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In 1955 Toledo, Ohio, suffered the double indignity of losing both its baseball team and its baseball park. The departure of the Toledo Sox and the fall of Swayne Field were unexpected, sudden, and brutally final, and the effects were long-lasting. As the 1955 baseball season drew to a close, no one in Toledo suspected […]

Hard-throwing right-hander Bill Dietrich battled wildness, struggled with his temper, and endured chronic elbow pain that resulted in two operations to fashion a 108-128 record and log in excess of 2,000 innings in parts of 16 injury-plagued big-league seasons (1933-1948) while playing for primarily second-division clubs. Twice waived out the American League in 1936, Dietrich […]

In all of Major League Baseball history, 119 players originated in the “Tree Planters’ State”1 of Nebraska. Charlie Abbey was the first, arriving during “the mauve decade”2 of the 1890s. Abbey doggedly zig-zagged his way through the loosely knit minor leagues with uneven progression. He was an anomaly as a lefty second baseman early on […]

Longtime Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray once wrote that Ralph Garr was as hard to get out as an impacted tooth.1 Getting “The Road Runner” out was an especially difficult task in his signature year, 1974, in which he won the National League batting title, hitting .353. This came after finishing second to Joe […]

With a lineup featuring Nap Lajoie and Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Cleveland Naps were expected to contend for the 1912 American League pennant. The club, however, proved a disappointment. By early September, a 54-71-2 (.432) record placed the Naps closer to the AL bottom than the top, and cost first-year manager Harry Davis his job. […]

Bobby Roth, sometimes called Braggo, was an often insufferable self-promoter who bounced around among six American League teams in the years surrounding World War I, and was on the wrong side of two of the most lopsided trades of the Deadball Era. A player with diverse skills, Roth won a home run title and also […]

When Jeff Montgomery took the mound for the Cincinnati Reds on August 1, 1987, he was living out the storybook baseball tale. A three-sport athlete from small Wellston, Ohio, Montgomery grew up a couple of hours down the road from Riverfront Stadium in the era of the Big Red Machine. His idol, Reds manager Pete […]

A versatile fielder who could play second, third, or short, Heinie Zimmerman rose to prominence with the Chicago Cubs during the early teens as a lovable eccentric whose aggressive batting style won the loyalty of fans and the respect of opposing pitchers. But despite winning the National League’s Triple Crown in 1912, the lifetime .295 […]

As a big leaguer, Ed Charles was perhaps the most accomplished player in the brief history of the ill-fated Kansas City Athletics, and he achieved fame as a baseball poet, reciting his poetry on television a few times per year and mailing verse to young fans with requested autographs. But he is best remembered today […]

One of the things the classic movie Field of Dreams brought to light, via the tale of the now-legendary Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, was plight of the many players who had a chance to play in only one major-league game. During the war years, the Pittsburgh Pirates had a 6-foot-3, 175-pound pitcher by the name of […]

There are many quotes regarding the importance of living life. Just look it up on the internet; it’s a fact! One such quote is “It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.” That quote is attributed to Abraham Lincoln … and Adlai Stevenson … and Dr. Edward […]

Pitcher Brian Kingman compiled an 8-20 record with the 1980 Oakland Athletics. Prior to 1980, instances of pitchers losing 20 games in a season occurred with great regularity. After Kingman’s 20-loss season, however, his place in baseball lore was cemented for 23 long years until it finally happened again. The stinging effects of Kingman’s 20-loss […]

“Van Dyke VS Keating” the Boston Globe article headline read on September 25, 1912. A heavyweight title fight, perhaps? No. The paper was anticipating the last regular-season contest at brand-new Fenway Park. In bookend fashion, the World Series-bound Red Sox were facing the last-place New York Highlanders, who, accommodatingly, were the losers in the inaugural […]

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 […]

Shingo “Mr. Zero” Takatsu: His nickname sounds like a superhero. He earned it by giving up zero runs while pitching in 11 Nippon Series championship games for a 0.00 ERA. His key pitch, “The Frisbee,” sounds like a superpower. It was a side-arm sinker averaging around 68 mph, so slow that Brooks Boyer, the White […]

Johnny Lucadello was a hard-hitting and versatile infielder who, like many of his generation, saw a promising Major League career fizzle after he lost four prime years to military service. John Lucadello was born on February 22, 1919, in Thurber Texas.1 At its peak, in the early 1900s, Thurber, situated between Fort Worth and Abilene, […]

During the 1889 season, rookie right-hander Alex Ferson parlayed pitching intelligence and an excellent curveball into a commendable record for a last-place team, the National League’s Washington Senators. He was 17-17 (.500) for a club that was hapless otherwise (24-56, .300). But a promising start went unfulfilled. It soon became apparent that the 5-foot-9, 165-pound […]

Dick Williams’s intense competitiveness and versatility earned him 13 years as a major league utility player. He parlayed those strengths into one of baseball’s most successful managerial careers, though not one of the winningest, and the record suggests that he was probably one of the two finest managerial turnaround artists1 between Joe McCarthy and Lou […]

At 10:45 A.M. on July 5, 1947, Larry Doby and Cleveland Indians assistant public relations director Louis Jones arrived by train in Chicago. The pair made a brief stop at the Congress Hotel to pick up Indians owner Bill Veeck, and journeyed to Comiskey Park, where they were about to make history.1 It was the […]

Bob Feller’s return to major-league baseball after 44 months in the Navy and eight battle stars couldn’t have gone much better as he pitched a complete-game 4-2 victory over the Detroit Tigers, striking out 12 in a brisk 2 hours and 17 minutes. It was a much-anticipated event which, once Feller got his release orders, […]

The St. Louis Cardinals were surging. On June 30 St. Louis had trailed the first-place and defending World Series champion New York Giants by 5½ games, but the Cardinals had won three of four games against the Giants at Sportsman’s Park from July 15 to July 18 to cut the lead to a half-game. St. […]

The first major-league no-hitter on the West Coast belongs not to Sandy Koufax, who would have been an obvious choice. On May 5, 1962, a rookie just 17 days into his major-league career threw a no-hitter for the Los Angeles Angels against the Baltimore Orioles: Robert “Bo” Belinsky. It took place at Dodger Stadium because […]

Two years after Sports Illustrated published his spoof on the adventures of Hayden (Siddhartha, Sidd) Finch in the New York Mets’ 1985 spring-training camp, the ever-creative George Plimpton1 expanded the April 1, 1985, classic into a 275-page novel, also titled The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.2 SABR revisited the April foolery with a 30-year retrospective […]

It was another dramatic victory or staggering collapse, depending on perspective. After exploding for a World Series-record 10 runs in the seventh inning to win Game Four, the Philadelphia Athletics scored all of their runs in the ninth inning in Game Five to defeat the Chicago Cubs, 3-2, and capture their first championship since 1913 […]