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When the Yankton Treaty was signed in 1858, the United States government acquired a large parcel of land: the northernmost part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, much of which had been Sioux Indian land. In 1861, the area was incorporated as the Dakota Territory. Its borders changed over the next decade, at one time […]

Most major league baseball games that are protested or suspended do not result in unusual situations. Actually, until 1943, suspended/successfully protested games were very rare: there were only five such games from 1876 through 1942. Since then, there have been 153 such games. Most protests are quickly dismissed by league presidents. Many suspended games are […]

All-Star Football Game program, 1941. (COURTESY OF BRYAN STEVERSON)   “There but for the grace of God” is an expression used when someone avoids a very serious situation, possibly life-threatening, and gives credit to the Almighty.1 In the life of Jack Roosevelt Robinson, this thankfulness applied on December 7, 1941. After a disappointing 1940 football […]

There was one sentence that I read in Ted Williams’ autobiography, My Turn At Bat, which set me off on a personal research journey that took me some unexpected places and raised a few eyebrows along the way. It was a 44-word sentence about his mother, which I really only focused on the third time […]

A boy on a pony, his glove hitched to his belt, emerges from the fields along Venezuela’s Oeste 1      highway and pauses while a cane truck lumbers by. A bus sweeps past, enveloping him in dust, but brakes for the slow-moving truck. The boy, with a whoop, gallops after the crawling caravan. Waving wildly, he […]

Although the arrival of Major League Baseball in Southern California is usually dated to 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, big league clubs had roots in the area going back several decades. The Chicago Cubs began training in L.A. in the spring of 1903, and the White Sox played an exhibition game […]

Keeping it Alive: The Proactive Clark Griffith  At age 72, Clark Griffith again faced the challenge of maintaining the operations and financial stability of his “small market” team, the Washington Senators, during a world war. The Senators, by population, were the smallest team in major-league baseball. During World War I, the major leagues continued to […]

Frank Shaughnessy (middle, second row) guided the 1913 Ottawa Senators to their second straight Canadian League title, nosing out the London Tecumsehs by a single game. First baseman “Cozy” Dolan (top row, third from left) led the Senators with a .358 batting average. (Alfred Pittaway of Pittaway & Jarvis Photographers, Ottawa)   For Frank Shaughnessy, […]

“Joe Mendez is better than any pitcher but Christy Mathewson and Mordecai Brown — and sometimes I think he’s better than Matty.” — John McGraw   Little Jose Mendez, the wiry 20-year old Cuban fast-baller, startled the baseball establishment in November 1908 when the Cincinnati Reds arrived in the Islands and faced him for the […]

1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars (Rob Fitts Collection)   Eddie Lopat was a fine, soft-tossing southpaw during a 12-year baseball career with the Chicago White Sox and most famously the New York Yankees. Called the Junkman because of his assortment of off-speed pitches, Lopat was also something of a baseball entrepreneur. He not only ran a […]

Oscar Charleston is shown here in the uniform of the Santa Clara Leopardos, circa 1923. The 1923-24 Leopardos, for whom Charleston played, were considered the best Cuban team in history—a team so dominant that halfway through the season the league simply declared them champions and then reorganized. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   April […]

Vinland baseball team circa 1920. (Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas)   Before sport became an integral aspect of Americana, early iterations of games catering to the working class were quite violent. In the eighteenth century, prizefighting, cockfights, and bear baiting, accompanied by drinking and gambling, were common recreational activities. Pious Americans in Protestant […]

A memorial program was conducted in Spokane in July to commemorate the eight Spokane players and the bus driver, who died on June 24, 1946, when their team bus careened off a narrow road in the Cascade Mountains. (Courtesy of David Eskenazi)   Blessedly, professional baseball has had very few terrible moments, incidents that end […]

The Baltimore Elite Giants. In the front row, Tubby Scales is on the far left, Junior Gilliam is fourth from the left, and Henry Kimbro is in front on the far right.   Spring training for the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro National League began April 1, 1946, at Sulphur Dell in Jim Gilliam’s […]

The 1934 All-Americans outside Nagoya Castle (Yoko Suzuki Collection)   Katsusuke Nagasaki’s breath billowed as he loitered outside the Yomiuri newspaper’s Tokyo offices. The morning of February 22, 1935 was chilly. But that was good; nobody would look twice at his bulky overcoat. Matsutaro Shoriki, the owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun, was late. Nagasaki strolled […]

Canton, Ohio, the defending champions of the Tri-State League, assembled for spring training at home on April 9, 1890 with five rookies on hand for the first practice. Included was a six foot two inch, 200 pound, 23-year-old pitcher seeking his first professional baseball job. Denton T. Young and four companions made the jaunt to […]

In 1974, the Oakland Athletics signed track star Herb Washington as a “designated runner,” despite his having had very little baseball experience. Keeping on the roster a player whose only purpose was to run was a new idea, but there have been many other real baseball players whose main purpose it was to pinch-run. The […]

“The disturbed state of the country and the fact that the baseball players are the most largely represented fraternity in the ranks of our volunteers, and to this may be attributed the small number of represented, there being sixty-one answering the roll call,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,1 referring to the annual meeting of the […]

Dodger Stadium hosted the Olympic baseball tournament in 1984. Japan beat the USA in the championship game. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   Though baseball’s history as an “official” Olympic event is short and fragmented (1992-2008, 2020, 2028), the sport was on the roster as an “exhibition” game for various decades. Although a dozen […]

Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement on which Jews fast, seek forgiveness from God and other people, and rehearse their deaths1 — occupies an iconic space in the annals of baseball and American Jewry. Jewish-American fans regularly contemplate and debate whether Jewish players will and should play on the holy day.2 Yom Kippur in […]

The 1937 season had been frustrating for the Chicago Cubs. After a slow start, they had climbed their way through the National League standings, taking over first place on June 15. They maintained a lead over the second-place New York Giants for all but one day of the next 10 weeks. By August 3 the […]

As a New York Yankee in the late-Joe DiMaggio, early-Mickey Mantle era, Bobby Brown sprayed line drives, an appropriate style of hitting for a man whose life has turned out to be a line drive of constant achievement in many directions. The ballplayer, cardiologist, highly-demanded banquet speaker, and current American League President is the only […]

  The Washington Post described the so-called significance of the August 12, 2021, matchup between the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox played in Dyersville, Iowa—where the movie Field of Dreams was filmed—this way: “Thursday night, 30 years and a pandemic after the release of that movie, the state will host its first […]

Tom Harris interviewed Bobby Thomson at his home in New Jersey on September 26, 1993. Some text in the original transcript has been omitted here and, for clarity, some portions have been transposed. Click here to listen to the entire interview in the SABR Oral History Collection.   Bobby Thomson: I was born in Glasgow, […]