting on a bluff overlooking El Malecón, Havana’s famed coastal roadway, the Nacional […]

I still think relief pitchers are slighted or faintly patronized in most fans’ and writers’ consideration. Ask somebody to pick an all-time or all-decade lineup for his favorite team or for one of the leagues and the chances are the list will not include a late inning fireman. — Roger Angell1 Much has changed since […]

The year 1947 was a banner one for the Brooklyn Dodgers. At the same time as the newly desegregated Dodgers seized the National League pennant, the team expanded its appeal to a demographic not traditionally served by organized baseball. It was also a banner year for the advertising industry. With the abatement of wartime shortages, […]

The Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees have one of the fiercest rivalries in American sports. It is a rivalry borne out of regional differences that date back to Colonial America. The rivalry goes beyond sports—New York and Boston were early economic rivals, eventually becoming a cultural rivalry between New York and New England. […]

The researchers at Protoball — the de facto authorities on baseball’s ancestral and descendant games — unsurprisingly categorize the popular recreational sport of kickball as a baseball derivative.1 But how did kickball originate? In On the Origins of Sports: The Early History and Original Rules of Everybody’s Favorite Games, authors Gary Belsky and Neil Fine […]

Maury Wills attempts to turn a double play against the Yomiuri Giants (Robert Fitts Collection)   By 1966, the bloom was coming off the chrysanthemum of Japan tours by major-league teams. Rebuilding US-Japan relations was less worrisome as the Japanese economy surged and Tokyo proved a stout ally for American fears about Russian and Chinese […]