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This article was published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 34 (2005).   A team’s season record is massively influenced by luck. Suppose you take a coin and flip it 162 times to simulate a season. Each time it lands heads, that’s a win, and when it lands tails, that’s a loss. You’d expect, on […]

The 1934 baseball winter meetings could very easily have just gone to the dogs. The talk leading up to the convention was the desperate attempt of the Boston Braves owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, to pull his team out of the red by requesting that Braves Field host nightly greyhound racing. These were desperate times during […]

The American Association (AA) began operation in 1882 as a major league, challenging the National League’s (NL) hegemony in professional baseball that had existed since the NL’s founding six years earlier. The AA had a mostly successful ten-year run until it merged with the NL in 1892. An interesting question is whether, at any time […]

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, […]

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 […]

On May 7, 1929, the American League announced it had abolished the “League Award,” the most valuable player honor that it had awarded annually since 1922, ostensibly because “it tended to create ill-feeling among the players.”1 The National League followed suit on June 8, eliminating its League Award, which had been given annually since 1924, […]

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 […]

1923 Eastern Colored League After the initial success in the Midwest of the Negro National League, which was launched in 1920, there began a drumbeat on the East Coast for a black league there. There were enough good teams to support one, and as early as the spring of 1922 rumors of an organization were […]

President John F. Kennedy delivered the ceremonial first pitch in Washington’s Griffith Stadium on April 10, 1961, to inaugurate baseball’s new era. The debut of the new Washington Senators against the Chicago White Sox was the first game in the 10-team American League, marking the majors’ first expansion since 1901. The creation of the two […]

AT 4:09 A.M. on Easter morning, April 19, 1981, just 51 minutes before sunrise, a hardy group of 17 freezing souls huddled in the 28-degree pre-dawn chill of McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, R.I. They had just seen their beloved PawSox close out the thirty-second inning of a 2-2 tie against the Rochester Red Wings. When […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).   When a team of Japanese collegians defeated their American counterparts to claim the 1984 Olympic gold medal for baseball, stunned American fans realized what the Japanese have felt for years: Baseball is as truly theirs as ours. Japan’s […]

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 […]