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Lester B. Pearson was Canada’s 14th prime minister (1963-68) and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.1 He was also a talented amateur ballplayer in his youth, a lifelong baseball fan, and an honorary president of the Montreal Expos from 1968 until his death in 1972.2 When the Toronto Blue Jays joined the American League in 1977 […]

If the baseball fans of Seattle had understood the significance of April 12, 1969, they might have arranged a parade, or perhaps a municipal celebration at Seattle Center with plenty of free-flowing Rainier beer.1 And certainly, more than 8,319 of them might have come out to Sick’s Stadium for the evening’s Seattle Pilots-Chicago White Sox […]

Baseball fans in the small-town New York-Penn League discovered an extra reason to go to games in the summer of 1975. On certain nights, there was a chance that beloved Hall of Famer Yogi Berra might join them in the stands at one of the short-season Class A loop’s modest ballparks. Yogi and his wife, […]

The 1952 baseball season had turned the page to May, and the season’s stories were just starting to bloom like ivy on the brick walls of Wrigley Field. The Chicago Cubs led the National League with nine wins (against four losses), yet were percentage points behind the first-place Brooklyn Dodgers, who had a record of […]

On June 15, 2003, Steve Trachsel pitched the 24th one-hitter in New York Mets franchise history, an 8-0 win over the defending World Series champion Anaheim Angels. The Mets’ road trip crossed the country the next day, heading east to face the Florida Marlins in Miami. After a fifth-place National League East Division finish in […]

In April 1977 a brand-new baseball team called the Blue Jays took the field for the first time, kindling joy in the hearts of fans and bringing the pro game back to a baseball-starved city. And then, two months later, it happened all over again. The expansion Toronto Blue Jays played their first season in […]

“Always stand on principle … even if you stand alone.” — John Adams1   During the 1970s, four American League games ended in forfeit. Three were the result of fans throwing caution to the wind – near the end of the Senators’ farewell to Washington in September 1971, during the Cleveland Indians’ 10-cent beer night […]

The Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians experienced completely different kickoffs to their 1921 campaigns. The 1920 season ended with Cleveland capturing their first World Series, over the Brooklyn Robins, after a season-long battle with the White Sox and the New York Yankees for the American League pennant. The White Sox were constantly battered by […]

In the early morning hours of July 27, 1971, the Philadelphia Phillies slumped away from Veterans Stadium after losing a 15-inning battle to the Houston Astros that took 4 hours 12 minutes to finish. The loss was bad enough to think about on its own, but manager Frank Lucchesi sent one of his players home […]

Shortstop Joe Boley played for 11 pennant winners in his first 16 professional seasons. Contemporary observers considered him a key player on the Philadelphia Athletics teams that won three consecutive pennants and two consecutive World Series from 1929 through 1931. Throughout his career, sportswriters described him with superlatives like “brilliant,” “sensational,” “sparkling” and “great.” He […]

Right-handed reliever Ken Tatum was off to a brilliant start in his baseball career, a candidate for American League Rookie of the Year honors with the California Angels in 1969. The award had never gone to a relief pitcher, but Tatum’s stats (7-2, with a 1.36 earned run average) helped give him a Wins Above […]

Craig Cacek (pronounced Cass-ek) played in seven games for the Houston Astros in 1977. From June 18 to July 10 he was in the major leagues for the only time.1 He had one hit, one RBI, and one walk in 21 plate appearances, a .050 batting average. The Astros’ trade of Cliff Johnson to the […]

From the moment he was born in the back seat of a car in the parking lot of the East Orange (New Jersey) General Hospital, during a snowstorm on December 21, 1948,1 Elliott Maddox showed a knack for doing things on his terms. He was a premier defensive outfielder who had just begun to show […]

Born in what is now Oklahoma shortly before it became a state, Bill Breckinridge was a right-handed pitcher who appeared in three games for the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics. A Dartmouth College standout, Breckinridge was one of many ballplayers that manager Connie Mack brought directly to the big leagues from an institute of higher learning. Breckinridge […]

Jerry Coleman was a true American war hero who played a little baseball for the New York Yankees during the times the Marines did not demand his services. He was the only major-league ballplayer to see combat in both World War II and the Korean Conflict.1 And he saw more than just a little combat […]

The small town of Gridley, California, was established five years after the Civil War. It would become known for its agriculture, eventually becoming the “Kiwi Capital of the United States.” The Northern California community would also be successful in growing such other crops as peaches, plums that would become prunes, rice and walnuts. Gridley became […]

June 15, 1977 is a black day in the history of the New York Mets. On that date, in what came to be known as The Midnight Massacre, M. Donald Grant, the team’s chairman of the board, traded away Tom Seaver, a/k/a “The Franchise,” to the Cincinnati Reds for Pat Zachry, Doug Flynn, Dan Norman, […]

One could pull up Dickey Pearce’s statistics at the reference sites and be completely unimpressed. His numbers in the National Association and the National League are unremarkable. This is only part of the story; he was 35 years old when the National Association started and 40 when the National League began. Pearce’s reputation and contributions […]

Jug Thesenga was sick through the entire flight from Kansas to New York City. This boy from South Dakota was on his way to Yankee Stadium to start for the Washington Senators the next day. That was September 1, 1944, and the Senators were desperate for pitching during those World War II years. Scouts plucked […]

Jim Knight and his daughter were in for a surprise when they visited Pittsburgh’s PNC Park in 2005. The grandnephew of Pirates great Paul Waner asked a stadium worker, “Where can we find the Paul Waner stuff? We’re relatives and we’d like to get some pictures.” Knight was told that no Waner “stuff” existed. They […]

The cover photo on the Sunday magazine insert of the June 29, 1958, edition of the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen was of a young boy wearing a Little League baseball uniform gazing admiringly at an older, bespectacled gentleman who was squatting, a baseball bat in hand. As the accompanying article explained, the man in the photo […]

Rich “Goose” Gossage was “the type of relief pitcher that has become extinct,” as Murray Chass of the New York Times once put it.1 Today’s closer typically has the mission of pitching one inning. In 1978, when the fearsome, hard-throwing righty was the mainstay of the bullpen for the World Series champion New York Yankees, […]

On October 10, 1924, Virgil “Zeke” Barnes stood on the mound in Griffith Stadium, poised within tantalizing reach of a rare and coveted prize, just four outs shy of a Game 7 World Series win. Palpably close, but it was not to be. His moment of reckoning came with an improbable, aberrant bounce of the […]

Ten years a backup catcher for five major league teams, Matt Batts was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He lived in the north part of the city at the time, but San Antonio has grown so much since he was born on October 16, 1921, that where he lived would be nearer the […]