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When the delegates to the annual convention of the National Association of Base Ball Players gathered at New York’s Grand Central Hotel in December 1870, they didn’t know they were attending the final meeting of the old organization, or that by the following spring the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players would be the […]

By 1942 World War II was already impacting the Philadelphia Phillies’ spring training activities as they prepared for the regular season in the soft sands of Miami Beach, Florida. Air corps stunts were observed above Flamingo Park; the players inspected fighters and bombers at a nearby base; and manager Hans Lobert, who had run the […]

Pre-game ceremonies for the 2019 Opening Day Series (Courtesy of Shane Barclay, JapanBall.com)   The two-game 2019 “Opening Series” between the Oakland Athletics and Seattle Mariners at the Tokyo Dome served as the eighth time – the fifth in Tokyo – that Major League Baseball opened the season abroad. To prepare for the season opener, […]

Major league baseball arrived in South Florida on April 5, 1993, when the Florida Marlins took to the field against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Joe Robbie Stadium. Prior to this momentous day, there existed a long and largely forgotten history of minor league baseball in Miami. On April 6, 1927, Florida State League president […]

Atlanta’s baseball history is dominated by names such as Hank Aaron, John Smoltz, Greg Maddux, Dale Murphy, and Chipper Jones. The Braves also dominated their division in the 1990s, but that is only a small part of Atlanta’s long and storied baseball history. Anyone can look up the history of the Braves and their players […]

Although he was known as “Mr. Golf,” Fred Corcoran served as agent to Ted Williams and other players. For a time, he and Frank Scott were the only agents working with baseball players. (COURTESY OF JUDY CORCORAN)   Fred Corcoran was the go-to guy in golf circles, starting in the late 1930s. He had successfully […]

You can’t hit it if you can’t see it. Success in baseball requires good visual skills, including being able to see clearly. Many people need glasses or contact lenses. The most common reason for using them before age 40 is myopia (nearsightedness), which affects 20 to 30 percent of young adults in the United States.1,2 […]

Over the past 10 years, interleague play has become one of the rites of summer for baseball fans. Interleague play arrives with a lot of fanfare, as so-called “natural rivals” square off while new teams from the other league come to town for the first or second time, theoretically creating a set of unusual and […]

Michael Joseph Donlin was born May 30, 1878, in Peoria, Illinois, the sixth child of railroad conductor John Donlin and his wife Maggie (Clayton) Donlin. He grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. When Mike was eight, his parents died in a bridge collapse. Young Mike had to hustle for a living and worked as a machinist. […]

Following years of posturing and outright conflict, first with the Brotherhood, then in the final showdown with the American Association, the National League achieved monopoly status. Twelve clubs, deemed the strongest of the two great major leagues of the 1880s, stood alone in a combination at the top of Organized Baseball. After deep financial losses […]

In December 1936, the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League purchased a catcher from the Albany Senators. Bill Starr would leave his mark on San Diego baseball history: As a player, he had the honor of pinch-hitting for Ted Williams. As an owner, he signed the player who broke the Pacific Coast League […]

Juan Soto’s family represented as cardboard cutouts at Nationals Park in 2020. (Photo by Ed Shea/All Pro Reels)   The 2020 Major League Baseball season was unprecedented, as games were played without fans for the entire COVID-19-abbreviated schedule, creating a unique environment for study of the effect of fans on MLB team performance. The season […]

The image of American higher education reflected by college athletics is any­thing but flattering. As of March 1982, 17 schools were on the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s pro­bation list—the highest number for a single period—and the Association’s enforcement department declared that the list would lengthen before it shortened. An additional 35 schools were under investigation […]

Yankees owners Jacob Ruppert and Til Huston realized early in their partnership that New York wouldn’t tolerate anything less than a championship team. Ruppert had a championship in mind when he hired Miller Huggins to manage the club in 1918. According to Ruppert: “Huggins had vision. Getting him was the first and most important step […]

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 […]

The dominant characteristics of the Texas Rangers’ early history were inept management, pitiful baseball, and terrible attendance. The team proved incapable of coming up with a workable plan and sticking with it. This premise was stated well by a presumably neutral observer, veteran Chicago sports columnist Bernie Lincicome: “Texas has been a franchise governed by […]

If the business of baseball seemed bleak following the previous season, the 1893-1894 offseason started from a different place in attitudes toward the business of baseball. Following the upheaval of recent seasons, Sporting Life proclaimed, “Both artistically and financially the season was the most successful since 1889.”1 Just as the negative outlook following the 1892 […]

George H. Lawson (1864–1927), promoter of various baseball leagues, including the United States League, which drew attention for his announcement that he would sign African American players. After a modest launch in spring 1910, the league was disbanded in May, a few weeks into the season. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)   Few men appear to have […]

The turbulence in the business of baseball reached its height in 1890. The players, through their Brotherhood association and chafing under the owners’ efforts to exert more control over them, assembled the financial backing to form their own league, the aptly-named Players’ League. The magnates of the National League and the American Association — particularly […]

 Minor-League Winter Meeting The prospect of war cast a long shadow over the National Association meeting for 1941. Europe and Asia had been mired in conflict for more than two years by this time, and just days after the meetings concluded, the United States would be forced to enter the second worldwide war of the […]

“No nation that has had as intimate contact with baseball as the Japanese,” The Sporting News wrote in an editorial shortly after Pearl Harbor, “could have committed the vicious, infamous deed of … December 7, 1941, if the spirit of the game had ever penetrated their yellow hides.”1 Today, 60 years removed, the writing is […]

It has been noted time and time again that the search for the good old days of baseball is bound to come up dry. In every period of the national pastime, there has been greed, poor sportsmanship, lying, and cheating, to name a few of the lesser offenses. The subject of this article is further […]

The Illinois-Indiana-Iowa baseball league started its ninth consecutive season of play in May 1909. While the league was better known then as the Three-I or Three-Eye league, the name was actually a misnomer. The eight teams in the league that year were located only in Illinois and Iowa. (This would not be the last time […]

Aquino Abreu in the uniform of the 1968–69 National Series champion Azucareros ball club, three seasons after his miraculous three-game pitching string. (Author’s Collection)   Aquino Abreu—a diminutive right-handed fastball specialist who labored for a decade and a half during the formative years of the modern-era post-revolution Cuban League—remains entirely unknown to North American and […]