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For decades, professional baseball players surnamed Weaver were routinely dubbed Buck by the sporting press. The game’s two most prominent Buck Weavers – the Black Sox third baseman and the late-19th-century outfielder also called Farmer Weaver – are already the subject of excellent BioProject portraits. The following is a biography of a lesser-known Buck Weaver, […]

It might have been the coal mines or baseball. Dee Miles had the talent and probably made the right choice. His father, Gustavus Miles, was a coal miner from Alabama who worked a couple of decades in the mines, becoming a mine foreman by 1920. He and his wife, Idella, a Tennessean by birth, had […]

“You look out and you’re in a big-league park, you’re on a big-league field, you’re going to pitch. It’s a hundred emotions going through you.” – Abe Alvarez, on his major-league debut with the 2004 Boston Red Sox1 Abe Alvarez pitched four games in the major leagues, including his debut for the 2004 Boston Red […]

It took a special type of athlete to play for Chicago American Giants manger Rube Foster. He liked to engage in small ball and built his teams around speed and bunting. He wanted only smart competitors on his team. Foster was known to say, “If you haven’t got intelligence enough to fit into this play, […]

A stonemason from Scotland, Alexander Congalton moved to Canada in the latter half of the 19th century and had seven children with his wife, Janet, also a native of Scotland. Their son William was the middle child, the fourth-born. He was born on January 24, 1875, in Guelph, Ontario, about 60 miles west of Toronto.1 […]

Two-sport standouts were not as common in the Deadball Era as in later decades, but several men excelled in two or more sports (one being baseball). The best known of these players is Jim Thorpe, but Bill Powell (basketball) and Homer Davidson (football) also played two sports. Another two-sport athlete was R.B. Kelly of the […]

At spring training in 1921, Branch Rickey, vice president of the St. Louis Cardinals as well as the club’s field manager, was looking over the rookies in camp at Orange, Texas. Turning to veteran shortstop Doc Lavan, he said, “Tell that bat boy to get out of the infield.” Advised that the “bat boy” was […]

Max Macon was the top pitching prospect in the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm system before he blew out his arm in his first spring training appearance. The left-hander, so skinny he could “close one eye and look like a needle,” was the rare pitcher who hit well enough to make a comeback as a position […]

What’s in a name? Jacob Walter Miller’s nickname was Jake,1 but contemporary sportswriters preferred to call him J. Walter or Lefty. He pitched for the Cleveland Indians from 1924 to 1931. Cleveland Plain Dealer writer Gordon Cobbledick referred to him as Jake on only two occasions, once in 1929 and again in 1931. Miller, a […]

A familiar baseball stereotype of the mid-twentieth century was the “good field, no hit” Latino shortstop.1 The prototype was captured by Willy Miranda – who many contend was the slickest Cuban glove man ever born but who ended his near-decade-long sojourn in the majors with a mere 70 extra base hits and a lightweight .221 […]

It would be hard to spend time studying the American League’s first decade without running into the brawny and brawling figure of left fielder Patsy Dougherty. A powerfully built (6’2″, 190 pounds, large for his day) second-generation Irish-American with a moon face and cleft chin, Dougherty was a major contributor to the first two AL […]

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 […]

Orel Hershiser set a major-league record by pitching 59 consecutive scoreless innings in 1988, but he was well behind the mark established by Oliver “Rube” Faulkner, who pitched 78 consecutive scoreless innings in 1903 for the Wilmington (Delaware) Athletics.1 Faulkner was an enigma. A right-hander blessed with talent, he declined opportunities to pitch in the […]

The Cleveland Blues led the American League in offense in 1904, and with the addition of Jim Jackson from St. Paul and a revamped pitching staff they set their sights on the pennant in 1905. As often happens, their hopes were dashed, in this case by a rash of injuries and inconsistent pitching. First player-manager […]

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 […]

If a young, successful major league pitcher had decided to become an outfielder in 2001, it would have been news. And if he had hit above .300 for the next five straight years, culminating in 2005 by winning the league’s batting crown with a .377 average, he would have graced magazine covers. Finally, if upon […]

Paul Hardy was a defensive-minded catcher who played in the Negro leagues for nearly three decades, from 1931 to 1959. He stood 5-feet-10 and weighed just 162 pounds — a slight build for a backstop — but he developed a reputation for durability and regularly caught both ends of doubleheaders during his career. Nicknamed “Piccolo,” […]

“I’ve seen a lot of powerful hitters in my time but for sheer ability to knock a ball great distances, I’ve never seen anybody better than Easter — and I’m not excepting Babe Ruth.” — Del Baker1   Luscious “Luke” Easter was born August 4, 1915 at 8:15 PM in Jonestown, Mississippi. During his playing […]

With almost a century having passed since the end of his fitful professional career, right-handed pitcher Hi Jasper is an elusive subject, a hard man to pin down. But two Jasper characteristics are unmistakable. He had ability — such astute talent evaluators as Jimmy Callahan, Frank Chance, and Pants Rowland recognized his merits. Yet Jasper’s […]

Fielder Jones was an exceptionally talented ballplayer and manager. He played while professional baseball was still in its infancy, from 1896 to 1908 and briefly in 1914 and 1915. He won pennants with Brooklyn of the NL in 1899 and 1900 and with the Chicago White Sox in 1901 and 1906. As the White Sox […]

In 1922, the defending American League champion New York Yankees and the St. Louis Browns battled for first place all season long. The pennant was at stake when the Yankees came to Sportsman’s Park on a mid-September weekend for a three-game “Little World Series” with only a half-game lead over the Browns. After the teams […]

Pud Galvin stood 5-feet-8 and weighed 190 pounds. Despite that stocky frame, Galvin won 365 major-league games, including a no-hitter for the National League’s Buffalo Bisons against the Detroit Wolverines on August 4, 1884. Buffalo and Detroit played five games in Detroit from August 2 to 8 and Galvin started four of them. He pitched […]

When the 1922 season began on April 12, the New York Yankees were without the star and face of the franchise Babe Ruth and slugger Bob Meusel, both of whom were suspended for six weeks after brazenly defying Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s order not to barnstorm after the 1921 World Series.1 Landis had told Ruth […]

To some observers, the 1990 major-league baseball season seemed at times like a 162-game formality, a steady march toward the Oakland A’s winning their third straight American League pennant and repeating as World Series champions. Sports Illustrated, Athlon’s Baseball, The Sporting News Baseball Yearbook, Inside Sports Baseball Preview, and Baseball Digest all agreed that everyone […]