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The history of baseball in America has always been closely tied to the history of race in America. The progression of baseball from an exclusionary sport to a beacon for integration and eventually to a global game has paralleled our country’s movement from slavery to the civil rights movement to modern day multiculturalism. While the […]

National League president Warren Giles was in San Diego for Opening Day, April 8, 1969, and here joins Buzzie Bavasi holding an aerial photograph of the Padres’ new ballpark, San Diego Stadium. (Courtesy of Tom Larwin)   San Diego’s quest for major-league baseball began in the mid- to late 1950s, around the time Los Angeles […]

Babe Ruth calling his shot . . . Gabby Hartnett’s home run in the gloamin’… Ernie Banks’ No. 500. . . These are some of the 6,905 major league home runs hit at Wrigley Field. The first home run was hit by Art Wilson of the Chicago Whales in a Federal League game on April […]

Bordering Hoboken — which dubs itself the “birthplace of baseball” because of the legendary 1846 game between the Knickerbockers and the New Yorks at Elysian Fields — Jersey City stands on the edges of the Hudson River and Newark Bay, somewhat obscured by the baseball notoriety of its neighbor to the northeast and the epic […]

Taken on Labor Day in 1902 during a doubleheader between the Phillies and Chicago Orphans, the photo shows the edge of the grandstand and bleachers along the third base line where the collapse would take place less than a year later. (Author’s Collection)   Introduction “From the lips of a frightened little girl came a […]

Baseball is called America’s national pastime, but in Cuba baseball is a way of life. In the late 1890s during the war of independence, baseball unified the Cuban people in opposition to Spaniards, who looked down on the sport and preferred traditional European bullfighting. Sixty years later when Fidel Castro came to power, he knew […]

Gladys Goodding was more than just an artiste whose musical stylings entertained the Ebbets Field faithful from the early 1940s on. This cheerful, occasionally mischievous woman was a baseball pioneer. Hers was the first organ permanently situated in a big-league ballpark and she predated Eddie Layton, Jane Jarvis, Wilbur Snapp, and other ballyard organists. Her […]

1992 All-Star Baseball Series program (Robert Fitts Collection)   For the MLB All-Star team, the 1992 series was all about redemption.1 Nothing less. Two years earlier, an American team boasting stars like Randy Johnson, Roberto Alomar, Barry Bonds, Lenny Dykstra, and Ken Griffey Jr. had won just three of eight games to become the first […]

April 6, 1987, was a slow news day. President Reagan spoke to the Canadian Parliament, hardly a reason to stop the presses. Republican former quarterback Jack Kemp announced his candidacy to succeed Reagan in 1988. The Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 2,400 for the first time. It was Opening Day for 16 of the 26 […]

“In the ’80s we had a terrible cocaine problem. Did we have a policy? Did anything happen? No. We have a (steroid) policy.” — Commissioner Bud Selig, July 13, 2005, San Francisco Chronicle Lonnie Smith had batted leadoff in hundreds of major league games, but on September 5, 1985, he was at the top of […]

In 1915, the Chicago Tribune announced a contest to find the three best amateur baseball players in Chicago. The prize for the three youngsters would be a chance to join each of Chicago’s major league teams, the American League White Sox, the National League Cubs, and the Federal League Whales. The contest’s origins, execution, and ultimate success […]

A boy on a pony, his glove hitched to his belt, emerges from the fields along Venezuela’s Oeste 1      highway and pauses while a cane truck lumbers by. A bus sweeps past, enveloping him in dust, but brakes for the slow-moving truck. The boy, with a whoop, gallops after the crawling caravan. Waving wildly, he […]

When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem during a 2016 preseason game to protest police violence against black people in America, all hell broke loose. Voices of praise and condemnation rained down. Passion often trumped reason. The “conversation” remains heated, while complicated criminal justice problems remain unsolved. Is […]

Triumph, mystery and sorrow marked his life. A weak hitter as a semi-pro, the pint-sized shortstop not only starred afield, but also batted .304 during his seven years with the Chicago Cubs. Early in the morning of August 14, 1940, Constable Arthur C. Mosley and Deputy Charles Gordon of Clayton, Mo. (a suburb of St. […]

Introduction The Winter Meetings of 1990 were held amid a dispute between the major and minor leagues and uncertainty arising from an agreement between the major-league owners and the players union concerning collusion. The minor leagues were mainly asking for additional support for their farm teams from the major-league parent. With respect to the collusion […]

On July 12, 1966, National League All-Star manager Walter Alston wrote out a lineup card with arguably the greatest outfield ever to appear in a baseball game — on any team, in any league, in any era. Leading off was center fielder Willie Mays, batting second was right fielder Roberto Clemente, and hitting third was […]

Sitting in the bleachers at Coffee Pot Park during a break at spring training. The seats were pine boards without arm or backrests. Left to right: Erskine Mayer, Pat Moran, Jack Adams, Dode Paskert. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   It seems obvious that Florida is an apt location for major league baseball to […]

The glossy, color print advertisement for the 2002 All-Star Japan Series features an exterior shot of a terminal at Tokyo Narita airport. But instead of planes pulling up to the gates, giant baseball bats of various makes and models encircle the building, as if preparing to disgorge passengers. Below the image the ad copy reads […]

The highly regarded “five-tool” label is a relatively modern term in baseball’s lexicon, usually traced to Leo Durocher proclaiming the greatness of his star player of the early 1950s, Willie Mays.1 The five tools are: hit for average, hit with power, run with speed and prowess (particularly on the basepaths), catch the ball, and throw […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume II (1987).   Contributors: Dick Beverage, Bill Borst, Jon Daniels, Cappy Gagnon, Bob Hoie, Tom Jozwik, Phil Lowry, John Pardon, Larry Ritter, Leverett T. Smith, Jules Tygiel, Alan Blumkin, Jake Carlson, Jay Feldman, Mark Gallagher, Lloyd Johnson, Jack Kavanagh, Vern Luse, Frank Phelps, […]

What we have in this special edition of the Baseball Research Journal are four snapshots of events and personalities from the wide world of “baseball-and-the-law”: Roger Abrams on arbitration and the 1975 Andy Messersmith reserve-clause case; Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court’s 1922 decision in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League of Professional […]

Chances are if one were to poll SABR members about the greatest left-hander in the 121-year history of the Dodgers franchise, the most frequent response would be, “Sandy Koufax.” But they would be incorrect. Without a doubt, the honor of greatest southpaw in organizational history belongs to Vincent E. Scully. Since the emergence of radio-broadcast […]

One baseball executive said Willie Mays’ glove was “where triples go to die.” (SABR-Rucker Archive)   One of the game’s greatest players of all time was also one of the greatest defensive players of all time. Willie Mays set a standard of excellence for outfielders that is virtually unmatched. As Dodgers executive Fresco Thompson said, […]