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A natural on the radio, Jackie Robinson spent a fair amount of time behind the microphone. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)   One of the more impressive aspects of his trailblazing life is that Jackie Robinson had a wide and varied interest in the world, and his career reflected that. As early as college, […]

A packed crowd of 61,808 fans heard Lou Gehrig make his “Luckiest Man” speech between games of a doubleheader against Washington. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Lou Gehrig played his final game for the New York Yankees on April 30, 1939. Though only 35 years old, the Iron Horse, who played in 2,130 consecutive games, had been […]

Once upon a time, A.J. Liebling, consummate Manhattanite and writer for The New Yorker, dubbed Chicago America’s Second City.1 But in relation to New York-centric baseball movies, this AAA-league rating is extremely generous. Across the decades, baseball films with Chicago references have been relatively scarce. For every on-screen image of Wrigley Field, there are scores […]

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 […]

The 1963 baseball winter meetings were alive with discussion of important issues, including the permissible size of catcher’s mitts and the color of baseball bats. The clubs also made time to once again reconfigure the minor-league structure and adopt an amendment designed to assist the player-development efforts of expansion teams. The minor leagues kicked off […]

Jim Spencer had 36 major-league home runs at Yankee Stadium during his 15-year career, the first coming on August 6, 1969. However, his first Yankee Stadium homer came on August 12, 1963, in a tune-up game for the annual Hearst Sandlot Classic. Spencer was on the United States All-Stars, who defeated the Eastern Pennsylvania All-Stars, […]

A game at Minneapolis’ Nicollet Park in 1954, the most hitter-friendly park of its era. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society)   Contrary to what you might read elsewhere, Forbes Field was not the first modern ballpark made of steel and concrete. That honor belongs to a minor-league stadium that now, like so many historic […]

Background The 1972 baseball Winter Meetings played host to over 1,300 people at the Sheraton-Waikiki Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, from Saturday, November 25, through Friday, December 1. “It looms as the largest in history,” said Jack Quinn, general manager of the Pacific Coast League’s Hawaii Islanders, “and it marks the first time that all convention […]

Introduction and context The 1988 Winter Meetings were held at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, from Sunday, December 4, until Wednesday, December 7. These meetings came at the tail end of the collusion cases, as teams were beginning to open their wallets and spend money again, and a lot of teams were looking […]

Organized professional baseball began in the 1870s with three independent entities. The first was the National Association, which operated from 1871 to 1875. This was followed in 1876 by the National League, which has operated continuously to the present day. The third was the International Association, so called because it initially included Canadian teams. It […]

What if? This is one of the most often asked questions of historians. What if the Mayflower had not sailed? What if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated? What if the Watergate break-in had never been discovered? Baseball fans play out the same scenarios. What if Shoeless Joe Jackson had not been banned from baseball? […]

It’s often said that there are no ties in baseball. If a game is deadlocked after nine innings,1 you keep playing until someone wins.2 That’s the general rule, to be sure, but tie games have occurred in the past, for all sorts of special reasons.3 And the neck tie, the real subject of this essay […]

More than any other sport, baseball as we know it today is infatuated with numbers. Every movement, whether from defensive positions, the pitcher’s mound, or the batter’s box, is examined, analyzed, and quantified. As a result, we are treated to “quality starts,” “holds,” and batting averages with two-strike counts or on artificial turf in night […]

When quintessential baseball buff Douglas Heeren first approached me about a player named Ducky Holmes, I failed to grasp the depth of the subject. Pointing out my misidentification of Ducky in a team photo in my book about baseball in Northwest Iowa, Heeren simply wanted to set the record straight.1 A young man from rural […]

ABSTRACT Minor league baseball has undergone a resurgence, exemplified by record-setting attendance and a growing number of new ballparks. Much research has focused on factors that drive attendance. Chief among those factors is promotions, with numerous studies showing that giveaways and sponsored off-the-field activities at games can increase gate receipts. The quality of the team […]

The Annus Mirabilis that was 1884 left a massive fallout for the campaign of 1885. For the first time, there had been three major leagues operating simultaneously, and the messy multi-circuit milieu — especially the tenuous stability of the freshman Union Association, and the renewed tensions between the National League and the American Association — […]

The 1977 major-league baseball season witnessed two new teams — the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays — join the American League. George Foster hit 52 home runs for Cincinnati. The Twins’ Rod Carew flirted with hitting .400 and Yankees outfielder Reggie Jackson’s bat returned the World Series championship to New York City. The 1977 […]

Introduction and History I have taught or co-taught sabermetrics in the mathematics department at the United States Military Academy several times. We covered all the metrics but what always interested me most was the direction student projects took to solve or analyze various issues in baseball. In one of these courses, for example, the group […]

“The only real game in the world is baseball. In this game, you have to come up from youth. You’ve got to start way down at the bottom, if you’re going to be successful like those fellows over there (the Yankees lining the field between home and first base).” – Babe Ruth, April 27, 1947, […]

Major-league rules have stipulated since 1950 that the home team always bats last. However, as Gary Belleville relates in a recent Baseball Research Journal article, an exception has been added to the rulebook: Starting in 2007, any team that had to relocate a home game to another city would still bat last. … MLB’s revised […]

Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig formed the most feared batting twosome in the history of baseball. Batting third and fourth, they served as the heart of the great Yankee teams that won three World Series between 1927 and 1933. Despite their heroics, Ruth and Gehrig played a different type of baseball, led decidedly different lives, […]

One of baseball’s most highly-regarded accomplishments by an individual player is hitting for the cycle: collecting at least one of each of the four types of safe hits (single, double, triple, and home run) in the same game. While recognized as a rare and remarkable feat, the cycle has been achieved 286 times during the […]

This story tells the tragic tale of Michael “Doc” Powers, a catcher who played primarily for the Philadelphia Athletics and whose baseball career was cut short by his untimely death. Misconceptions about what caused his demise abound, but can be laid to rest by this article. Ultimately, “Doc Powers Day” was organized by the American […]

Indian Head Rockets sweater crest, 1951. (Indian Head Museum)   “Wonder how long it will be before we have baseball in these parts again?” mused the man on Coffee Row as he sipped his java. He was scanning the sports pages jammed with holiday ball tournaments. There must have been 100 teams within hailing distance […]