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A strong keystone combination is considered essential for a good team. Before there was Whitaker and Trammell, before The Wizard and Tommy Herr, before Tinker and Evers (and Chance), there was Nicholson and Scheibeck. Who, you ask? In 1890, Parson Nicholson and Frank Scheibeck became just the third major league combo to start every game […]

August 27, 1968. Yankee Stadium. Bottom of the sixth. Angels 1, Yankees 0. Bases loaded, two out.  The crowd of 21,419 lets out a tremendous roar as Mickey Mantle is called upon to pinch hit. Although it was the last year of The Mick’s career, he’d already hit 16 homers and was still a threat […]

During an eastern road trip in the middle of the 1912 season, Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey made two moves to strengthen his thin pitching staff. One was the purchase of Eddie Cicotte from the Boston Red Sox. The other was the acquisition of a hard-throwing youngster from the Burlington, Iowa club of the […]

“What I have done after my baseball career and being able to help people with their lives — means more to me than all the things I did in baseball.” — Don Newcombe1   Don Newcombe was the third black pitcher to appear in a major-league game after Dan Bankhead and Satchel Paige. Playing at […]

During a seven-year period from 1985 to 1991, Tom Browning was the most durable starting pitcher in major-league baseball. In a career that spanned 12 major-league seasons and just shy of 2,000 innings pitched, Browning was most notable for working the majority of his career as a sturdy, dependable starter who would take the ball […]

Tommy Thevenow earned a place in the record books for the home runs he didn’t hit. He never cleared the fences in 15 big league seasons. He hit three inside-the-park homers in 17 days in 1926 — two in September and one in the World Series — then didn’t manage another for his last 3,614 […]

In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, 17-year-old Phil Cavarretta helped support his family by playing professional baseball in the Chicago Cubs organization. At the end of his first and only season in the minor leagues, the Chicago native made his first start in the big leagues two months after his 18th birthday […]

Left-handed pitcher Ray Dobens graduated as a bachelor of philosophy from Worcester, Massachusetts’ College of the Holy Cross on June 19, 1929 and signed a Boston Red Sox contract that same day. Eighteen days later, he broke in with the Boston Red Sox. College teammate Bots Nekola signed with the Yankees and had to wait nine more days for his first game. They […]

During the 1970s and early ’80s, every announcer or writer had to dish the dirt on his story. He played major league baseball in summer, but Richie Hebner dug graves in winter. Beginning in the ninth grade, he continued digging throughout his 18-year major league career, even when free agency expanded his paychecks beyond 1976, […]

They say the best things come in small packages and this is quite true when analyzing Ted Giannoulas’s career as a 5-foot-4 costumed chicken for four decades and counting. Baseball fans in San Diego consider The Chicken as their own but as time passed The Famous Chicken took his act around the world, mesmerizing fans […]

Near the end of his long major-league career, Rudy May said, “I learned that it’s better to throw an 85 mile an hour fastball on the outside corner than it is to throw a 95 mile an hour fastball down the middle.” Asked when he discovered that, he replied, “When I couldn’t throw a 95 […]

Mark Clear was a hard-throwing righty pitcher who was released by the Phillies after one year in the minors but became a durable two-time All-Star after converting to a reliever. He played from 1979 through 1990 for the Angels, Red Sox, and Brewers. The 6-foot-4 inch, 200-pound hurler, earned nicknames “The Elongated Man” and “Horse,” […]

To many who saw Al Luplow dive over the right-center field fence at Fenway Park on June 27, 1963 to glove a potential game-winning home run, it was the greatest catch they’d ever seen. An outfielder with the Cleveland Indians, Luplow was instinctively doing something he’d done as a Michigan State running back — launching […]

Edward Morgan Lewis was the first player in Boston Red Sox franchise history born outside of North America.1 Ted Lewis was born on Christmas Day 1872 in what was then the market town of Machynlleth, Wales, population slightly over 2,000, set in the lower Dyfi Valley about 10 miles from the coast. It’s also known […]

It was time for Ted Williams to unload. He came into the Tuesday night game in Detroit hitless in his last six at-bats. He was facing Jim Bunning, against whom he had been 0-for-7 to this point in 1958. Nine days earlier, Bunning had no-hit the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Williams was 0-for-4 in […]

Baseball brawls are usually limited to some vigorous pushing and shoving. Punches may be thrown, but few connect. The donnybrook on June 6, 1993, between the Orioles and Mariners, however, was the exception to the rule, with the scene at Camden Yards more reminiscent of an NHL hockey brawl. The dust-up delayed the ballgame for […]

The Pittsburgh Pirates’ bid for a fourth straight National League East Division title in 1973 remained alive, even though the Pirates trailed the New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals when the schedule’s final day had concluded. With rainouts rescheduled for Monday, October 1 – a Mets-Chicago Cubs doubleheader and a single game between Pittsburgh […]

Believe it or not, Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. had been in somewhat of a slump in the early part of the 1984 season. Although he started the season well, hitting safely in all but four of the Orioles’ first 23 games, in early May his batting average dropped from .352 on April 30 […]

It was 1946, and “the boys were back” from World War II. Baseball had continued in the interest of public morale through four seasons of diminished quality. Now, however, as spring-training camps opened, there was “joyful relief that the war was at last over and old teammates were together again under the sun.”1 Navy veteran Jack […]

When the 1969 baseball season got underway, the Cincinnati Reds’ fiery right-hander Jim Maloney felt that he had something to prove. For two seasons he had battled chronic shoulder pain that had taken a few notches off his heater. He was no longer the consistently overpowering hurler who had posted a 74-34 record over a […]

When New York Mets and Kansas City Royals faced off in Game Two of the 2015 World Series on October 28 both teams may have been a bit tired. The night before, Game One had lasted more than five hours before the Royals won 5-4 in 14 innings. Although no one got much sleep, the […]

On August 4, 1945, Pittsburgh Pirates rookie Bill Salkeld “joined an exclusive club as just the seventh catcher to hit for the cycle.”1 He also set a few records. Pittsburgh was hosting the St. Louis Cardinals in the second game of a four-game series matching the top two National League teams from the 1944 season. […]

As predictions go, it doesn’t rival Joe Namath’s guarantee that his New York Jets would defeat Baltimore in Super Bowl III. In fact, it wasn’t even a guarantee. Nonetheless, it was right on the money. A half-hour or so before he was to face the St. Louis Cardinals on June 29, 1990, Los Angeles Dodgers […]

It was “a baseball burlesque … a wild slugfest with a flock of pitchers being rushed in and out of the box.” — James M. Gould, St. Louis Star, May 11, 1923   The Philadelphia Phillies hosted the St. Louis Cardinals at Baker Bowl on Friday, May 11, 1923. It was the final game of […]