Search Results

Nothing occurs in a vacuum, not even in the green cathedrals of baseball. This is also true of the domination of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP) by the Boston Red Stockings. Baseball as we know it was created in New York, America’s largest and richest city. Teams from Brooklyn and Philadelphia, […]

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 […]

Outfielder Al Shaw played from 1907 to 1909 with the St. Louis Cardinals, for nine end-of-season games in 1907 and for more than 100 games in each of the following two years. For the next four years he played in Single A and Double A, until he came back to the majors for the two […]

Among the many essential cogs in the Go-Go White Sox machine of 1959 was Bob Shaw, a 6-foot-2, 195-pound right-handed pitcher. In just his second full season in the majors, Shaw won 18 regular-season games and finished third in the American League in ERA. He paired with mentor Early Wynn to give the Sox a […]

The bottom of the first inning of the game between the Cleveland Indians and Baltimore Orioles on September 5, 1989, showed the athleticism of Brad Komminsk that had excited scouts and executives for over a decade. With two outs, Cal Ripken, Jr. took John Farrell’s first pitch to deep left-center field. Chasing the ball, Komminsk […]

Career goals for a kid growing up in rural Kansas are pretty simple – either he works the family farm or comes up with a talent that allows him to see a world beyond a wheat field. The talent in Jerry Robertson’s right arm opened doors for him and allowed his childhood dream of being […]

Middleboro, Massachusetts has a long and rich baseball history. While every generation has a favorite candidate, determining the greatest player is not really debatable because only one man has gone from the baseball diamonds of Middleboro to the major leagues. Cyril Arlon Morgan was born in nearby Lakeville on November 11, 1895 to Joseph and […]

The man who hit the first home run at Fenway Park was a native of North Grafton, Massachusetts: Hugh Frederick Bradley. Bradley’s parents were Joseph A. Bradley and Sarah Nutting Bradley and they celebrated his birth on May 23, 1885. Hugh had one brother, John E. Bradley, 11 years his junior. The first time we […]

The National Baseball Hall of Fame has an extensive library, packed with research materials. Most players have a file at the Hall, whose contents are made available to researchers. Some files are fairly thick. Most contain some basic information about the player, including a certificate of death for a deceased player, and newspaper clippings that […]

Right-handed pitcher Cory Bailey was a 15th-round draft pick of the Boston Red Sox in 1991 at the age of 20. His lengthy career ran through 2008 and featured stints in both the American League and National League, as well as Japan’s Central League, Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League, and Venezuela’s winter league. In the […]

The 2013 Boston Red Sox season got underway with a road game against the New York Yankees on April 1. In 2012 the Yankees (95-67) had finished first in the American League East, 26 games ahead of the cellar-dwelling Red Sox (69-93).1 Boston’s .426 winning percentage was its worst since 1960. The Red Sox had […]

The National League’s ill-advised crackdown on balks had reached its zenith. On May 4, 1963, Milwaukee Braves starter Bob Shaw was charged with five balks in an abbreviated outing against the Chicago Cubs. The infractions were stunning considering Shaw had begun the season with just one balk in 970⅓ career innings in the big leagues. […]

“Excellence may have many definitions, but Tip-Top Bread defines excellence: the supreme, clean, healthful loaf,” touted a 1914 newspaper advertisement.1 Robert B. Ward’s bakeries produced nearly 250 million loaves in 1913.2 Ward became a baseball magnate in 1914 when he acquired the Brooklyn franchise in the upstart Federal League. The team was named the Tip-Tops […]

Carl Yastrzemski was legendary in Boston — and throughout baseball. In his 23-season Hall of Fame career with the Red Sox, he made 18 All-Star teams, and won three batting titles, seven Gold Gloves, and the 1967 Triple Crown before retiring in October 1983. Two generations later, the Yastrzemski name returned to the majors.1 His […]

After the Brooklyn Tip-Tops rallied for a one-run victory over the visiting Pittsburgh Rebels in the first game of a Labor Day doubleheader, Brooklyn fans were treated to another come-from-behind one-run victory in the second game. In addition to a five-run rally by the Tip-Tops in the bottom of the eighth inning, the second game […]

Just a year after winning the World Series in 2013, the Red Sox were struggling. With only two days left in June, they were in fourth place in the American League East, seven games behind first-place Toronto and five games behind the third-place Yankees. They had finished in last place in 2012, before bounding to […]

As the Los Angeles Angels rolled into town on July 1, Red Sox fans were uneasy. High hopes for the Red Sox were being dashed. They had lost 17 of their last 29 games and trailed the Baltimore Orioles by four games for the AL East lead. Many of the Red Sox faithful were looking […]

The 2016 season was something of a breakout for Mookie Betts. It was his second full season in the major leagues, playing outfield for the Boston Red Sox. He’d hit for the same .291 batting average in both 2014 and 2015, but in 2016 the 23-year-old Betts improved to .318 and drove in a career-high […]

As the Indianapolis Hoosiers (63-49) prepared to host the Brooklyn Tip-Tops (54-53) in a doubleheader, the Hoosiers had a 1½-game lead over the Chicago Chi-Feds (62-51) in the first year of the new Federal League. Brooklyn was in fifth place in the standings 6½ games behind Indianapolis. Indianapolis had won seven of its last eight […]

It was a rough September 1991 for David Cone. The Mets right-hander had been sued for $8.1 million by three women who claimed that he had threatened them at Shea Stadium in August. Cone admitted to confronting the women but denied threatening them. “In a span of 15 seconds I must’ve dropped 90,000 F-bombs. I’m […]

Montreal mayor Jean Drepeau with (from left) John Bateman, Jim “Mudcat” Grant, and Maury Wills on Opening Day in New York, April 8, 1969 (COURTESY OF THE McCORD MUSEUM, MONTREAL)   When the International Olympic Committee chose Montreal as the host city for the 1976 Winter Olympics, Jean Drapeau, the mayor of Montreal, told the […]

More than a century ago, the Detroit Tigers staged the biggest ninth inning come-from-behind-victory engineered in baseball. It still stands.1 The inaugural 1901 American League season was scheduled to open in Detroit on Wednesday, April 24, but rain just before game time prevented play. The next day was sunny, warm for April, and “a day […]

Here are the SABR Defensive Index™ rankings through games of June 16, 2019. For the seventh consecutive season, the SDI will be used to help select the winners of the Rawlings Gold Glove Award and Rawlings Platinum Glove Award™, presented by SABR. The SABR Defensive Index accounts for approximately 25 percent of the Rawlings Gold […]