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The 1899 baseball season had not gone as expected, and the defending National League champion Boston Beaneaters, mired in third place behind the Brooklyn Superbas and Philadelphia Phillies, approached the final weeks of the campaign with both resignation and bitterness. Boston had won five pennants in the decade – three straight from 1891 through 1893 […]

Desperately needing a win, the Orioles entered Memorial Stadium in downtown Baltimore for Game Two of the 1983 World Series. They had lost Game One the previous day and were aware that no team had recovered to win the Series after losing the first two games at home. The Orioles’ Mike Boddicker had fashioned a […]

When seventh-place teams visit fourth-place teams in the third week of September, they usually hope to play the role of spoiler. As such, the Detroit Tigers hoped to vanquish the Chicago White Sox in at least one game of a scheduled doubleheader. The American League pennant had already been claimed by Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics. The […]

On the night of Wednesday, September 27, 1967, the Kansas City Athletics played their last two home games. The Athletics were leaving Kansas City, their home for 13 years after being moved from Philadelphia. The club’s owner, Charles O. Finley, had received permission from his fellow American League owners to move the team to Oakland. […]

As the resurgence of the Brooklyn Dodgers as a pennant-contending team in the 1940s moved into the next decade, there is one thing that scorekeeping fans could count on since 1949. Campy, Gil, Jackie, Pee Wee, Billy, Duke, and Skoonj. For the radio broadcast, you could pencil in their names into the lineup on your […]

Baseball records, like other forms of knowledge, are not chiseled in stone. Our knowledge changes over time as new information comes to light.1 At the start of the twenty-first century, baseball’s consensus was that Jimmy “Nixey” Callahan had thrown the American League’s inaugural no-hitter, in 1902, and Bob Rhoads had tossed the first one for […]

In the first inning of a National League contest on August 8, 1877, Louisville Grays leadoff batter George “Jumbo” Latham fouled off an offering from St. Louis Brown Stockings pitcher Joe Blong. The ball struck catcher John Clapp on the left side of his face.1 His cheekbone was smashed and feared broken, Clapp left the […]

A crowd of 25,762 showed up at Ebbets Field on August 20,1947, to see the final game of the Dodgers’ four-game series against the St. Louis Cardinals. Overcast skies delayed the game for 47 minutes. After winning the first two games of the series, Brooklyn had lost the third game, 11-3. The Dodgers still had […]

You know the old cliché: Some fans claim they’ve seen it all. Yet only a crowd of 35,759 at Citi Field can state that they have witnessed in person perhaps one of the greatest comebacks in the history of New York Mets baseball. In a “win that defied all logic,”1 Asdrubal Cabrera led the New […]

It takes two to tango and two to mambo But you can do it all with just one Bombo Bombo Rivera will carry us to victory!— “The Ballad of Bombo Rivera”1   Expos outfielder Bombo Rivera sported a career batting average of .224 with no home runs and four RBIs when the game began. Yet […]

There died a myriad of them, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization, … — Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)   Friday, May 9, 1919. The Armistice ending the Great War was nearing its six-month anniversary. The Spanish influenza pandemic hadn’t loosened its […]

Pete Charton’s time in the big leagues was brief; he pitched in 25 games for the Boston Red Sox in 1964. It hadn’t taken him long to get there, having worked just one season in the minors beforehand. He showed considerable promise, but professional baseball did not hold the attraction he had hoped for. Before […]

Milwaukee fans anxiously awaited the outcome of rookie Pete Ladd’s duel with future Hall of Famer Rod Carew. With one more out, the Brewers would earn the franchise’s first trip to the World Series. The 1982 American League Championship Series between the California Angels and Milwaukee Brewers was knotted at two games apiece. The Angels […]

Outside MCU Park in Coney Island, there stands a statue of two baseball players. Both are famed Brooklyn Dodgers. Both are Hall of Famers whose legends transcend batting averages and fielding percentages. One is a white Kentuckian. The other is an African-American from California. They are Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson. The statue depicts […]

In 1966 New York Mets’ coach Yogi Berra scanned the Pittsburgh Pirates’ spring training camp in search of the right-handed reliever whose contributions from the bullpen led the New York Yankees to an American League crown two years earlier. “Where’s Mikkelsen?” the former skipper asked. “He helped me win the pennant in 1964 . . […]

Despite 100-plus big-league victories, a half-dozen straight workhorse campaigns of 200-plus innings tossed, and a crucial role in a historic mid-’60s American League pennant drive, Pedro Ramos’s small degree of diamond immortality will likely always rest upon two individual pitches tossed in the midst of an erratic 15-season sojourn. Both fateful deliveries came while he […]

No one in the history of major-league baseball had a first appearance like that of hard-throwing left-handed pitcher Pete Richert. In his debut with the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 12, 1962, against the Cincinnati Reds at Dodger Stadium, Richert set a record by striking out the first six batters he faced. With the Dodgers […]

Chris Welsh was a prodigal son who returned as a journeyman southpaw pitcher for his hometown club. When his days on the mound ended, he ventured into the booth and gradually transformed himself into a broadcast fixture in Cincinnati. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, on April 14, 1955, Welsh was the third of four children and […]

Catcher Dave Criscione spent one month with the Baltimore Orioles in the summer of 1977. Though he appeared in just seven games, he made the most of them, receiving three standing ovations in one and connecting for a game-ending home run in another. David Gerald Criscione (pronounced KRUH-shone) was born on September 2, 1951, in […]

“There’s no hidden agenda to Fay Vincent. … What you see is what you get.” — Peter O’Malley1 “A man of deep moral conviction.” — Guy McElwaine, motion picture executive2   Francis T. Vincent Jr. was the eighth Commissioner of Major League Baseball. After serving as Deputy Commissioner under his dear friend Bart Giamatti, he […]

How did a first-year pitcher with a 3-11 record and a 5.70 earned run average in Single-A baseball make it to the major leagues the very next year?  Right-handed pitcher Dave Gray was 20 years old in 1963, pitching in Iowa for the Waterloo Hawks that year. The next year he was pitching for the […]

The son of an All-Star, a two-time All-American at Harvard University, and a first-round draft pick, Mike Stenhouse seemed destined to thrive in the majors. But in a five-year career with three teams that never saw him play in more than half the schedule, Stenhouse never hit. While he did not make the postseason roster […]

Major-league right-hander Bob Chakales was one of five sons born to Edward Peter and Blanche Wiggs Chakales – (sons in order: Robert, Charles, Dwight, and twins John and James). Bob was born on August 10, 1927, in Asheville, North Carolina. His mother worked in retail, selling women’s clothing, and his father – known as Eddie […]

Editor’s note: Have you ever wondered where the statistics that appear on Baseball-Reference.com or Retrosheet.org come from? For those of us who access those indispensable websites every day, it’s hard to imagine a time when historically accurate baseball stats weren’t readily available. But those stats weren’t handed down through the years in pristine, pre-formatted fashion […]