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It’s an old story. A player comes on the scene, dazzles in his rookie year, and is gone seemingly as fast as he came. Then there’s Jimmie Hall. Hall burst on the scene with a bang with the Minnesota Twins in 1963. Actually, he had 33 of them, which broke Ted Williams’s AL record for […]

The future looked bright for California Angels infielder Dave Machemer on June 21, 1978, as he rounded the bases after hitting a home run in his first major-league plate appearance. Machemer lined a full-count pitch off Minnesota Twins southpaw pitcher Geoff Zahn that just cleared the fence inside the left-field foul pole at Metropolitan Stadium […]

He was a handsome, stylish Italian-American from the streets of Brooklyn who strutted into prominence at the same moment John Travolta’s Tony Manero did the same on the silver screen. But there was more to Lee Mazzilli than a pair of tight-fitting pants. He was a graceful athlete with a good eye who could hit […]

After a difficult childhood, a traumatic year in Vietnam, and replacing a legend in San Francisco, Garry Maddox came to Philadelphia in 1975. The “Secretary of Defense” proceeded to win eight consecutive Gold Gloves in center field. As a Phillie, he experienced great depths (an inexplicable error that ended Philadelphia’s 1978 pennant aspirations) and scaled […]

Cincinnati Reds pitcher Johnny Vander Meer was close to achieving baseball immortality, but he didn’t know it. It was June 15, 1938, and he was on the mound in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field with the bases loaded, two outs, and a 1-and-1 count on the irrepressible Dodgers shortstop Leo Durocher. One more out and his name […]

It may have been happenstance that made Ron Blomberg own a piece of history as baseball’s first designated hitter. After he overcame anti-Semitism in his hometown of Atlanta to become the number one overall pick by the New York Yankees in the free agent draft in 1967, his dream of playing in New York City, […]

“Beware of robbing a wretch or attacking a cripple. Do not laugh at a blind man, nor tease a dwarf, nor cause hardship for the lame. Don’t tease a man who is in the hand of the god (i.e. ill or insane)…” [Instruction of Amenemope, Ancient Egypt]1 Frank James Burke was born on March 19, […]

Had Grover Cleveland Alexander been a writer, the French would have called him a poete maudit, a cursed poet. Alexander had within him the greatness and the frailty that make for tragedy. Except for Ty Cobb among his contemporaries, no other player had to cope with so many personal demons. With Cobb and Christy Mathewson, […]

Doug Griffin’s professional baseball career comprised 13 years, beginning at Idaho Falls in 1965 and finishing with the Boston Red Sox in 1977. He spent eight seasons in the major leagues, seven of them with the Red Sox, and appeared briefly in the 1975 World Series. Douglas Lee Griffin was born on June 4, 1947 […]

Eldon John “Rip” Repulski was a major-league ballplayer from Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, who enjoyed storytelling. This was especially true after his career with the St. Louis Cardinals, Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Boston Red Sox came to a close in 1961, and Rip eventually opened a cocktail lounge on St. Germain Street in St. Cloud, […]

The fifth-winningest pitcher of all time, Warren Spahn went 363-245 over parts of 21 years from 1942 to 1965. Only by remaining in the game two seasons too long did he fail to finish with an ERA under 3.00 (3.09) and a winning percentage over .600 (.597), and his totals are all the more impressive […]

“One feller I want to meet if he’s still alive and can be found is that fellow Henriksen,” remarked 72-year-old Hugh Bedient to Jamestown Post-Journal sportswriter Frank Hyde. It was March of 1962, and in four weeks’ time Hugh was expected in Boston along with the other surviving members of the 1912 World Champions for […]

There was never an Alex Grammas question on Family Feud. However, if Richard Dawson, the late and long-time host of the popular game show, were to have asked a hundred of his contemporaries how they remembered Grammas, the survey would invariably point to three answers: flawless fielding, excellence as a third-base coach, and his Hellenic […]

With a six-hitter in which he walked just one, Roger Moret pitched his only shutout of the 1975 season as the Red Sox “added insult to injury with a 6-0 success in the nightcap”1 to complete a double-shutout sweep of a doubleheader, the first one suffered by New York since June 15, 1958, against Detroit.2 […]

Baseball history buffs would love to hop on a time machine and head to Cincinnati’s Crosley Field for the Redlegs’ July 31, 1958, incredible comeback against the San Francisco Giants.1 If H.G. Wells’s imaginary invention were a reality, the lucky time travelers would have seen an exciting game that included several famous footnote players who […]

In the summer of 1915, momentum carried the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. Over the preceding five years, the number of Western states granting women full voting rights leapt from four to 11, while Illinois granted them the vote in presidential elections.1 The push for a constitutional amendment needed victories east of the […]

Detroit Tigers right-hander Lynwood Thomas “Schoolboy” Rowe “gave one of the most courageous exhibitions of pitching ever seen in World Series,” wrote H.G. Salsinger of the Detroit News.”1 After the Tigers’ demoralizing 8-3 loss to Dizzy Dean and the St. Louis Cardinals in Game One of the 1934 fall classic at Navin Field in the […]

By August 1971, the American and National Leagues had combined to play a little more than 90,000 games in the twentieth century, and roughly 8,300 of those games had ended in a walk-off,1 a single play that scored the winning run for the home team in the ninth inning or later. Even with those staggering […]

Like all the other major-league teams, the Boston Red Sox had lost many of their best players to military service during World War II. In 1945 five pitchers who had been regulars, Tex Hughson, Joe Dobson, Mickey Harris, Earl Johnson, and Mace Brown, were serving in the military. The Red Sox had finished in fourth […]

On May 7, 1901, three men pulled off a brazen heist on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, robbing a jewelry display case owned by Arnstine Bros. & Mier in broad daylight. The Cleveland Plain Dealer declared it the boldest crime in years.1 As two men engaged in conversation to block the view of the display, a […]

Southpaw Ross Grimsley waited until the last inning of the last game of the 1978 season to become the Montreal Expos’ first and only 20-game winner. With one out and two men on in the final frame of a tie game against the St. Louis Cardinals on October 1, Grimsley strolled to the plate. “He […]

This game may be remembered most for the miserable weather in which it was played. In his report for the Boston Globe, Peter Gammons wrote that the setting resembled “a Cambodian rice paddy in rainy season.”1 It took 4 hours and 10 minutes of elapsed time due in large part to rain delays of 33 […]

After administering the worst home-team defeat ever in a World Series opener,1 the Brewers began Game Two against the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium looking for a sweep and a commanding lead to take home to Milwaukee. The Cardinals, who had won the World Series five of the last six times they won Game […]

On August 4, 1991, a sellout crowd of 41,0591 packed into Comiskey Park to see the Chicago White Sox host the Baltimore Orioles. Chicago (58-45) had won eight straight games before losing the first two games of this series against Baltimore, and that 8-out-of-10 stretch had enabled them to climb into second place, three games […]