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Vern Stephens was recruited to play in Mexico instead of for the Browns in 1946, but quickly returned to the team after seeing the conditions south of the border. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   The St. Louis Browns’ American League (AL) Championship in 1944 was followed by a 1945 campaign best remembered for […]

Although he was known as “Mr. Golf,” Fred Corcoran served as agent to Ted Williams and other players. For a time, he and Frank Scott were the only agents working with baseball players. (COURTESY OF JUDY CORCORAN)   Fred Corcoran was the go-to guy in golf circles, starting in the late 1930s. He had successfully […]

Evaluating a player’s talent, ability, and contributions to his team is an important task of analyzing the game of baseball. In recent years, the prevalent metric for player evaluation has been Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which distills the evaluation into a single number that can be compared directly with that of other players. WAR measures […]

Overture Adrian C. Anson’s professional baseball career came to an abrupt end on February 1, 1898, when Chicago Club president James Hart unceremoniously sacked him without notice. Anson had made his living playing baseball since 1871, had been a member of the Chicago Club since 1876 and, as their captain since 1879, had risen to […]

Histories of the Philadelphia Phillies portray the club’s admission to the National League (NL) as a straightforward and swift process. Early in 1883, League president Abraham G. Mills informed former star player and old friend Alfred J. Reach that the Worcester franchise was moving to Philadelphia. Mills asked Reach — now a successful business entrepreneur […]

R—O—L—A—I—D—S. The answer in the classic ad: “How do you spell relief?” TRIPLE PLAY!!! The answer to the question, “What’s the perfect remedy for a relief pitcher sum moned into a diamond game with nobody out and two (or three) runners on base?” Take for instance May 30, 1967, at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. In […]

Washington, D.C., is primarily known today as the home of our nation’s central government and for its wealth of great museums. Very few people are aware that the city helped give the game of baseball its rich national identity over 150 years ago. A thorough review of the recent “find” of baseball materials, known simply […]

In Baseball Research Journal 33 Fred Worth presented an intriguing article titled “Interesting Statistical Combinations,” analyzing combinations like high batting average and low walks or lots of losses but a low ERA. He concluded the article, “Obviously there are many more comparisons that could be considered.” I took this as a challenge and investigated a number […]

Seattle Nippon and Keio University in 1914. (Rob Fitts Collection)   INTRODUCTION Between 1890 and 1910, over 100,000 Japanese immigrated to the West Coast of the United States. Many settled in the urban centers of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Within a few years, each of these immigrant communities had thriving baseball clubs. The […]

  Toronto’s worst incident of civil unrest happened in one of its most storied ballparks. More than six hours of brawls, bloodbaths, and beatings were unleashed at the corner of Bloor and Christie streets because of tensions built during 15 years of postwar animus. It was a race riot, it was a lawless free-for-all, it […]

Upon the conclusion of the 1889 season, attention in baseball shifted to preparations for the coming war between the owners and players. The Brotherhood, its complaints heard but basically unaddressed, positioned itself for a break with the principals of the National League and the American Association. Although the Association was clearly affected by the events […]

Jim Bouton (right) and John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s Official Historian, sharing the stage at SABR’s 47th annual convention in New York City in 2017. (Photo: Jacob Pomrenke)   In the fall of 1976, CBS Television premiered the television series Ball Four, based upon the 1970 book by former major-league pitcher Jim Bouton, a best-seller […]

South Florida is notoriously hot in the summer, but conditions heated up another notch in 1952 when the Miami Sun Sox and the Miami Beach Flamingos fought it out in one of the great pennant races of minor league baseball. The 1952 dash for the pennant involved two colorful managers: the contentious Johnny “Pepper” Martin […]

All the poetry and folklore of “Tinker to Evers to Chance” notwithstanding, the great Chicago Cubs teams of 1906–10 won their four pennants and two World Series by way of outstanding pitching. The glories of Mordecai “Three Fingered” Brown, Ed Reulbach, Jack Pfiester, and Orval Overall have been widely recognized, and rightfully so. Sadly ignored, […]

Baseball fans planning to attend the game at Island Park in Wichita, Kansas, on June 21, 1925, were advised by the Wichita Beacon, the afternoon newspaper, that “strangle holds, razors, horsewhips, and other violent implements of argument” would be barred at the gate.1 The fear was not of unrest that might somehow be provoked by […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, No. 2 (1983). Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century. — Mark Twain . . . social inequality … means that in all the relations that […]

Cover of the May 1927 issue of Yakyukai depicting O’Neal Pullen and Shinji Hamazaki (Rob Fitts Collection)   Kazuo Sayama, baseball historian, author, and member of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame (enshrined in 2021), states with great passion and conviction that had it not been for the tours of the Negro Leagues’ all-star 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 […]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. One of the longest droughts in baseball history came to an end in 2004 when the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918. With that victory, a new age was dawning. One in which even the Chicago Cubs could start […]

On the morning of May 11, 1953, the fair citizens of Waco, Texas woke up to a muggy day. Many prepared themselves for the beginning of the work week by downing their daily cup of coffee and reading the latest edition of the Waco Tribune–Herald. Sprawled across the front page were reports of intense tornadoes […]

When James Bentley “Cy” Seymour of the Reds stepped into the batter’s box on August 2, 1905, in Cincinnati, he was battling Pittsburgh Pirates great Honus Wagner for the National League batting crown. At start of play that Wednesday afternoon Wagner, 31, was batting .356, and Seymour, 32, was at .357.1 Wagner had won the […]

In 1892, Frank Grant played for the Gorhams and then the Cuban Giants on his way to a Hall of Fame career. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   During a playoff game in October 1905, Leland Giants pitcher Walter Ball rushed onto the diamond at Chicago’s West Side Park and threw a punch “with […]

P.K. Wrigley and the Chicago Cubs’ “College of Coaches” in 1961. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)   In any business venture, management often seeks to make changes in everyday operations in order to bring about improvements in overall performance. These changes may range from minor tweaks in normal operating procedures to overhauls of the conventional methods in place. […]

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in  “Baseball’s Business: The Winter Meetings, 1958-2016” (SABR, 2017), was honored as a 2018 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award winner.   Negro League baseball magnates meet at the Hotel Teresa on June 20, 1946, in New York City. The owners had all attended the Joe Louis boxing bout the night […]