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The first professional baseball team Jack O’Brien played for lasted only 14 games (they were 7-7) – the 1895 Troy Trojans of the New York State League. On May 22 Troy withdrew from the league, and the following day the Albany team was dropped from the league. The players dispersed, most of them, to other […]

Once clocked on a stopwatch from plate to first in 3.5 seconds, Harry Bay was considered by many contemporary baseball authorities to be the fastest man in the American League. A photographer experimenting with a motion picture camera filmed “Deerfoot” in full stride and newspaper reports commonly referred to the speedster as “a ten-second man […]

A flashy dresser and world-class trash talker, Benny Kauff was the Deion Sanders of the Deadball Era. “I’ll make them all forget that a guy named Ty Cobb ever pulled on a baseball shoe,” the brash 26-year-old told reporters on his arrival with the New York Giants in 1916. Kauff’s boastfulness was not without some […]

When Wally Moon came to bat for the first time in the majors, some of the home fans in St. Louis booed. Others yelled, “We want Eno.” Two days earlier Enos Slaughter, a Cardinal favorite for 16 years—the hustling, hard-nosed, red-necked Country Slaughter, who left the dugout running and kept running until he hit the […]

In a remembrance published in the Bangor (Maine) Daily News of January 18, 1962, the decades-deceased Gil Whitehouse was described as “the Babe Ruth of his time” and “the greatest baseball player in Maine’s history.”1 Something of a baseball prodigy, Whitehouse reached the major leagues as an 18-year-old catcher. But a one-game audition with the 1912 Boston Braves proved a […]

Yankee Stadium, October 12, 1977, World Series, Game 2: The Yankees were trailing the Los Angeles Dodgers, 5-1, but had runners on first and second with only one out. Yankees public address announcer Bob Sheppard, “the Voice of God,” surely intoned his usual introduction, “Now batting for the Yankees, pinch-hitter, number 25, George Zeber, number […]

The Hall of Fame second baseman is not the only significant figure in New York baseball history to have the name Joe Gordon. Decades before Flash was anchoring the infield of great World War II-era Yankees teams, an earlier Joe Gordon was helping to put the franchise on the map, serving as the first president […]

“I don’t care for Rockefeller’s millions and I have no desire to share Wilson’s honors,” Heinie Wagner once quipped to a group of players during a long, hot train ride out west. “But I would like to be as good a pitcher as Walter Johnson and always be able to pitch for a team as […]

Howie Fox was a right-handed pitcher who spent most of his career with the Reds during the club’s franchise-worst stretch of 11 consecutive losing seasons. By the time Cincinnati finished over .500 again, Fox had been traded, released and tragically murdered. Howard Francis Fox was born on March 1, 1921, in Coburg, Oregon — population […]

Harry O’Hagan owns two distinctions that will never be equaled. The lesser of the two is that he had the longest stretch between his first and second major-league appearances of any position player who debuted in the nineteenth century. Born in Washington, D.C., on September 30, 1869, O’Hagan was catching for a Washington YMCA team […]

The major-league career of Berlyn “Trader” Horne was brief. From April to July 1929, he threw 23 innings during 11 games with the Chicago Cubs, with a record of 1-1 and an earned-run average of 5.09. He was gone from the team before it won the pennant that year. But Horne (whose nickname came from […]

Tacks Latimer was a journeyman catcher during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although his major league career was brief, 27 games and 86 at-bats spread over five different seasons (the writer Bill James has suggested that this might be some sort of record), he played professional baseball for over a decade and a […]

Ray Hayworth intended to go into the upholstery trade, but was talked out of it by a friend, and the result was an 18-season career as a catcher, 15 of them in the major leagues. Hayworth was prized for his defensive ability, but swung an effective bat for a catcher, with a .265 career batting […]

Ray Kolp had an average fastball that appeared better when used in tandem with his assortment of spinners, most notably a curveball. His greatest talent came as a bench jockey. Blessed with a high tenor voice, he could easily get an opponent’s attention from the bench. But Kolp took it one step further. Veteran catcher […]

With the dog days of August 1904 having descended on St. Louis and the Browns well back in the American League standings, manager Jimmy McAleer was looking for something to maintain fan interest in his club. To that end, he placed two local favorites from the semipro St. Louis Trolley League on the Browns roster: […]

Nicknamed “Moose” because of his 6-foot-5, 215-pound stature, Mike Marshall spent the bulk of his 11-year (1981-1991) major-league career with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Batting and throwing right-handed, he was primarily a right fielder, but with a number of games at first base and in left as well. During his nine seasons with the Dodgers, […]

Before Curt Schilling and the bloody sock in 2004, one player who personified toughness in a Boston Red Sox uniform was Butch Hobson. Hobson’s legacy is that of a power-hitting third baseman who brought a football mentality to the diamond in the way he played through pain and gave every ounce of effort on the […]

Three days before World War II ended, Philadelphia Phillies scout Fred Mathews convinced the mother of Stephen George Ridzik that she should let her 16-year-old son become a professional baseball player.1 Julia Ridzik agreed to sign the contract, provided that Steve finish his last two years of high school. Thus began a 22-year pitching career […]

Tom Baird was present at the beginning of the Negro National League in 1920 and stayed nearly to the conclusion of the Negro Leagues themselves in 1956. His long tenure was spent solely with the Kansas City Monarchs, the dominant and longest-running franchise in the history of the Negro Leagues. He was the longest-serving club […]

Monroe “Dolly” Stark – not to be confused with his namesake Albert “Dolly” Stark, the first Jewish umpire in modern baseball – endured an Odyssean journey through baseball.  Monroe Stark, the original “Dolly Stark,” logged an itinerant career in baseball from 1904 to 1922 in several minor leagues, as well as a brief fall call-up […]

One of the doubleheader’s several previews in the New York Tribune said the games were part of the “Little World Series.” Interestingly, the two paragraphs did not mention the race of Rube Foster’s Chicago American Giants and the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants, much less note that the Chicago club was the champion of the Negro […]

The pendulum kept swinging the same way after the New York Yankees had evened the 1951 World Series with a convincing win over the New York Giants in Game Four. Gil McDougald hit the third grand slam in World Series history, Eddie Lopat pitched his second five-hitter of the Series, and the Yankees bombed the […]

The Philadelphia Athletics were one game away from their third consecutive World Series title, an unprecedented feat.1 Their opponents, the St. Louis Cardinals, were reeling from an 8-1 loss in the sixth game and would be relying in Game Seven on a 38-year-old pitcher with an aching hand, a sore shoulder, and an inflamed appendix. […]

On April 12, 1955, the former Philadelphia Athletics, having moved that winter to Kansas City, opened their first season at Municipal Stadium: A’s 6, Tigers 2, before a standing-room crowd of 32,147. Flanked by franchise progenitor Connie Mack, former President Harry Truman tossed the team’s first ball in Missouri’s first American League (AL) opener since […]