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In a 21-year career that was honored by his 2024 election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, Adrian Beltré spent one season – 2010 – with the Boston Red Sox. At age 31, it was one of Beltré’s best years, and it reignited the Dominican-born third baseman’s path […]

As the first week of September drew to a close, neither the Red Sox nor the Phillies were doing much more than playing out the string.  The Red Sox had again failed to regain the magic that had fueled their surprising 2013 World Series championship, a victory followed by a return to the cellar in […]

Things weren’t looking that good for the Red Sox heading into the bottom of the ninth. It was the home opener of the 1952 season at Boston’s Fenway Park. Jimmy Dykes and his Philadelphia Athletics held a 4-1 lead. Right-hander Bob Hooper was dealing. He’d allowed seven scattered hits and walked three, but the Red […]

Baseball fans love to say when they go to the ballpark that there is always a chance that something may happen that they have never seen before. Those among the announced crowd of 9,614 who stayed to the end of the matchup between the University of Arkansas and the University of Central Arkansas on April […]

In the 1960s, the home for the Rutgers University baseball team was University Heights Field on the Busch Campus, just across the Raritan River from the main campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Memory serves to recall the expansiveness of the field often whipped by strong winds. Imagine looking down the left-field line and spotting […]

The American League home-run leader with 47 in 1926, Babe Ruth had hit only four in his first 25 World Series games. Then he gave “the greatest exhibition of batting a World’s Series ever saw”1 and become the first player to hit a trio of homers in a postseason game as the Yankees evened the 1926 World Series […]

“The law of averages had to catch up with you.” – Rusty Staub, May 25, 1973, after driving in the decisive run in a very long game.1   Marathon games dot the histories of the New York Mets and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers played 26 innings against the Boston Braves on May […]

It was the “longest home run in the history of baseball,” gushed sportswriter Joe Trimble of the New York Daily News, about Mickey Mantle’s titanic blast over the left-field bleachers and out of Griffith Stadium.1 Not ready to dismiss the icon who began the sport’s love affair with the long ball two generations earlier, New […]

No matter how bright or bleak the prospects for the coming season, on Opening Day every baseball team has its share of hopeful anticipation. Since they were the defending National League champions, this was especially true for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 13, 1921, when they opened the season in Boston. For once the New […]

To say that the Montreal Expos faced some adversity on the road to their first-ever playoff appearance would be an understatement. In their first decade of existence (1969-1978), the Expos never finished higher than in fourth place in the National League East standings and their record was below .500 in each of those years. Although […]

When the two worst teams in the American League met at Shibe Park for a September 20, 1942, doubleheader, Philadelphia’s legendary owner-manager Connie Mack readily admitted that the results were not foremost on his mind. His A’s had clinched the basement for a third season in a row, but the team avoided 100 losses by […]

“Outside a miracle, you’ll never pitch again.” Dave Dravecky, one of the aces of the San Francisco Giants’ pitching staff, had suffered an injury-ridden 1988, in which he pitched in only seven games. But nothing prepared him for the shocking diagnosis he received in September of that year. He had felt a lump on his […]

Season-ending games rarely hold much fascination for many fans or players, and such was the case when the Texas Rangers hosted the California Angels in the finale of 1984. For Mike Witt, the circumstances of the visiting pitcher in his last start also served as the conclusion of a salary drive, and the lanky right-hander […]

In the overnight hours of May 14-15, 1969, a fire ravaged MacArthur Stadium in Syracuse, New York, home of the Syracuse Chiefs of the Triple-A International League. A city fire marshal surveying the destruction declared: “[The Chiefs] will not play here any more this year.”1 The team’s management thought otherwise. The Chiefs, top minor-league affiliate […]

To the extent that twenty-first-century baseball fans remember Willard Hershberger, they remember him for the unfortunate circumstances of his death. Hershberger, a 30-year-old backup catcher in his third season with the Cincinnati Reds, took his own life in a Boston hotel in August 1940 after a long struggle with depression. He was the first active […]

Chicken Hawks was a double threat for those who construct imaginary teams of players named after birds.1 Despite batting .316, the lefty swinger had just 393 at-bats spread across two major league seasons. His time at the top level was limited because he was streaky at bat and suspect on defense in the outfield and […]

Philadelphia A’s star left-hander and future Hall of Famer Eddie Plank had scattered five hits and had not allowed a run as the Boston Braves batted in the top of the ninth in Game Two of the 1914 World Series. Unfortunately for Plank and his mates, Braves starter Bill James was pitching just as well. […]

During the 1890s southpaw Bert Inks pitched for six different major league clubs – but posted a winning record for only one of them. More than a century later, that performance prompted a 19 th century baseball scholar to declare, “Bert Inks exemplified the lengths to which teams often go to give a left-handed pitcher […]

One of the top two-sport athletes to come out of the Twin Cities, Bill Davis starred at the University of Minnesota in both baseball and basketball in the early 1960s. After graduation Davis began his professional baseball career by signing with the Cleveland Indians. Davis played parts of three seasons in the majors but could […]

In January 1983, NBC television debuted a new action series titled The A-Team. The show followed the exploits of a fictional group of former U.S. Army members with such colorful names as Face, Hannibal, and the brawling, straight-talking, ludicrously bejeweled B.A. Baracus, the fictional embodiment of the character’s actor, Mr. T. Within months of the […]

Among numerous icons from Cuba’s somewhat murky pre-revolution past, swarthy-skinned pitching ace José de la Caridad Méndez Báez stands at the very apex of the heap. Among the young nation’s first true national sporting heroes, the rawboned fastball hurler maintains an indelible image as one of the earliest icons of island baseball history. But it […]

Soon after the 1967 World Series ended, Fleetwood Recording Co. released a long-playing phonograph record, The Impossible Dream, a reprise of the Boston Red Sox magical same-year pennant. Narrating, Sox announcer Ken Coleman hailed “an affair twixt a town and a team,” telling how the Boston American League Baseball Company used wonderwork to wave 1967’s […]

David Green was one of baseball’s big “what if” stories. The imposing Nicaraguan was often called “the next Roberto Clemente.” His talent has also been compared to that of Vladimir Guerrero, André Dawson, and Darryl Strawberry — even Willie Mays. Alas, personal troubles and nagging injuries stopped him from realizing this vast potential. Looking back […]

The 1945 Boston Red Sox had two Steiners on the roster – catcher Red Steiner and second baseman Ben Steiner. Though it might seem unusual for a team to have two unrelated players with the same surname, in the 1940s alone the Red Sox had Skeeter Newsome/Dick Newsome, Jimmie Foxx/Pete Fox, Bob Johnson/Vic Johnson, and […]