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It took a lot to pry the attention of the baseball world away from New York teams on September 30, 1973. The Yankees played their final game at the original Yankee Stadium, losing to Detroit. And the Mets split a doubleheader with the Cubs to cling to a one-game lead in the National League East. […]

Fidel Castro records the ceremonial first hit of Cuba’s baseball season on January 14, 1962 against Azucareros starter Jorge Santín at Gran Stadium in Havana. (Courtesy of Peter C. Bjarkman)   As the International League’s Rochester Red Wings prepared to play a doubleheader with the Montreal Royals on July 4, 1959, some of them might […]

On August 5, 1977, the Kansas City Royals gave the Chicago White Sox a taste of their own medicine. The host Royals smacked four home runs en route to a 12-2 victory in the Friday night opener of a three-game weekend series. Making the defeat worse for the visiting White Sox was watching the Royals […]

Brian Giles emerged as one of the National League’s top hitters after a 1998 trade to the Pittsburgh Pirates freed him from the Cleveland Indians’ talent-heavy roster. An early-season game in 1999 demonstrated his immediate impact. Upstaging San Francisco Giants slugger Jeff Kent’s five-hit cycle and teammate Jason Kendall’s five hits and two runners caught […]

Three teams had been battling all year for the 1977 American League East crown and as of Sunday afternoon, September 18, the Yankees held a 2½ game lead over the Orioles, who themselves were two games ahead of the third-place Red Sox with only 13 games remaining. While the Yankees were playing the Tigers in […]

The Game Score was introduced by Bill James in his annual Baseball Abstract in 1988.1 It’s a simple stat – a measure of a starting pitcher’s effectiveness by adding and subtracting points from a starting point of 50 based on in-game events. SABR’s Jeff Angus wrote in the Baseball Research Journal that James “humbly called […]

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 […]

Budding media mogul Ted Turner, who had obtained the rights to broadcast Atlanta Braves games on his television station, WTCG, in 1973, purchased the franchise in 1976 and attempted to engineer an immediate reversal of its faltering fortunes. Turner dipped into the brand-new free-agent market and signed one of its trailblazers, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher […]

“I think I just hit for the cycle.”1 That’s what Dwight Evans said to teammate Bill Buckner after hitting a walk-off three-run home run in the bottom of the 11th inning on June 28, 1984, versus the Seattle Mariners.  Ed Nunez gave up the homer to Evans in what must have felt like a déjà […]

The Detroit Tigers hosted the visiting Red Sox at Briggs Stadium for a Friday afternoon game. The Red Sox had split a doubleheader in Cleveland the day before and were 6½ games out of first place. The Tigers had lost at home to the first-place Yankees, whom they trailed by 15 games. Boston was in […]

Perhaps no player in the annals of baseball has had his reputation sullied more than Ty Cobb, thanks primarily to Al Stump, who served as the ghostwriter for Cobb’s autobiography and whose later magazine article and biography created a sensationalized portrait of Cobb as an outright fiend. Charles Leerhsen rehabilitated Cobb’s name to a great […]

The Angels and Mariners partake in an emotional pregame ceremony at Safeco Field on September 18, 2001, the first game back following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Seattle clinched the AL West the following night. (Courtesy of the Seattle Mariners)   Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, the major-league season resumed on Monday, September 18. […]

Chris Hartje got his first taste of the major leagues as the Brooklyn Dodgers’ backup catcher during the final weeks of the 1939 campaign. In his major-league debut, he delivered as a pinch-hitter in what would prove to be the high point of his brief big-league tenure. Seven years later, Hartje was attempting to reignite […]

Tom Metcalf had been called up by the New York Yankees in early August of 1963 and had appeared in only four games for the league-leading Yankees during the month. Relief appearances were few and far between; the New York staff led the American League in complete games with 59. In fact, the Yankees used […]

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 […]

Illinois native Del Howard wasn’t as well-known as Hall of Famers Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance, but he was a valuable backup first baseman, outfielder, and pinch-hitter on the Chicago Cubs’ world championship teams of 1907 and 1908. “Del [Howard] has been carried two years with the Cubs and is as full of […]

Deron Roger Johnson, labeled the “next Mickey Mantle,” spent 16 seasons as a major-league slugger. His finest year was not as a Bronx Bomber but as a Cincinnati Red. A dual football and baseball interscholastic sports star, the San Diego native excelled on the gridiron. Johnson played end, linebacker, kicker, and punter for San Diego […]

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 […]

“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. […]

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 […]

An underrated middle reliever for the mediocre Red Sox teams of the first half of the 1980s, Venezuelan righty Luis Aponte pitched for five years in the majors, the first four for Boston before a final campaign in Cleveland. He had a more storied career in winter ball in his native country. Luis Eduardo Aponte […]

Cleveland pitcher Dennis Eckersley was pitching pretty well. His last outing was a 12-inning game against Seattle, in which he held the Mariners without a hit from the sixth inning on, covering the last 7 2/3 innings. He was rewarded with a complete-game win, when the Tribe pushed a run across in the last of […]

Nicknamed “Moose” because of his 6-foot-5, 215-pound stature, Mike Marshall spent the bulk of his 11-year (1981-1991) major-league career with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Batting and throwing right-handed, he was primarily a right fielder, but with a number of games at first base and in left as well. During his nine seasons with the Dodgers, […]

Note: On Wednesday morning, April 23, 2014, Conrado Marrero passed away quietly in his native Havana, Cuba, marking the end to one of the most celebrated and tenacious baseball lives on record. The sad news comes less than two days before the seemingly ageless Cuban legend would have reached his 103rd birthday, extending a remarkable […]