Search Results

On September 20, 2002, the Los Angeles Dodgers played a doubleheader against the Arizona Diamondbacks and scored five runs in the eighth inning to come back and take game one 6-5. This gave the Dodgers a season record of 103-44, a .700 winning percentage (briefly, as they lost game two), a feat rarely accomplished in […]

Little serious statistical or analytical research has been done on baseball prior to 1871, the year that the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players started, in large part because there was no organized record-keeping of games. Several very good general histories of the period have been published, notably John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden […]

Sponsor Herbert L. Kokernot Jr. and manager Tom Chandler view the Alpine Cowboys practice at Kokernot Field in 1956. (Courtesy of Rick Herrscher)   Thanks to a successful, quiet, unassuming, and very generous rancher named Herbert Kokernot, the most remote part of the great state of Texas, sometimes referred to as Far West Texas, has […]

Babe Ruth, right, battled fiercely with Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert and manager Miller Huggins over the years. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   He filled the ballpark with fans who craved to see him hit the long ball. His home runs forever changed the game from scientific baseball to power hitting, and he helped […]

Ford Frick, president of the National League in 1947, is not the first person who comes to mind concerning Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball, though he deserves more consideration than he has been given. While no other individual rivals the role played by Branch Rickey in breaking the game’s color barrier, other than […]

Cover of the January 1929 issue of Yakyukai showing Ty Cobb with Keio players Takayoshi Okada and Saburo Miyatake (Coutesy of Robert Klevens, Prestige Collectibles)   On an off-day on the road in Cleveland, Tyrus Raymond Cobb, hailed for much of his career as the greatest player the game had ever known, announced his impending […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in “The Journal of Illinois History” (Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter 2006) and reprinted in SABR’s “The National Pastime” (No. 26, 2006). The version below has been edited for clarity and updated with new information about the Black Sox Scandal that has come to light in the years […]

I think that no players in the majors today could conceive of going through what Negro Leaguers did for a chance at a baseball career. At the same time, however, most of the veterans of baseball’s black leagues will say that, if given the chance, they would do it all over again. A statement like […]

One of the most unusual baseball games in Amer­ican League history took place at Shibe Park, Philadelphia, on May 18, 1912. Nominally a contest between the Philadelphia Athletics and the Detroit Tigers, the men who suited up for the Tigers that day were locally recruited ballplayers, while the real Tigers players bought tickets to sit […]

Willie Mays and Willie McCovey played together for 14 seasons, including in McCovey’s 1969 MVP campaign. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Willie Mays and Willie McCovey formed one of the greatest one-two power combinations in baseball history. The pair were teammates on the San Francisco Giants from 1959 to 1972. During that stretch, they won the 1962 National […]

In recent years, statistics have been developed to facilitate comparisons of player performances across seasons and across generations. One such statistic, OPS+, places a players’ OPS (on-base plus slugging) into the context of the league’s OPS, adjusted by a park factor. An .800 OPS in a pitcher’s year such as 1968 results in a higher […]

Editor’s Note: On this page, Parts One and Two, which were published separately in the Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 issues of the Baseball Research Journal, are combined into one article as the author intended. Sandy Koufax (SABR-Rucker Archive)   American Jews have long had a love affair with baseball. They have played baseball since […]

If any team might symbolize the tumultuous years of major-league baseball during World War II, the St. Louis Browns would be a prime candidate.  During the war the quality of play at the major-league level deteriorated as players were drafted into the service.  They were replaced by untested youngsters, passed-over minor leaguers, resurrected veterans, or […]

President Warren G. Harding shaking hands with  New York Yankee Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. April 25, 1923.  (Leslie Jones photo, courtesy of the Boston Public Library.)   In the wake of the 1919-20 Black Sox scandal, baseball got lucky. Luck’s name was George Herman Ruth, who entered our vernacular in a long-ball way and […]

On September 23, 1908, as I wrote in The Un­forgettable Season, “the Giants and Cubs played the most celebrated, most widely discussed, most controversial contest in the history of American sports. The game was declared a 1 to 1 tie.” This was, of course, the game of the “Merkle blunder.” As Kurosawa’s film masterpiece Rashomon beautifully illustrated, the same event may be […]

Harry M. Stevens, shown at left with Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, was the Yankees’ official concessionaire through the 1963 season. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   The 12-page official program of the new “Greater New York Base Ball Club of the American League“ at its home opener on April 30, 1903, was published by […]

A list of hit sequences for players who completed a cycle during the 1920-2017 period.This is the online appendix for Herm Krabbenhoft’s “‘When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It’: Who Took the Cycle or Quasi-Cycle?”   Click here to scroll down for Table A-2: Sequences for Players Who Completed a Quasi-Cycle […]

When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem during a 2016 preseason game to protest police violence against black people in America, all hell broke loose. Voices of praise and condemnation rained down. Passion often trumped reason. The “conversation” remains heated, while complicated criminal justice problems remain unsolved. Is […]

After the passing of nearly 40 years, as is the case since World War II, we are inclined to recall events differently than the way they really happened. Now, there’s nothing wrong with fantasizing a little or adding color to actual events, but the amount of distortion and misleading material that has been published in […]

“It takes courage to be a pioneer”1   The Hero Two Doors Down, written by Sharon Robinson, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, and cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi and Mary Claire Cruz. (Courtesy of Scholastic Publishers)   There is a lovely scene in Ken Burns’ documentary series Jackie Robinson in which Robinson’s daughter, Sharon, remembers […]

When Brandon Nimmo took his position in right field on September 26, 2018, in a game at Citi Field, he was wearing his usual number nine and would bat ninth in the batting order. It seemed to me that this was an interesting confluence of facts: a player whose uniform number matches his fielding position […]

Before the first game of the 1911 World Series, legendary managers John McGraw (left) of the New York Giants and Connie Mack (right) of the Philadelphia Athletics are pictured shaking hands. Also shown are the pitching aces of the two teams, Hall of Famers Christy Mathewson (left) of the Giants and Charles Albert Bender (right) […]

If Bob Sheppard, longtime public address announcer for the New York Yankees, was class personified, Tex Rickards, who held a similar slot with Dem Bums, reflected the spirit of the “woiking” class Brooklynite.1 And while Robert Merrill, the classy Metropolitan Opera baritone, often sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at Yankee Stadium, at Ebbets Field the […]