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George Washington Bradley1 of the St. Louis Brown Stockings shut out (or, in the baseball parlance of the time, “Chicagoed”) the Hartford Dark Blues by a score of 2-0 on July 15, 1876. Aside from their being Chicagoed, the Blues also failed to get any hits in the process (although Bradley did walk two) establishing […]

Late in his major-league career, Bill Singer pitched a complete-game victory despite throwing in pain the entire game. His postgame comments accurately described much of his career. “It was so bad when I was warming up that I almost quit,” said Singer. “It was killing me. But then it’s easy to quit. Too easy. I […]

Thrust into a starting role with the Pittsburgh Pirates as a teenager, Aramis Ramírez blossomed after a 2003 trade to the Chicago Cubs, providing the franchise’s best long-term play at third base since Ron Santo. As of 2021, his 386 career home runs, hit over 18 seasons with three National League Central Division teams, lead […]

On Opening Day 1998 the reigning World Series champion Florida Marlins took the field minus a dozen of their 1997 teammates, many of whom were, as The Sporting News put it, “victims … of a halved payroll,” adding, “The roll call of departed comrades read like a Memorial Day remembrance of war casualties” with the […]

Sam Jethroe was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1950, playing for the Boston Braves, and the first African American to play major-league baseball in Boston. Five years earlier, he’d tried out for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, along with Jackie Robinson and Marvin Williams, but the Red Sox pursued none […]

On December 12, 2018, at the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, Museum President Bob Kendrick, with historian Jay Caldwell, announced the Negro League Centennial Team. The team was a key part of the Museum’s celebration in 2020 of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro Leagues. The team of 30 […]

During the early 1880s, fireballer Jim Whitney ranked among baseball’s most accomplished pitchers, notching two seasons with 30-plus wins and pitching the Boston Beaneaters to the National League pennant in 1883. But afterwards, events conspired to undermine Whitney’s productivity. After the 1885 season, he was sold by Boston and thereafter consigned to labor for dismal, […]

He was not the first man to be recognized as a threat to break Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season, but Frank Howard was surely one of the first to draw such attention while still in the minor leagues, or even in college. This gentle, humble man would be no match […]

A combination of accountant, impresario, and American success story, Russian-born Leonard Koppett wrote with verve and understanding about the personalities, games, and statistics of the national pastime and other major sports for over half a century. Today, he is honored from Israel to Cooperstown. Born Leonard Kopeliovitch in an apartment near Red Square in post-revolutionary […]

Quietly dependable though seldom spectacular for most of his five full major-league seasons as an infielder, Steve Yerkes grasped immortality when he played a central role in one of baseball’s legendary episodes. In the bottom of the 10th inning of the deciding game of the epic 1912 World Series, Yerkes raced home with the winning […]

Baseball writers were intrigued by the unlikely story of a slightly built walk-on working his way up to play for the New York Yankees. As a result, Bernard Oliver Bengough was referred to as “the Peter Pan of baseball” during the early years of his professional career.1 The youngest child of James Bengough (1862-1930), a […]

Best known as the president of the National Football League from 1921 to 1939, Joe Carr also worked many years in a variety of executive positions in minor-league baseball.1 He was an officer of the Ohio State League (1910-1916), president of the Columbus team in the American Association (1926-1931), and promotional director of minor-league baseball […]

Baseball history was made at Boston’s Fenway Park on Friday afternoon, September 14, 1951. In the top of the second inning, in his first major-league at-bat, Bob Nieman of the visiting St. Louis Browns hit Mickey McDermott’s low-and-away 1-2 pitch into the screen above Fenway’s Green Monster. An inning later, in his next trip to […]

As his nicknames, Speed Boy and Sparkplug,1 suggest, John Edward Reese was a fleet-footed outfielder who put together a 12-year career at the highest levels of professional baseball in the Negro Leagues. Although he spent most of his career as a reserve outfielder, he was talented enough to play in the outfield alongside some of […]

Frank Albert “Fay” Young was one of the most influential sportswriters in the Black press, during a career that spanned five decades. Modern scholars have praised him for his thorough coverage of Negro Leagues baseball,1 as well as for reporting on athletic events at historically Black colleges.2 Writing at a time when few Black newspapers […]

“I don’t care for Rockefeller’s millions and I have no desire to share Wilson’s honors,” Heinie Wagner once quipped to a group of players during a long, hot train ride out west. “But I would like to be as good a pitcher as Walter Johnson and always be able to pitch for a team as […]

Any number of the marginal talents listed in the major-league record book owe their entries to either of the two momentous roster-shaping events of the late-Deadball Era: the two-season run of the renegade Federal League of 1914-1915 or American entry into World War I in April 1917. Whether pitcher Bill Upham falls into the first […]

Pack your bags. Frank Lane’s in town. The compulsive trader known as Frantic Frank shuffled at least 690 players in 414 transactions with five teams.1 Wherever Lane went, turmoil followed. He traded one manager for another. He traded a home run champion for a batting champ. He traded local heroes and future Hall of Famers. […]

Jesse Levan was the last baseball player to be banned for trying to fix games. A two-time minor-league batting champion, he was held back by injuries and was no longer a prospect when he was banished from professional baseball for life in 1959. He always denied conspiring to throw games, but the damning evidence against […]

Maurice Joseph McDermott, Jr. was a hard-throwing southpaw teenage “can’t miss” prospect who devolved into a journeyman reliever. Slated as the next Lefty Grove, Mickey McDermott played 12 seasons in the big leagues with the Red Sox, Senators, Yankees, Athletics, Tigers, and Cardinals. He spent the first half of his MLB career in Boston where […]

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 […]

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 […]

Editor’s note: This article continues from Part 1, on the New York Giants team ownership from 1883 to 1957.   Stoneham the Younger The narrative of Giants ownership had changed abruptly and dramatically on January 6, 1936, when Charles A. Stoneham died of symptoms associated with Bright’s disease. The franchise immediately passed into the hands […]

South Side Park, later known as Schorling Park, located on 39th Street between Princeton and Wentworth Streets, hosted its first game on April 21, 1900. (THE INTER-OCEAN, APRIL 8, 1900)   The ballpark on 39th Street in Chicago between Princeton and Wentworth Streets had as many names as any ballpark in the era before corporate […]