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Among the top scouts, few have possessed as varied a background and perspective as John Joseph (Jack) Doyle. During his remarkable 71 years in the game, Doyle performed as a front-line player and captain, major- and minor-league player-manager, National League umpire, minor-league club owner, and as the head scout of the Chicago Cubs during their […]

On a cold, rainy Valentine’s Day in 1962, several newspaper reporters brazenly walked through the open driveway gates of a mansion on Maryland’s Eastern Shore looking for the United States spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers. Powers, who had been shot down over Russia in 1960, had been recently returned to the U.S. in a prisoner […]

Baseball is a difficult game to play well for those with two good arms but Pete Gray did it with one. Gray played only one season in the major leagues, 1945, but that was enough to have a lasting positive influence on people with disabilities. His accomplishment enlightened those of us who are perfectly formed, […]

Assumption High School in Windsor, Canada, must have had some pretty good ballplayers in 1956 and 1957. “I never made the baseball team. I was cut in both my junior and senior years,” said Pete Craig. “They had two really good pitchers and didn’t need a third. I could throw hard, but had no control.”1 […]

Even if Pete Varney had never strapped on a chest protector and shin guards for Harvard, he would have had a place in the hearts of the Crimson sports faithful forever from one momentous football game in 1968. But baseball was his game, as he gained All-American recognition and led Harvard into the 1971 College […]

The National Baseball Hall of Fame has an extensive library, packed with research materials. Most players have a file at the Hall, whose contents are made available to researchers. Some files are fairly thick. Most contain some basic information about the player, including a certificate of death for a deceased player, and newspaper clippings that […]

“Dr. Frederick L. Wood, Dentist, Dies Suddenly” announced the London (Ontario) Free Press on November 18, 1935.1 The obituary for the “well-known dentist” amounts to one unassuming paragraph. 2 Surprisingly, it makes no mention of his many and varied accomplishments in sports — including 13 games in major-league baseball in 1884-85 — music, and the […]

He took a long time to find his place in the major leagues. After four brief callups, a successful emergency start in 1963 gave Gary Peters a job with the White Sox on his fifth and final trial. He still managed to put up a few big seasons and 124 wins, coming agonizingly close to […]

“Running! turning! leaping! like little Al Gionfriddo — a baseball player, Doctor, who once did a very great thing.” The great thing novelist Philip Roth described took place on October 5, 1947. It was Game Six of the World Series. Outfielder Al Gionfriddo, a little-used reserve, made a racing, twisting catch in deep left-center at […]

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 the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, Detroit police raided an after-hours “blind pig,” an unlicensed bar, at 12th Street and Clairmount Avenue in the center of the city’s oldest and poorest black neighborhood.1 A party at the bar was in progress to celebrate the return of two African-American servicemen from Vietnam. […]

The Louisville Colonels didn’t have many bright spots during their major-league-record 26-game losing streak1 in 1889, but Pete Browning’s cycle on June 7 was one of them. Browning’s feat came in Louisville’s 9-7, 11-inning road loss to the Philadelphia Athletics. The Colonels entered the game losers of 13 straight American Association games and followed it […]

The biggest story in baseball history was breaking in Chicago as the Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals took the field in the Windy City to kick off a three-game set to end the regular season. Three days earlier, star pitcher Eddie Cicotte of the Chicago White Sox had testified in a Cook County courthouse before a […]

The final score of the game between Brooklyn and Cincinnati on June 12, 1949, looked like that of a football game. Gil Hodges and Billy Cox were the offensive stars for the red-hot Dodgers. Except that they weren’t scoring or passing for touchdowns; they were hitting home runs and driving in runs in bunches that […]

The St. Louis Cardinals entered July 1944 with an eight-game lead over the second-place Pittsburgh Pirates. The reigning NL champions compiled a 42-19 record through June 30, the best record in the majors. Manager Billy Southworth guided the Cardinals to successive World Series appearances in 1942-43 and a 17-5 record during June 1944. Their success […]

Historian Bill James has called the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers “that close to being a perfect team,” citing their lineup that had future Hall of Famers Joe Medwick in left field, Pee Wee Reese at shortstop, and Billy Herman at second base and included such other luminaries as Pete Reiser, Dixie Walker, and Dolph Camilli. “In […]

When Charles Comiskey and other investors purchased the minor Western League in 1894, it was with the express intent of transforming the loop into a major league on a par with the well-established National League. Aggressively signing major-league-caliber players and shifting franchises from smaller markets such as Grand Rapids and St. Paul to Cleveland and […]

The New York City hosting the 1977 All-Star Game had drastically changed in the 13 years since the Mets hosted the 1964 Midsummer Classic. In the summer of ’77, Big Apple residents lived in fear of the “Son of Sam” serial killer stalking the outer boroughs, and on July 13, the entire city was plunged […]

Led by MVP Dolph Camilli, the Dodgers staved off a fierce challenge from the St. Louis Cardinals to capture the pennant in 1941, winning 100 games for skipper Leo Durocher. (Photo: SABR-Rucker Archive)   Brooklyn’s Freddie Fitzsimmons knew nothing but hard luck on the big stage. He had started three World Series games for the […]

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 […]

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 […]