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From left to right: George Foster, Sadaharu Oh, Pete Rose, Isao Harimoto, and Johnny Bench. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York)   Pete Rose basked in the attention he was receiving from the Japanese press on Opening Day, April 6, 1978. His Cincinnati Reds were facing the visiting Houston Astros in a […]

Prince Edward Island native and H&D League alumnus Vern Handrahan with the Kansas City Athletics in 1966. (Prince Edward Island Sports Hall of Fame)   The Halifax and District (H&D) Baseball League was a postwar offspring of the Second World War when Nova Scotia, and Halifax in particular, served as a major debarkation point for […]

The 1912 Ottawa Senators Baseball Team. (City of Ottawa Archives, MG946-3)   In the early decades of the twentieth century, baseball was by far the most popular sport in North America. By 1911 about 400 cities in Canada and the United States had professional baseball. But not Ottawa. Ottawa, pop. 87,000, was reportedly the only city […]

Just how bad were the early Texas Rangers teams? Put it this way: When reporter Mike Shropshire wrote a book about covering the Rangers from 1973 to ’75, he called it Seasons In Hell, and when that book was published, two decades later, the Rangers still hadn’t made the playoffs. Counting the ’60s, the decade […]

Introduction Deep in the heart of Texas, the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (better known as the minor leagues) huffed and puffed at their major-league brethren and tried to … well … not blow the house down but remodel it into something they could live with more comfortably. But from New York, the majors […]

Led by Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio’s brother Vince, who belted 21 homers and knocked in 100 runs, the 1941 Pittsburgh Pirates under future Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch finished in fourth place with an 81-73 record, 19 games behind the National League champion Brooklyn Dodgers.  Two months later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the country […]

This article was originally published in “St. Louis’s Favorite Sport,” the 1992 SABR convention journal.   There was a time in baseball history when exhibition games meant something. There was a time when rival teams met each other on the field of play, and even though the exhibition contests did not figure in the regular […]

In 1999 the Society for American Baseball Research completed a poll that ranked Harry Wright as the third largest contributor to 19th-century baseball. Though hindsight is often said to be 20/20, that is questionable in this case. In fact, the 19th-century perception of that question was quite different. In a November 1893 edition of The […]

The Most Important Baseball Figure of the 19th Century? In 1999 the Society for American Baseball Research completed a poll that ranked Harry Wright as the third largest contributor to 19th-century baseball. Though hindsight is often said to be 20/20, that is questionable in this case. In fact, the 19th-century perception of that question was […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986). A person’s first impression of baseball literature usually comes from library books, usually from the juvenile fiction section. Judging from what I see as a librarian, there are no more series of baseball books being published today for 8- to 12-year-olds. […]

The Houston Astrodome was the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned major-league ballpark. It was formally unveiled in an exhibition game that pitted the Houston Astros against the American League champion New York Yankees on April 9, 1965. Unlike previous sports venues, the Astrodome was built to be a massive all-purpose, climate-controlled facility that would serve as […]

Historical Backdrop Although the first all-professional baseball organization, the National Association, was established in 1871, only six years after the Civil War, Major League Baseball began with the establishment of the National League in 1876. MLB’s first seven decades took place against of backdrop of Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and lynchings, and MLB was a […]

The Brooklyn Robins reached the World Series for the third time as a National League franchise, under manager Wilbert “Uncle Robbie” Robinson during the 1920 season. Brooklyn’s first National League championship occurred in 1890, when they finished first in the NL with an 85–44 record; they tied the American Association champion Louisville Colonels in the […]

As the story goes, in 1899 Barney Dreyfuss purchased the Pittsburgh National League club, arranged a trade with the team he previously owned, the Louisville Colonels, and spirited away all of Louisville’s best players, including Honus Wagner, Fred Clarke, and Rube Waddell. This established the Pirates as one of the dominant National League teams for […]

George A. “Tuck” Turner was a member of the National League and American Association for seven seasons (1893–98) and a utility outfielder for the Phillies for the first five of those big league seasons. How Tuck Turner became a major leaguer and a member of the Philadelphia Phillies is an unusual story. Bill James observed […]

Introduction The most important events of the season were the founding, organization, and successful completion of its championship season by the American Association of Professional Base Ball Clubs (AA), and the market responses by the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs (NL), the incumbent, and the death of longtime NL President William Ambrose Hulbert. […]

As 1869 was coming to a close, baseball and the nation at large were in the midst of rapid change. Americans still had the bloodstained fields of the Civil War fresh in their memories, and the horror of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on their minds. Reconstruction was ongoing, as attempts were made to restore a divided […]

Major-league baseball players and umpires are sometimes at odds, but both groups seemed to be thinking along the same lines around 1968. It was then that the Major League Baseball Players Association won the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports, and umpires started on the road to formation of a union that would eventually […]

Least known of the three major leaguers by that name, he pitched a no-hitter for the Miracle Braves and had an equally fascinating life outside of baseball. There are three George Davises in the Macmillan Encyclopedia. Best known is George Stacey Davis, a shortstop for 20 seasons with a .297 lifetime average. This George Davis, […]

Introduction By contemporary accounts, the 1883 championship season was a grand success, noteworthy for the nationwide baseball boom, establishment of new professional joint-stock clubs, and organization of professional baseball associations. The offseason business meetings prepared professional baseball for an orderly championship season. No doubt this was due to a desire for the established National League […]

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 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 […]

Once upon a time in a faraway place—a place so far away no one under the age of sixty today has ever been there—there was a land called Organized Baseball, consisting of two major leagues of eight teams each and fifty-one minor leagues with names like Kitty, Pony, Cotton States, and Three-I. There were six […]

The 1934 baseball winter meetings could very easily have just gone to the dogs. The talk leading up to the convention was the desperate attempt of the Boston Braves owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, to pull his team out of the red by requesting that Braves Field host nightly greyhound racing. These were desperate times during […]