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His teams won more games than any team in the annals of organized black baseball. “Candy Jim” Taylor’s professional baseball career began in 1904, well before Rube Foster’s first Negro National League was formed, and his managerial tenure ended abruptly, just before the 1948 baseball season began, due to Taylor’s sudden death. In between, Taylor […]

Looking back over a century of hometown baseball, a Pittsburgh sportswriter observed that pitcher Nick Maddox “may be the best September call-up in Pirates’ history.”1 No wonder. In his September 13, 1907 major-league debut, the 20-year-old right-hander threw a two-hit, 14-strikeout shutout at the St. Louis Cardinals, winning 4-0. Three days thereafter, he set the […]

A switch-hitting reserve catcher (.228 career batting average) who came up in the Red Sox farm system, Tim Blackwell had his best season at the plate as a Chicago Cub, hitting .272 and catching full-time in 1980. Blackwell grew up in San Diego and participated in Little League baseball. A star in two sports at […]

I was strictly a submarine pitcher, a lot of junk. I had a good fast one, but I didn’t throw it when I didn’t have to. With the hard hitters, I’d time them. I’d throw mixed pitches – “56 varieties” they used to call me. And then when I showed them a good fast ball, […]

A late-season addition by the Detroit Tigers in 1905, right-hander George Disch posted a 2.64 ERA in eight games. Initial reports were positive, and a bright future was predicted. However, he could not crack a Tiger rotation of George Mullin, Ed Killian, Bill Donovan, and Frank Kitson (116 complete games in 137 starts in 1905) […]

A league pennant was squarely on the line under the brutal Mexican sun on September 5, 1938. A team known as Agrario, led by the legendary Satchel Paige, battled Aguila for the championship of the summertime Mexican circuit, a league recently strengthened by the importation of such frontline Negro League stars as Josh Gibson, Ray […]

Jimmy Sebring was one of those players who surface ever year or so that are identified as “can’t miss” candidates for major league baseball stardom. Big for his time at 6 feet, 180 pounds, Jim had it all when it came to baseball: instincts, a strong and accurate throwing arm, speed, and a natural hitting […]

Frank E. Bradley, a fireballing right-handed pitcher who played in six seasons for the Kansas City Monarchs before suffering a career-ending wound in World War II, was born on February 3, 1918, in Benton, Bossier Parish, Louisiana. He was the son of June and Adline (Gates) Bradley. If Frank had any siblings, no mention of […]

Lázaro Salazar was a great two-way player and manager in Cuban professional baseball and the American Negro Leagues, as well as in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, from 1930 until 1957. In addition to winning two MVP awards in the Cuban Winter League, he won four batting championships in three countries, won more than […]

“They used to say Brantford could put its left-fielder five feet from the foul line, the right-fielder five feet from the other line and Jimmy Wilkes would cover the rest.” — Bob McKillop1 “Riding the bus again!” Jimmy Wilkes said, his voice cracking with excitement. “I love it. Now, that brings back memories.”2 The 69-year-old […]

“I was born in 1912 [sic] in Giddings, Texas, a little town between Austin and Houston. Rube Foster came from about twenty-five miles from my house, a little town right above me.” — Hilton Smith 1   Something must have been in the air as the state of Texas produced eight Negro League Hall of […]

Consider the two nearly identical rookie seasons below:   AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI AVG Player #1 464 59 127 22 5 20 68 .274 Player #2 482 75 128 23 5 20 56 .266   These highly acclaimed prospects started 18 years apart. Both were center fielders, blessed with power and speed. […]

On All Saints’ Eve 1906, 17-year-old Southern California native Elmer Rieger made his professional baseball debut in the highest level of minor leagues at the time, for the local Los Angeles Angels in the Class A Pacific Coast League. Unsurprisingly, a good audition it was not. Yet a little over three years later, the spitballer […]

The small town of Colony, Oklahoma, began as an agricultural settlement for Native Americans trying to adapt to a new way of life. In 1886 about 120 Cheyenne and Arapahos left their tribal lands in an attempt to assimilate themselves into the American culture. They became farmers, growing such staples as wheat and cotton. Six […]

Bob Watson of the Houston Astros touches home plate to score what was widely reported as the 1 millionth run in Major League Baseball history on May 4, 1975. (COURTESY OF THE HOUSTON ASTROS)   Like many youngsters growing up in urban America in the 1950s, Bob Watson’s first at bat was in a game […]

It’s a trivia question that most baseball fans would struggle with: Who was the first American League or National League batter to have a 7-for-7 game in the twentieth century? Even with the hint that it was a Detroit Tiger, the question is a tough one to answer. Ty Cobb would be a good guess. […]

When St. Louis Browns coach Charley O’Leary pinch-hit in the final game of the 1934 season, the fans at Navin Field in Detroit thought they were witnessing nothing more than a bit of harmless fun to liven up a relatively meaningless contest. At the time, O’Leary, a veteran of 833 games with the hometown Tigers […]

The Atlanta Braves had been spiraling downward. From a division championship in 1982, Atlanta’s plummet to the National League West Division basement was slow but sure. In 1983 the Braves finished in second place, three games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers. In 1984 they were second again but looking up at the San Diego Padres, […]

One evening in the summer of 1947, the National League’s best and worst teams put on a display that a future baseball commissioner labeled “a farcical exhibition which was a disgrace to baseball and a complete travesty of all the rules of sportsmanship.”1 The Philadelphia Phillies and Brooklyn Dodgers spent 12 anarchic minutes in Philadelphia […]

The Detroit Stars held first place in the Negro National League when they arrived in Ohio to play the Columbus Buckeyes in July 1921. The Stars appeared set to maintain their pace when they took an early lead in the series opener at Columbus’s Neil Park on July 9, but the Buckeyes capitalized on shaky […]

Overview The origins of the Negro League All-Star Game date from 1933 when sportswriters Roy Sparrow of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph and Bill Nunn of the Pittsburgh Courier championed the idea. Not coincidentally, their brainchild surfaced around the same time as the inaugural major-league All-Star game, which was to be held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in […]

Baseball links geography, and rivalry. In 1908 Philadelphia constructed the sport’s first concrete and steel double-decked field: Shibe Park. Three hundred miles to the west, the Phillies’ main foe turned green. That fall Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss began a search for an idyll that “will make people forget about Shibe,” he told friend and business […]