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On the morning of Tuesday, June 24, 1947, two titans of sport made their final preparations before doing battle that evening. Linked not only by their race, but by the last name Robinson, Sugar Ray would fight in the ring while Jackie would fight on the diamond. Walker Smith Jr., better known as Sugar Ray […]

Oh, pass the biscuits, Mirandy, I’m a-gonna load up my gun. I’ll use your biscuits for bullets, I’ll put them varmints on the run. —  from the song “Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy,” by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, 1942   The Brooklyn Dodgers won the 1941 National League pennant by a 2½-game margin over […]

Charles Lindbergh’s nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic in May of 1927 brought him overnight worldwide acclaim. No more than a thousand well-wishers saw the former stunt pilot take off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, but as many as 150,000 were on hand when his Spirit of St. Louis touched down in […]

Rookie superstar Fred Lynn stole second base in the ninth inning to score the game’s only run and then made a phenomenal catch of a Graig Nettles gap shot in the bottom of the frame to preserve Bill Lee’s six-hit shutout of the fading Yankees in the opener of a doubleheader in Queens. The loss, […]

The Pittsburgh Pirates were leading the National League East Division in June 1975 when they promoted 21-year-old John Candelaria to patch up their injury-eroded rotation. In Candelaria’s third big-league start, against the New York Mets at Shea Stadium, the Brooklyn native dazzled his hometown and outdueled superstar Tom Seaver by taking a no-hitter into the […]

The same two cities squared off in the 1915 World Series as had in 1914, but the teams were different. In 1914 Boston’s National League team — the Braves (the so-called “Miracle Braves”) — had swept the Series in four games from the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League.1 In 1915 the Boston Red Sox […]

Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Gavvy Cravath and pitcher Tom Seaton enjoyed their finest seasons in 1913. Cravath led the National League in hits, home runs (19), and slugging percentage, while setting a league record for runs batted in (128) that was not surpassed until 1922. He placed second in batting average at .341 (behind only Jake […]

The New York Mets entered the 1969 National League playoffs with their hopes riding on the arms of their young and talented pitching staff. But they won the first game of the series with their bats. After the Braves tagged Mets ace Tom Seaver for eight hits, including two home runs, Seaver’s teammates saved his […]

For a while, Boston National League fans who saw Brooklyn play at Braves Field had a decent chance of seeing a lot of extra baseball. On May 1, 1920, the teams played 26 innings to a 1-1 tie – still the longest game in major-league history as of spring 2022. Two days later they played […]

On September 22, 1911, three rookies made their major league debuts for the St. Louis Cardinals, including 21-year-old third baseman Ed “Irish” Conwell, who took over the hot corner in the top of the eighth inning with his team trailing Red Ames and the first-place New York Giants, 3-0. The game was of consequence to […]

With his pitchers falling by the wayside on a seemingly daily basis, Cleveland Blues manager Jimmy McAleer figured there couldn’t be any harm in asking. After injuries to his other pitchers forced McAleer to put Bill Hart on the pitching slab for the third time in five days on May 14, 1901, less than three […]

Each baseball season’s early summer games take on a mystical quality in cities that endure longer, darker winters. Near June solstice, night patiently awaits dusk’s extended loitering, humidity is tolerable, and the schedule is still young enough to keep fans of even the most dismal teams buoyant for revelation. Such was the setting on a […]

Plummeting through a disastrous homestand in 1950, the onset of an eight-season purgatory in the lowest rungs of the National League standings, the Pittsburgh Pirates called up Vern Law from their Double-A affiliate in New Orleans. In Law’s first big-league start, on June 11 at Forbes Field, the 20-year-old right-hander outlasted Philadelphia Phillies ace Robin […]

On the morning of August 11, 1921, the New York Giants were in second place, 2½ games behind the Pittsburgh Pirates. If the National League pennant race remained close, any one of a number of factors could be the difference between success and failure. Doubtless with some satisfaction, the Standard Union (Brooklyn) claimed, “[s]hould the […]

On Friday, October 8, on a beautiful afternoon in front of a Milwaukee County Stadium crowd of 50,135, for the second time in six days, Don Sutton took the mound for the Brewers in Game Three of the American League Championship Series. With the Brewers down two games to none to the California Angels and […]

The dreary weather for the San Francisco Giants’ 1985 finale matched the gloom that engulfed the downtrodden franchise. Some 14,537 fans showed up on a Sunday afternoon – a large crowd by Giants’ standards of the day1 – potentially to witness unwanted history and possibly to see their team play in San Francisco for the […]

A member of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame, Pete Donohue was a right-handed pitcher from Texas who won 127 games for them over a 10-year stretch, including three years of 20 or more wins in the early to mid-1920s. He led the league with 27 complete games in 1925 and wins in 1926. By […]

“Pinch hit hero mobbed by rabid Red Sox enthusiasts” was a sub-headline of the October 17, 1912, edition of the Boston Globe reporting on young Olaf Henriksen’s game-tying base hit in the eighth and deciding game of the 1912 World Series, against a dominant Christy Mathewson. It was a crucial blow off the great Mathewson, […]

As pitching coach for the White Sox in the 1950s and ’60s, Ray Berres was noted for two things: developing quality pitching staffs year after year, and not wanting to draw attention to himself. Quiet and unassuming, he once said, “I stayed away from writers. … I didn’t care for publicity.” But Ray Berres couldn’t avoid […]

Lou Finney was a tough man to strike out. A fast, feisty left-handed hitter with line-drive power, Finney made contact often enough and was versatile enough in the field to play an important role first for Connie Mack’s Depression-era Philadelphia Athletics and later for Joe Cronin’s World War II-era Boston Red Sox. A scrappy, curly-haired Alabaman […]

Donning the uniforms of the Chicago Cubs and Brooklyn Dodgers for the better part of his career, along with playing short stints for the Reds, Giants, and Athletics, Augie Galan (pronounced “guh-LANN”) put together a lifetime .287 batting average in 16 major-league seasons. He reached the .300 plateau six times, played in three World Series, […]

Richard John McAuliffe was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 29, 1939. He grew up in the tiny town of Unionville, a burg “not exactly a breeding spot for major league athletes,” according to Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, another Connecticut native. “Chickens are more along its line. … Unionville has about nine months […]

“If you can’t get fundamentals down for Hal Lanier, you cannot play for Hal Lanier,” declared the native Floridian about his managerial philosophy, nearly a half-century since his professional baseball début in 1961.1 Lanier’s emphasis on the foundations of baseball characterized his longevity as a helmsman and, for 10 seasons, a major league ballplayer. To […]

“People don’t know how good the Pacific Coast League is,” a onetime miner named H.V. “Hardrock Bill” Lane said in 1935. “There’s Oakland, or San Francisco.”1 A year later he moved the then-Double-A Hollywood Stars to San Diego, renamed them Padres for a nearby mission, opened single-tier 9,100-seat Lane Field, and began to fill a […]