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Carlos Bernier was 26 years old when he broke the Pittsburgh Pirates’ color line on April 22, 1953, nearly one year before Curt Roberts played his first game with the Pirates.1 The controversial and temperamental outfielder was one of two Bucs, with Lino Donoso, a Cuban pitcher, who encouraged Roberto Clemente to refrain from emotional […]

Collage of Clemente Stamp Materials by Juan López-Bonilla. Background: Uncut panel of 20-cent 1984 United States Clemente stamp. Foreground, from left to right: Poster commemorating the 1984 stamp release, the Puerto Rican newspaper “El Mundo” article from 1982 denoting the design selection, the design sketch for landscape version of stamp, the signature of designer, and […]

I wish that someone had told me when I was 15 years old that Willie Stargell was starting a five-year tear that would transform him from a good home run hitter to one of baseball’s superstars. If they had, I would have taken more mental snapshots of the man who was not yet  “Pops.” While […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2022 as part of SABR’s Baseball and the Supreme Court Project. To place baseball on a pedestal as America’s foundational pastime from time immemorial serves to maintain its culturally ordained immunity from negative aspects of American history. By studying individuals who fought for equality within the confines […]

Roberto Clemente won MVP honors during the 1971 World Series with a .414 batting average (12-for-29), with two home runs, a triple, and two doubles. (Courtesy of the Clemente Museum)   In baseball, there is only one goal. Each season teams play 162 games, plus up to 15 more in the playoffs, to earn the […]

In the course of his career, Roberto Clemente played in 2,433 games and earned 266 assists. He made any number of spectacular defensive plays. One often cited is the time that Clemente, playing right field, earned an assist on a bunt. The game was at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh on Friday night, August 27, 1965. […]

Small-market teams often complain about the unfairness of baseball’s financial structure, contending that teams in large markets have disproportionate access to money to spend on players, giving them an unfair competitive advantage. Big-market teams disagree. But when it comes to the movies, there can be no argument. At the cinema, big-city teams such as the […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Although this quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, at least one Twain researcher claims […]

A quarter century has passed since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball. His appearance in a Brooklyn Dodger lineup in 1947 and the outstanding performance which he gave also opened, the door wider for players from Latin America, who previously had never appeared in significant numbers. The Society for American Baseball […]

Pittsburgh has a wealthy history in black baseball. Two of the premier teams in the Negro Leagues, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, made their home there. It seems only fitting that the first Major League team to field an all-black lineup would be the Pittsburgh Pirates on September 1, 1971. The Bucs came […]

For two days in the summer of 1971, Tom Seaver dueled with another dominant hurler, splitting the games by scores of 1–0 and 2–1. Red Foley, writing for the Daily News, rhapsodized about this matchup, comparing it favorably to legendary contests between Dizzy Dean and Carl Hubbell, Mort Cooper and Whit Wyatt, and Christy Mathewson […]

Asked what it was like to face Sandy Koufax, Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks said, “It was frightenin’.” (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Sandy Koufax faced 512 different batters during his Hall of Fame career, from Dick Groat (145 plate appearances, or PA), to Vinegar Bend Mizell (one PA, along with 63 other batters). Along the […]

Nate Colbert set a single-season RBI record in 1972; hardly anyone noticed. Even today – ten years after the fact – few fans and fewer record books are aware of the big right-handed slugger’s accomplishment. In fact, if it hadn’t been for his performance on August 1 of that year – the best single day […]

On October 13, 1985, a Pittsburgh resident by the name of Saul Finkelstein decided to personally commemorate the 25th anniversary of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. Finkelstein went to the corner of the University of Pittsburgh’s campus where Forbes Field was once located to listen to a tape recording of NBC’s broadcast […]

“Hardly anything in America symbolizes a large city more than its National or American League baseball team. To take the Pittsburgh baseball team out of Pittsburgh would be to deprive its people of the opportunity for a spontaneous outburst of civic pride, for which there is no substitute. In fact, it is practically impossible to […]

Pete Rose provided the nation’s baseball fans with sustained thrills during the summer of 1978 when he made the most serious challenge yet mounted to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak record with the New York Yankees in 1941. Rose surpassed the modern National League record of 37 consecutive games, set by Tommy Holmes of the […]

“Free-agent frenzy.”1 “Meat Market.”2 Negotiations dominated by “fast-talking, greedy little men.”3 Memories of the 1992 Winter Meetings in Louisville, Kentucky, were unvaryingly ugly. Over a tumultuous four days, baseball’s annual gathering had dissolved into nightmarish chaos and sent major-league executives running. Among the worst incidents, the Rev. Jesse Jackson denounced baseball’s “institutional racism,” threatening to […]

There have been more than 100 persons voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for their playing ability and not one was born in a foreign country. It is true that Harry Wright was born in England, but he was selected as a baseball pioneer and manager. In 1973, Roberto Clemente of Puerto Rico was […]

1935 Wheaties All-Americans. (Rob Fitts Collection)   “Last year in the Guide it was the pleasure of the editor to call attention to the fact that the Japanese had so thoroughly grasped Base Ball that they were bent on some day playing an American team for the international championship.”1 So proclaimed John Foster in the […]

Lee Lowenfish. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 683 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, photographs. Branch Rickey. Branch Rickey’s Little Blue Book. Edited by John J. Monteleone. Preface by Stan Musial. New York: Macmillan, 1995. 142 pp. Index. Murray Polner. Branch Rickey: A Biography. Revised Edition. Foreword by Branch B. Rickey. […]

Let me propose a hypothesis: The Cubs and Pirates are each other’s biggest rival. A few years ago I mentioned the idea to Cubs expert Art Ahrens (we were both in our cups), and he looked at me as if I were crazy. But I was researching the Cubs and the Pirates—my two favorite teams—and […]

New York Giants owner Andrew Freedman fired 13 managers between 1895 and 1902. He wasn’t the first to second-guess the actions of a manager, though he did help establish a time-honored tradition. In the years since, more than a few reputations and careers have suffered the ill-effects of the practice. Fans, owners, and journalists rightly […]

The Caguas Criollos won back-to-back Caribbean Series crowns in 2017 and ’18, beating Mexicali 1–0 in 10 innings on February 7, 2017, and defeating Aguilas Cibaeñas from the Dominican Republic on February 8, 2018. The Criollos’ fifth Caribbean Series title puts them in elite company: Only the Dominican Republic’s Tigres del Licey have won more […]

This article was originally published in “The SABR Book on Umpires and Umpiring” (SABR, 2017), edited by Larry R. Gerlach and Bill Nowlin. Bernice Gera, center, makes a call at the Jim Finley umpire school in 1967. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   “Are you blind?” is a familiar cry for fans sitting in […]