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1. THE INTERNATIONAL RETURNS In the case of Ottawa’s return to the International (née Eastern) League, as has so often been the case in Organized Ball, one town’s misfortune proved to be another city’s gain, however briefly. The New York Giants’ Triple-A club in Jersey City, affectionately or derisively known as the Little Giants, struggled […]

Two players from the Border League (1946-51) would become Hall of Famers. One, Willard Brown, played 30 games for the Ottawa Nationals in 1950 and narrowly missed being a teammate of another Hall of Famer. This other star athlete is not in Cooperstown, however, but rather in Toronto, home of the Hockey Hall of Fame. […]

The team that finally won the World Series for Boston, for the first time in 86 years, was not a homegrown team, a product of a robust Red Sox farm system. Of the 25 players on the postseason roster, only two had come up in the system – Trot Nixon and Kevin Youkilis. Five were […]

Kenichi Zenimura (right) with his cousin Tasumi Zenimura (left) in 1928. (Rob Fitts Collection)   Few baseball fans know the story of early twentieth-century Nikkei (Japanese American) baseball. Despite this lack of awareness, the Nikkei impact is still visible in today’s game. It’s subtle, though, visible only to the well-informed. The legacy is not a […]

Doug Harvey. (Courtesy La Patrie du Dimanche, December 3, 1959.)   Professional baseball in Ottawa was sporadic in the early to mid-twentieth century. From 1912 to 1915, the Ottawa Senators played in the Class-C (later Class-B) Canadian League and finished first in three of the four seasons. The Senators resurfaced in the Class-B Eastern Canada […]

The annals of baseball prose include several memoirs and biographies from and about major-, minor-, and amateur-league umpires, well stocked with entertaining war stories from the diamond front, as well as numerous how-to-manuals for those pondering careers in this noble and unappreciated profession; and books inviting fans to offer their own interpretation of baseball’s knottier […]

American League President Leland S. MacPhail (l.) awards the Seattle Mariners’ charter to co-owners Danny Kaye (c.) and Lester Smith. In addition to being a Hollywood star, Kaye co-owned a California-based radio network with Smith. (Courtesy of David S. Eskenazi)   When considering the formation of the Seattle Mariners, one should look to two key […]

Clyde Sukeforth as Dodgers manager, 1947. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   I met Clyde Sukeforth three times altogether. On the first occasion, Howard V. Doyle, an old Mainer, friend, and former boss who knew I’d be interested, invited me to join him on a trip to Waldoboro, Maine, specifically to meet Clyde, with […]

It may be the most famous baseball painting of all time. Created by Norman Rockwell, it goes by many different names, including The Three Umpires, Game Called Because of Rain, Tough Call, and Bottom of the Sixth. It depicts a baseball game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. […]

In the 1970s, the very time when players and umpires gained wealth and power, baseball’s field managers’ status declined as they became wretched scapegoats to be sacrificed to the bloodlust of victory-starved fans. True, sacking the manager was a time-honored ploy; whenever rumblings of fan discontent erupted, a manager was bumped off as virgins in […]

Washington, D.C., is primarily known today as the home of our nation’s central government and for its wealth of great museums. Very few people are aware that the city helped give the game of baseball its rich national identity over 150 years ago. A thorough review of the recent “find” of baseball materials, known simply […]

  Chocolatier William Klein Sr. of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, had a problem. The year was 1918. Soldiers were returning from the war in Europe. Klein was looking to expand to a national market for his “Lunch Bar,” a three-cent candy bar that was in direct competition with the chocolate bars produced by Milton Hershey at his […]

Speculating on ultimately unanswerable questions remains one of most fascinating aspects for those of us who study baseball history. For example, how might many of the all-time records differ if Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, and all of the other great Negro League stars had been eligible to play in white Organized Ball? How […]

Baseball has always been a favorite subject for artists wishing to portray popular aspects of American culture. Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), America’s “Dickens with a paint brush,” produced dozens of illustrations of the National Pastime for novels and magazine stories, commercial advertisements and magazine covers, notably 11 for the Saturday Evening Post. These paintings, which included […]

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 […]

Dodger Stadium has been home to the Los Angeles Dodgers since 1962 (Courtesy of the Los Angeles Dodgers)   Baseball is at one and the same time an idyllic game for children and a gravely serious business for adults. A sport that can be played on a pastoral commons requires, in the world of commerce, […]

This article was selected as a winner of the 2016 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award.   This well-known Chicago Tribune photo of Black Sox defendants, attorneys, jurors, and supporters shows them celebrating the not guilty verdicts on the steps of the Cook County Courthouse on August 2, 1921. A number of the celebrants have numbers inscribed […]

Scores of professional ballplayers have made their way from the big leagues to the big screen. A few, including Chuck Connors, Bob Uecker, and John Beradino (who played for the Browns, Indians, and Pirates as Johnny Berardino), became successful actors or media personalities. Some, notably Babe Ruth, appeared in movies as themselves, or as thinly […]

As a baseball executive, Lou Gorman worked for more than a third of a century with scouts. He’d been a farm director for the Orioles and Royals, director of player development with Kansas City, and GM or assistant GM with the Mariners, Mets, and Red Sox. The Providence, Rhode Island, native was once a minor […]

The date was October 14, 1972. Families across North America gathered around their wood-paneled television sets to watch Game One of the World Series that Saturday afternoon.  Many fans in the televised audience had not seen the Oakland A’s or the Cincinnati Reds in a regular-season contest.  There stood the Reds along the first-base line […]

  Veteran right-handed pitcher Frank Wickware posted a 5–3 record after joining the Chicago American Giants late in 1920. He made the team’s roster out of spring training in 1921 but got off to a poor start. In his first appearance of the season on May 10, Wickware’s wildness contributed to a 9–0 defeat at […]

At the end of the 1940 baseball season, all of the baseball men knew they would soon be facing the war’s demands. Shortly after the last game of the 1940 World Series, the order went out from Washington that all men ages 21-35 had to register with their local draft boards. Some men probably would […]

The importance of psychology in the development of baseball players has been recognized for many years. But there is not much information on how professional baseball organizations began to utilize the services of full-time mental training consultants during the 1980s. Harvey Dorfman is perhaps the most celebrated of these consultants. For over 27 years, Dorfman […]

Toronto hosted the 1979 winter meetings at the Sheraton Centre, marking the fourth time the winter meetings were held outside the United States (Montreal in 1930 and 1936 and Mexico City in 1967).1 The owners’ discussions, both formal and informal, focused on the game’s economics and the coming labor negotiations with the players — only […]