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Baseball was played at the Olympics for the first time as a demonstration sport at St. Louis in 1904; very little information on this game is available. Further Olympic baseball exhibitions took place in 1912 and 1924. Hoping to make baseball a sanctioned medal event, former major leaguer Les Mann petitioned the Olympic Committee to […]

Earle Combs began a string of Hall of Fame players who were starting center fielders for the Yankees. After Combs, who played from 1924 to 1935, was Joe DiMaggio, who played from 1936 to 1951, and after DiMaggio was Mickey Mantle, who played in center field from 1952 until 1966.1 Combs became the regular center […]

By the time the Cubs and Giants renewed their rivalry in 1908, it looked as though the Giants might not be a factor in the pennant race, or even in the rivalry. The Giants arrived at the West Side Grounds in late May in the midst of a miserable 20-game road trip. They had gone […]

Right-handed pitcher Happy Finneran played major-league baseball for five seasons. After playing two years for the Philadelphia Phillies, Finneran jumped to the Federal League in 1914 and played until the league folded in 1915. In 1918 he pitched for the Tigers and the Yankees. Joseph Ignatius Finneran was born on October 29, 1890, in East […]

A towering Southern farm boy with the mind of an engineer, pitcher Ernie Shore is forever linked with Babe Ruth. Teammates on three clubs and in two World Series, they together tossed what many fans and some historians long considered a perfect game—albeit an odd one in which the Babe faced the first batter and […]

“Beware of robbing a wretch or attacking a cripple. Do not laugh at a blind man, nor tease a dwarf, nor cause hardship for the lame. Don’t tease a man who is in the hand of the god (i.e. ill or insane)…” [Instruction of Amenemope, Ancient Egypt]1 Frank James Burke was born on March 19, […]

By his second year in the majors in 1958, sweet-swinging Harry (The Horse) Anderson of the Philadelphia Phillies was one of the premier left-handed power hitters in the game. But after his fourth year, he was back in the minor leagues, struggling to regain the batting stroke that had abandoned him as quickly as it […]

Each one of the three years he played as a big-league infielder, Homer Ezzell hit better than the year before, but even the 1926 Red Sox didn’t feel they had a position for him.  He had a great name: Homer Estell Ezzell. It was bestowed on him, of course, by his parents, George and Leila, […]

Bill Gleason is the younger of the two Gleason brothers who played on the inaugural St. Louis Browns team (the forerunner of today’s St. Louis Cardinals) in the American Association in 1882. Known as “Brudder Bill,”1 he covered shortstop for the Browns from their first season through their third straight pennant-winning season in 1887 and […]

As of September 2020, when this story was originally published, the two oldest living major leaguers were Eddie Robinson and George Elder, both veterans of WWII. Robinson served in the Navy but because of a leg operation was never in a combat zone. Elder served as a Marine artilleryman in the Pacific theatre. He served […]

Longtime scout Joe Stephenson once called Ken Brett “a combination of George Brett [his brother], Fred Lynn, and Roger Maris. He was the best prospect that I ever saw.”1 Ken Brett’s numbers never quite lived up to the reputation. “The worst curse in life,” Brett would later offer, “is unlimited potential.”2 After becoming the youngest […]

            “Starving for run making power, the Phillies’ Labor Day attendance found in their lap a brand new outfielder.             He hit a homer with the bases full. Also a triple, double, and two singles. He batted in six runs in the first game; 2 more in the nightcap….             Dangerous Dan Litwhiler is […]

For as long as he could, Fermín “Mike” Guerra kept playing baseball all year around, in his native Cuba and in the United States. The two lands obviously had quite different cultures, baseball and otherwise, and Guerra even told Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría that he had been initiated into santería, the particular syncretic Afro-Cuban religion.1 Fermín […]

A member of the three-time American League champions, Ed “Farmer” Willett was a fixture in the Detroit Tigers rotation from 1908 to 1913. During that six-year period, the 6-foot, 183-pound right-hander won at least 13 games in each season, topping out with a career-high 21 victories in 1909 when the Tigers captured their third consecutive […]

“If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I’d still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better. He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw and […]

Sportswriters treated pitcher Monte Weaver as a curiosity during his nine seasons with the Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox. He was a college professor, a mathematician, a hypochondriac and – most radically – a vegetarian, according to the sports pages. Montie Morton Weaver was born on June 15, 1906, in Helton, North Carolina, a […]

Some baseball players evoke a position. Recall catcher Mickey Cochrane. Others define managing: Connie Mack comes to mind. Many broadcast as a color analyst or play-by-play man, like Bob Uecker and Bob Costas. Few have performed all of the above at one time or another as well as the Blue Jays’ John Albert “Buck” Martinez, […]

Dick Stuart was fun – as long as you didn’t have to be on the field with him. He ran the bases head down and looking anywhere except at the third-base coach or the outfield or a teammate who might be able to tell him something, often sending his team out of the inning. As […]

There is nothing more exhilarating or more intoxicating in baseball than the seventh game of a best-of-seven championship series. It is an unforgiving arena where history is written of both the heroes who carry the day and their vanquished opponents. Winning pitchers in a game seven instantly become legends not only to their own team’s […]

 “Riggs Stephenson is a brilliant hitter, steady fielder, and a southern gentleman,” wrote Chicago Cubs beat reporter Edward Burns in 1929, as the rugged Alabaman was en route to a .362 batting average and 110 runs batted in for the pennant-winning Cubs.1 Blessed with eagle eyes, but cursed with a poor throwing arm, the career […]

Don Gross had a 13-year career in professional baseball as a left-handed pitcher, including a brief spell with the Pittsburgh Pirates at the beginning of the 1960 season. He pitched in 1950-1952 and 1954-1963, with time out in most of 1952 and all of 1953 while in military service). For much of his time he […]

Bill Cissell went from a farming community in Perry County, Missouri, to becoming “baseball’s costliest player.” The right-handed multi-position infielder played nine seasons in the major leagues from 1928 to 1938. He was found in 1949 “painfully ill and penniless in a gloomy one-room Chicago apartment” living with his 13-year-old son Gary. He’d been there […]

Lou Berberet was a very solid defensive catcher. With a fielding percentage of 1.000 as a catcher in 1957, he joined an elite group as only the third catcher in major-league history with zero errors in more than 350 chances. Since that time, eight other catchers have had error-free seasons with that number of chances.1 […]

Editor’s note: Have you ever wondered where the statistics that appear on Baseball-Reference.com or Retrosheet.org come from? For those of us who access those indispensable websites every day, it’s hard to imagine a time when historically accurate baseball stats weren’t readily available. But those stats weren’t handed down through the years in pristine, pre-formatted fashion […]