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On the first Sunday of the 1956 season, the American League’s two worst teams from the previous year met for a doubleheader. The temperature in Baltimore was pleasant enough – in the low 60s – but the sky appeared gloomy and a few raindrops fell during the 2 o’clock matinee.1 Nevertheless, fans continued to stream […]

Heavy hitters for the 1930 Brooklyn Robins (L to R): RF Babe Herman (.393, 35 HRs, 130 RBIs), CF Johnny Frederick (.334, 17 HRs, 76 RBIs), 2B Jake Flowers (.320, 2 HRs, 50 RBIs), 1B Del Bissonette (.336, 16 HRs, 113 RBIs), and C Al Lopez (.309, 6 HRs, 57 RBIs). (Photo: SABR-Rucker Archive)   […]

Fenway Park was back in the October sunshine. Winning the 1975 American League pennant was not just a good thing for Boston, for New England; it was a tonic for baseball fans across America. Since the Red Sox had last been in the World Series in 1967, new multisport facilities had proliferated throughout baseball, the […]

As winter turned to spring in 1941, war was spreading across the globe, a wildfire uncontained. Nazi Germany had subjugated much of Europe, with invasion of the Soviet Union next. Britain had endured The Blitz for months, Luftwaffe terror raining from above. Hitler’s racist regime brutally persecuted Jews, evolving by 1942 into the genocide we […]

The first series of the 1916 season between the Washington Senators and the Boston Red Sox began on April 17. The Red Sox were the defending champions, coming off a four-games-to-one mastery of the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1915 World Series. The Senators, perennial residents of the second division from 1903 through 1911, had begun […]

Heading into the 1993 season, the July 2 game between the Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres at Veterans Stadium seemed like an unexciting item. The Phillies had finished last in the National League East Division in 1992, 26 games out; the Padres were third in the NL West, 16 games out. The Phillies promotions […]

The Tampa Bay Rays finished second in the American League East division in 2013, 5½ games behind the Boston Red Sox. They wrapped up the season with seven games in three different cities. The third stop on their road trip had been Arlington, Texas, for a wild-card tiebreaker game on September 30, in which they […]

The Philadelphia Athletics were just a half-game behind the Cleveland Indians in the American League after the two teams split their four-game series in mid-July. The Athletics and Indians along with the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox had battled for first place most of the season. After being tied with the Indians on […]

The team that was the last to integrate had been – 26 years earlier – the first to field a native of Mexico in the major leagues. The team was the Boston Red Sox, who took until 1959 to field a Black ballplayer – Pumpsie Green. In 1933, however, when Baldomero Melo “Mel” Almada took […]

San Diego Padres staff ace Gaylord Perry was the National League’s most dominant pitcher during September 1978. Taking the hill for a Thursday night matchup against NL West Division rival San Francisco, Perry was seeking his 20th win in a season for the fifth time in his career, and was only 20 strikeouts shy of […]

Before the start of the 1951 season, many baseball writers predicted that the Philadelphia Phillies would be competitive in the eight-team National League, but not repeat as pennant winners. A poll in The Sporting News of 204 scribes forecast the Phillies to finish third behind the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, the Phils garnering […]

Baseball was already a fixture on the Cuban scene by the early 1870s and it had arrived burdened with its own home-grown Cuban apostles and its own full-blown and home-spun creation myths. It is well documented that a pair of Havana-bred brothers named Guilló (often misspelled as Guillot) had returned from Mobile, Alabama’s Springhill College […]

John Harley McNeal is listed in most current reference works as having played under the name Harry McNeal. But in game write-ups and items in sporting papers that mentioned him during his career, he was universally referred to as Harley McNeal. His surviving family members also remember that he was called Harley, Harlow or John […]

Pitcher Tom Metcalf came from a small town in central Wisconsin but got to fulfill the dreams of his childhood when he spent two months in America’s largest city as a member of the New York Yankees in 1963. The righty’s major-league career was limited to eight appearances on the mound that season, in which […]

Right fielder Dick Porter played 5½ years with the Cleveland Indians, half a year with the Boston Red Sox, and 15 years in the minors – all but the very last one in the International League. That length of tenure in the I.L. helped him earn induction into the International League Hall of Fame. He […]

A major-league ballplayer gets called a lot of things during his career, and a manager probably more so. In the case of Edgar Frederick Yost III, some of those things include taxidermist, catcher, grinder, idiot, app developer, survivor, twitter hashtag (#yosted), clothier, pot scrubber, and hunter. Oh, and one more thing — World Series champion […]

“Some people say he was the greatest African American player ever. That may be so — I don’t know — but what seems clear is that he was the best black player of his time.” — Monte Irvin   The story of John Henry “Pop” Lloyd has many facets. It is a story of communities […]

Steve Barber was a wild left-handed pitcher with a cannonball sinker, a chip on his shoulder, and a pain in his elbow. Barber was anointed as the majors’ fastest pitcher before he appeared in a regular-season game. He was the first 20-game winner in the modern history of the Baltimore Orioles, but his arm went […]

Reginald Martinez Jackson was born on May 18, 1946, in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, a largely white suburb north of Philadelphia’s central city. His father, Martinez Jackson, ran a dry-cleaning and tailoring business. As a grown man, Reggie claimed he still knew how to cuff a pair of slacks.1 His father was a veteran of World War […]

A master of the one-liner, Billy Grabarkewitz once claimed that “Abner Doubleday dreamed up this game [of baseball] to drive people crazy.”1 Perhaps no one knew this more than the diminutive right-handed hitting infielder whose entire career pivoted on injuries. It was injuries that slowed Grabarkewitz’s march to the big leagues; injury to fellow infielder […]

Ray Webster played in 47 major-league games in 1959 and 1960, and 732 games over eight seasons in the minor leagues, playing for teams ranging from Quebec to Hawaii. He was primarily a middle infielder but also played 75 games at third base and 35 in the outfield. During his time in the big leagues, […]

Jake Kenyon was on the threshold of the major leagues in November 1887 when he signed to play in St. Louis for the 1888 season. At the time, Kenyon was a highly regarded catcher who had played the previous two seasons with Topeka in the Western League. While he was signed by the St. Louis […]

“Coming into a game in the eighth or ninth inning is like parachuting behind enemy lines. And sometimes the chutes don’t open. You have to live with that. It’s an unexplained hazard.” – Dan Quisenberry1   The role of a relief pitcher, and more specifically, a closer, is one of the hardest tasks in baseball. […]

The San Diego Padres celebrated their 50th season in Major League Baseball in 2019. (SAN DIEGO PADRES)   San Diego’s quest for major-league baseball began earnestly in the mid- to late 1950s, around the time California’s largest cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, ascended to “the bigs.” Home of the Pacific Coast League Padres since […]