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Bruce Markusen’s Baseball’s Last Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s, an entertaining account of the club that dominated the American League West in the early to mid 1970s, has the following piece of trivia about the 1972 A’s team: “Later in the year, when terrorists murdered several Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games, [Ken] Holtzman, [Mike] Epstein […]

The 2014 major-league season ended with the San Francisco Giants winning their third World Series in five seasons, beating the Kansas City Royals in a dramatic seven-game series on the shoulders of a staggeringly dominant performance by their 25-year-old southpaw, Madison Bumgarner. The Giants had established themselves as the decade’s model franchise, the Royals emerged […]

The Brooklyn Dodgers wanted Babe Ruth for his box office drawing power, not his coaching expertise. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   Of all the facets of Babe Ruth’s long and distinguished career, his time as a coach with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938 has received the least consideration. Perhaps that is justified: Ruth […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 2).   J. Lee Richmond played four full seasons and parts of two others in baseball’s major leagues. Not a long career. Today, more than 100 years later, a check of his statistical record reveals little that would seem to […]

All the poetry and folklore of “Tinker to Evers to Chance” notwithstanding, the great Chicago Cubs teams of 1906–10 won their four pennants and two World Series by way of outstanding pitching. The glories of Mordecai “Three Fingered” Brown, Ed Reulbach, Jack Pfiester, and Orval Overall have been widely recognized, and rightfully so. Sadly ignored, […]

The Eastern Championship Association (ECA) was formed in 1881 by baseball clubs from New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. Two teams from Philadelphia were among its members, including the first one with the nickname Phillies. The Association had an unsettled existence — reflecting the institutional instability that afflicted organized baseball in the final quarter of […]

First Reserve Clause Enacted 100 Years Ago Baseball’s first reserve clause was enacted 100 years ago at a meeting of the National League magnates held at the Palace Hotel in Buffalo, New York, on September 29, 1879. The delegates to that historic meeting were:  William A. Hulbert, President of the National League, who represented both […]

1998 Super Dome All-Star Series program featuring Sammy Sosa (Robert Fitts Collection)   For baseball, 1998 was a banner year. The home-run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa made headlines worldwide and caused a surge in interest in the game after years of flagging attendance and viewership. For a group of major-league players and […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).   Let others praise the literary giants who have brought their skills to baseball fiction. Wolfe, Farrell, Malamud, Harris, Coover, Kennedy deserve kudos. But I toss my cap in the air and shout, “huzzah!” for Lester Chadwick, the author who invented […]

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, […]

The 1950 ManDak League Champion Winnipeg Buffaloes, featuring four Negro Leaguers: Hall of Famers Willie Wells (front row, fourth from left) and Leon Day (middle, far left), as well as Lyman Bostock (middle, far right) and Butch Davis (front, second from right). Third from right in the front row is John Kennedy, who never played […]

After clinching the 1884 Eastern League pennant in mid-August, the team replaced Philadelphia in the Union Association and compiled the majors’ worst record – a dismal . 111 won-lost percentage.   The year 1884 marked the Eastern League’s inaugural season, and the circuit had a less than auspicious start. A number of teams folded or […]

This article was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s February 2024 newsletter.   Walter East is hardly the sole Deadball Era career minor leaguer to have led an interesting and eventful life. But more than a century later, he may well be the only one to have his own Wikipedia page. Regrettably for East, the […]

Excerpted from The Cool of the Evening by Paula Kurman, to be published in the first quarter of 2024 by Rosetta Books.   Dear SABR members, My beloved late husband, Jim Bouton, asked three things of me if I were to outlive him: to make sure his archives were well and safely placed, to donate […]

Doug Glanville in his new baseball memoir notes that many players, “rewarded with huge contracts because of their offensive prowess, . . . have developed a kind of attention deficit disorder when it comes to defense. . . . If you put up tremendous offensive numbers year after year, the game will cut you a […]

2014 Suzuki Nichibei Yakyu program (Robert Fitts Collection)   On June 10, 2014, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association announced that the Nichibei Yakyu All-Star Series would be held in the fall after an eight-year hiatus. In 2006 the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association had voted not to participate in the […]

In the nearly 120-year history of the New York and San Francisco Giants, several of the club’s pitchers have distinguished themselves on Opening Days. “Smiling” Mickey Welch won the franchise opener in 1883, followed by three more first day victories. In 1902, Christy Mathewson’s shutout of Philadelphia snapped the Giants’ losing streak of nine consecutive […]

“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: used in logic to describe the fallacy of thinking that a happening which follows another must be its result.” — Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second College Edition “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” — The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)1 By long-standing consensus, a 21-year-old show girl […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (McFarland & Co., Fall 2008). Premise By the late 1930s, and particularly during the years of US involvement in World War II, segregation in sport and society was a topic of increasing public interest. Nationalism had at least […]

On June 10, 1944, during the ninth inning of a 13-0 blowout, an event occurred that is known to many fans with at least a passing knowledge of baseball history: Joe Nuxhall, at a mere 15 years and 316 days of age, made his way into an actual regular-season major league game, becoming the youngest […]

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 […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. Twelve managers have won more games than Bill McKechnie. None has won more respect. Deacon Bill McKechnie was the first to lead three different teams to the World Series and the […]

Although on the surface Miller Huggins and Jacob Ruppert seemed worlds apart, the two men had striking similarities. They were the architects of the New York Yankees’ dominance in the 1920s. (BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY)   Jacob Ruppert believed that hiring Miller Huggins as his manager after the 1917 season was the first and most important […]

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in  “Baseball’s Business: The Winter Meetings, 1958-2016” (SABR, 2017), was honored as a 2018 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award winner.   Negro League baseball magnates meet at the Hotel Teresa on June 20, 1946, in New York City. The owners had all attended the Joe Louis boxing bout the night […]