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During the time he spent with the Boston Red Sox, Charlie Wagner was Ted Williams’ roommate. When Williams first arrived in Florida for spring training in 1938, “The Kid” asked manager Joe Cronin for someone who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and liked to get to bed early and wake up early. Cronin pointed him to […]

It was the stuff of boyhood dreams. With two outs in the bottom of the 10th inning and the bases loaded, 25-year-old Tony Perez stepped into the right-handed batter’s box against veteran hurler Jack Fisher with a chance to send the 15,006 Cincinnati fans home happy. Perez had just won the All-Star Game for the […]

The 1970 Cincinnati Reds [102-60] ran away with the National League East by 14½ games before taking three straight from the Pittsburgh Pirates in the playoffs. Their opponents in the upcoming fall classic were the Baltimore Orioles who were attempting to rebound from a demoralizing World Series loss to the New York Mets the previous […]

On Sunday evening, April 4, the Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles opened their 2004 seasons at Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The game-time temperature was 43 degrees.1 The two teams had had very different seasons in 2003. The Orioles had finished in fourth place in the American League East, 30 games behind the […]

As the 1940 season began, the Cardinals were sputtering in the early going. Losers of their first three games and eight of their first 13, the runners-up to the Cincinnati Reds for the 1939 pennant were limping along a game and a half ahead of the miserable Boston Braves at the bottom of the standings. […]

Few teams in baseball history have had the luxury of all but clinching their division as early as April. The 1986 New York Mets knew this better than most, having fought to 98 wins in 1985 only to miss the playoffs at the hands of their bitter National League East rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, […]

A modest crowd of 9,018 fans gathered at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field on Saturday, April 18, 1970, as much of the nation was riveted on activities that took place earlier in the week many thousands of miles above the Earth. Millions of TV sets across the land were focused on the return to Earth and dramatic […]

At the close of the 1939 baseball season, Tex Carleton prepared to retire to his hometown of Fort Worth convinced that his big-league days were behind him. The 33-year-old right-hander had struggled in his first campaign with the Milwaukee Brewers of the American Association, posting an 11-9 record with a dismal 4.23 ERA. A sore […]

It was a “perfect” Saturday night for baseball: 19 degrees and sleeting, winds at 30 miles per hour, gusting to 45. On the eve of the 1982 season, the Minnesota Twins and Philadelphia Phillies were set for an exhibition game to open the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. “Dome” was […]

Jesse Tannehill led the National League in ERA in 1901 with the Pittsburgh Pirates and was a four-time 20-game winner in Pittsburgh. He jumped to the American League’s New York Highlanders in 1903 but had an off-year, 15-15 with an ERA that had climbed from 1.95 to 3.27. Fresh off winning the first World Series […]

On July 9, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mark Camps wrote: “If you plan to come to Candlestick and are looking for wild scoring games, save your eight bucks and rent an NBA All-Star game video.”1 By the end of the day, he could have printed a retraction. In 1987 the St Louis Cardinals and the […]

The champagne was ready in the Astrodome. With a two-games-to-one lead in the best-of-five National League Championship Series, the Astros were one win away from their first trip to the World Series. Considering the obstacles that both they and their opponents, the Phillies, had overcome, no one was apt to be counting on an easy […]

Shooting for .400, Ted Williams didn’t manage a single in the Boston Red Sox’ September 1 doubleheader with the Washington Senators, nor a two-base hit. He didn’t hit a triple, either, but he improved his batting average by three points, from .407 to .410. He did hit three home runs — two in the first […]

“They can do whatever they want. I’ll still be eating steak every night,” Von Hayes said after one of the many times he faced the boo-birds of Philadelphia.1 His quote about sums up the career of a stoic but confident kid from the West Coast who rocketed to the majors and unwittingly moved east in […]

John Young carried an impressive 6-foot-3, 210-pound frame during his baseball playing days. Even more impressive than his physical stature on the field, however, was the stature he later gained as a baseball ambassador for the underprivileged. In founding the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities program, Young left an indelible mark on the game that […]

On Saturday, September 27, 1924, with the New York Giants locked in a battle for the National League pennant with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Giants were set to meet the seventh-place Philadelphia Phillies at the Polo Grounds in a critical end-of-season game. Phillies shortstop Heinie Sand was standing on the field during batting practice when […]

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 […]

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 […]

A major-league pitcher for 18 years, Clarence Mitchell is best remembered not for a pitch he threw from the mound, but for one he hit while standing in the batter’s box. It was Sunday, October 10, 1920, the fifth game of the World Series between Cleveland and Brooklyn. The series was tied at two games […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]