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Ten years a backup catcher for five major league teams, Matt Batts was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He lived in the north part of the city at the time, but San Antonio has grown so much since he was born on October 16, 1921, that where he lived would be nearer the […]

Right-handed pitcher Bill Evans had a very brief major-league career, with a total of one decision (sadly, for him, a loss) in the 13 games he pitched over two seasons of big-league baseball. He worked in four games in 1949 for the White Sox, and in nine games in 1951 for the Red Sox. He […]

Lefty Sullivan had everything a pitcher could want: a blazing fastball, a knee-buckling curve, a disappearing spitball, and pinpoint control. The one thing he couldn’t do was field. Because he felt dizzy every time he picked up a bunt – a lifelong heart condition cut off the flow of oxygen to his brain when he […]

A star athlete in high school and at the University of Michigan, Elmer Gedeon played a handful of games for the Washington Senators in 1939. He died while flying a bombing mission over France in 1944, less than a week after his 27th birthday. James T. Taaffe, a fellow officer in the U.S. Army Air […]

Mike McNally emerged from the gritty Lackawanna Valley before World War I to fashion a half-century career in baseball. A deft, light-hitting utility infielder, he played 10 seasons in the big leagues, twice scored spectacularly in the World Series, and went on to become a popular manager, scout, and front-office executive. Along the way, irrepressible […]

“Me a pop-off? Aw, that’s bunk.” — Mickey Harris, Boston Post, May 20, 1941 Mickey Harris is well known for an impressive amount of self-confidence and for posting a 17-9 record as one of the key components of the starting staff that carried the 1946 Boston Red Sox to their World Series showdown with the […]

World War II ended when the Axis powers surrendered to the Allied powers in 1945. Men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces returned to an America deeply affected by years of war, and they sought to resume a simple, more pedestrian way of life. They looked to an America which embraced enterprise and entertainment, […]

War was raging in Europe as the 1941 baseball season came to a close. News of the fighting kept fans justifiably preoccupied, while the pennant races served as a badly needed diversion. The New York Yankees captured the American League flag, and then defeated the National League champion Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. A […]

Joe Burt Scott’s professional baseball career intersected with the emerging opportunities in the sport following Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers and the waning years of the Negro Leagues. This left-handed first baseman and outfielder was 26 years old in 1947, when he hit .400 for the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro […]

Solly Salisbury was an adventurer, a newspaperman, a soldier, a certified hero, and a ballplayer. He bombed in his only two professional games for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1902, but he was still good enough to be remembered in his home state 50 years after leaving the game. Solly was born William Ansel Salisbury on […]

Brooklyn–born Gennaro Joseph Casale, better known as Jerry, played 11 seasons in professional baseball beginning in 1952 and concluding in 1963. During a five-year stretch, from 1958-1962, he pitched for three major-league teams, a hard-throwing right-hander and recorded his best season in 1959 as a 13-8 rookie with the Boston Red Sox. Casale was a […]

Harry O’Neill played in just one major-league baseball game, had no times at bat, and no putouts or assists. Still, he won a measure of immortality as one of only two major leaguers who lost their lives during World War II. He was killed in action on March 6, 1945, during the battle for the […]

Andrew Lawrence Patterson was born on December 19, 1911, in Chicago.1 Both of his parents died while he was extremely young, so the duty of raising the boy fell to his maternal grandparents.2 Pat, as he became known, discovered athletics early on and augmented his classroom education as a multisport athlete at integrated Washington High […]

There used to be a ballpark on the edge of Burlington’s Intervale, near the intersection of North Prospect Street and Riverside Avenue. It was known as Athletic Park, and from 1903 to 1906 it was the home of Burlington’s team in the first of Vermont’s legendary Northern Leagues. During those years Athletic Park was the […]

Frank O. Mancuso was the younger brother of a better-known big league catcher, August “Gus” Mancuso, a two-time All-Star who enjoyed a 17-year major league career and produced his best seasons with the New York Giants from 1932 through 1938. Gus spent more than 40 years in baseball, serving as a minor league manager, a […]

“The art of converting base hits into putouts as exemplified by Sam West, knows no equal among major league outfielders and has had no peers since Tris Speaker’s glory days, on the authority of Washington club President, Clark Griffith, who will tell you that he has spent forty-two years in baseball, and he ought to […]

Every red-blooded American boy growing up during the Great Depression dreamed of playing in the World Series, preferably in Yankee Stadium. Philip Donald Haugstad came close twice, missing by one day in 1947 and by one pitch to Bobby Thomson in 1951. Phil entered the world on February 23, 1924, in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. […]

June 1940 ended with the reigning National League champion Cincinnati Reds in first place, 1½ games ahead of the second-place Brooklyn Dodgers. The Reds fell from the top spot by losing their first two games in July, but recaptured first place with a seven-game winning streak, and led the NL the rest of the way. […]

In 1794, the legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania codified a portion of English common law governing observance of the Christian Sabbath, or day of rest. The laws, known as “blue laws,”1 criminalized “any worldly employment or business whatsoever on Sunday (works of necessity, charity, or wholesome recreation excepted.)”2 Those laws were still very much […]

Brooklyn fans could barely believe what they were seeing. After losing the first two games of the 1947 World Series, their team rebounded to win the next two games at Ebbets Field. The fifth game, the last one to be played in Flatbush for the Series, was packed with fans hoping to see the Dodgers […]

Several hundred loyal Boston rooters blew their tin horns, banged their noisemakers, and cheered themselves hoarse against the roar of 12,000 Oriole fans. They had followed their team to the showdown series of the 1897 pennant race and had come prepared for a party unlike any other. The trip seemed such a unique and spectacular […]

During the 2017 baseball season, the Chicago Cubs surpassed 8,000 regular-season games played at Wrigley Field. The season included the raising of the team’s first World Series championship gained while calling Wrigley Field home. A century earlier, the Cubs played their first game at Wrigley (then called Weeghman Park), to a packed Chicago crowd that […]

Bumpus Jones was the talk of the baseball world at 22, a pitcher whose major-league debut foretold more potential than any other twirler who’d come before him. He was a big-league bust before he turned 24. But for one day on the cusp of two eras, Jones was the best there was in the game. […]

A crowd of 25,762 showed up at Ebbets Field on August 20,1947, to see the final game of the Dodgers’ four-game series against the St. Louis Cardinals. Overcast skies delayed the game for 47 minutes. After winning the first two games of the series, Brooklyn had lost the third game, 11-3. The Dodgers still had […]