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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. […]

One of the California Angels’ shortcomings in 1992 was a lack of production from their cleanup hitters. As the season trudged into August and the Angels sat 12 games below .500, interim manager John Wathan thought of a new way to try to get some production from the fourth slot in the lineup—bring up the […]

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 if the 2020 season wasn’t strange enough, an unusual incident occurred at Fenway Park during a late-season Sunday afternoon game against the visiting New York Yankees. The announced attendance for the game was 0 – yes, zero – as it was for every game all season long at the Boston ballpark. The COVID-19 pandemic […]

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 […]

Heading into the 1921 season, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Austin McHenry had shown promise in his two full seasons with the club. He hit. 286 in 1919 and .282 in 1920 with a combined 112 runs batted in.1 But no one would have predicted that his 1921 campaign would cause The Sporting News to proclaim […]

Two years after this game, the Boston Red Sox were well on their way to winning the American League East. That team went on to win the 2018 World Series, marching through each of the three rounds of the postseason with only one loss per round. The 2018 Red Sox featured an outfield of Andrew […]

The New York Mets had good reason to be tired when they took the field at Shea Stadium at 1:10 on Thursday afternoon to wrap up their four-game series with the Chicago Cubs. About 12 hours earlier, manager Willie Randolph’s squad had left the diamond after an 8-1 victory that began more than three hours […]

Brock Holt admits he was swinging to hit a home run. And why not? It was the top of the ninth inning and the Red Sox already had a 14-1 lead in Game Three of the American League Division Series. Yankees manager Aaron Boone had conceded the game, inserting a position player – backup catcher […]

The 1961 major-league season was barely three weeks old the day 29-year-old Willie Mays produced perhaps the greatest offensive performance of his legendary career. Led by Mays, the San Francisco Giants came to Milwaukee for a three-game series with the hometown Braves. Just a year away from the World Series, the Giants were a team […]

Welcoming back their popular soldier-catcher Hank Gowdy after nearly a two-year absence, the Boston Braves held a ceremony in his honor on Saturday afternoon, May 24, 1919, before a game against the Cincinnati Reds.1 Gowdy had been the first active major leaguer to enlist for military service in World War I. John Heydler, the president […]

On a pheasant-hunting trip during the offseason, Fergie Jenkins said he would try to win 20 games again. His teammate, Billy Williams, stated that he would try to hit 40 home runs for the first time in his career.1 The 26-year-old Jenkins had won at least 20 games for three consecutive seasons coming into 1970. […]

Cal Ripken Jr. homers on September 6, 1995, during his record-breaking 2,131st consecutive game. (Courtesy of the Baltimore Orioles)   The outcome of this game was of little importance to the fans of two cities separated by less than 200 miles. The New York Yankees’ record was mediocre, a pedestrian 60-61, only slightly better than […]

Between 1901 and 2000, there were 165 major leaguers who both struck out four times in a game and hit three home runs in a game.1 None did both in the same game, but on July 9, 2000, Tyler Houston of the Milwaukee Brewers became the first to hit those marks in back-to-back games.2 Yet […]

The Atlanta Braves’ offense wasn’t exactly feeble in the first month of the 1985 season. When they began a three-game series against the Montreal Expos on May 10, they had scored the third-most runs in the National League.1 Braves center fielder Dale Murphy, a two-time league MVP and baseball’s hottest hitter, boasted a .365 batting […]

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 […]

Garry Hancock was a strong-armed, good-hitting outfielder who did not earn a regular place in the star-studded Red Sox outfield of Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, and Dwight Evans. Instead, Hancock filled in for the outfield trio during the heartbreaking roller coaster ride that was Boston’s 1978 campaign. Ronald Garry Hancock was born on January 23, […]

He was a left-handed hitter who batted .285 over the course of 16 seasons, and Clark Griffith called him Washington’s greatest centerfielder, claiming that he played the position more shallow than any man in baseball. Yet Clyde “Deerfoot” Milan achieved his greatest fame as a base stealer. After Milan supplanted Ty Cobb as the American […]

Pedro Felix Borbón Marte (also known as Pedro Borbón Jr.) was born on November 15, 1967, in the town of Valverde de Mao, Dominican Republic. He is the son of workhorse relief pitcher Pedro Borbón, a two-time World Series champion with the Big Red Machine and 2010 inductee into the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame. […]

Joe Black helped lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to the 1952 pennant, going 15-4 with 15 saves, and a 2.15 ERA. He won the NL’s Rookie of the Year Award and became the first African American pitcher to win a World Series game. “Let’s put it this way,” Dodgers manager Chuck Dressen told reporters, “Where would […]

Hy Vandenberg was a big right-handed pitcher, 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds, who debuted in the majors in 1935 but didn’t win his first game until 1940 and didn’t win his second until 1944. Thanks to the war years, he was able to compile a 15-10 record in the big leagues and win 139 games in […]

For a player who appeared in only 19 games during part of a nineteenth-century season, Daniel Albion Jones Jr. received an inordinate amount of notoriety. Among the many cameo players who flitted briefly across the major-league scene, Jones was perhaps the most unique. He was a Yale man who sang in the college’s glee club. […]

Editor’s note: The following is a sample chapter from the Deadball Era Committee’s World Series Project. Learn more about it here: http://sabr.org/content/deadball-era-committee-world-series-book-project. 1918 Allan Wood, Series Editor {The 1918 World Series took place in early September due to the “Work or Fight” order that forced the premature end of the regular season on September 1. […]