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The magic number was 3 at County Stadium in Milwaukee on Saturday, May 14, 1983, as the Brewers hosted the Boston Red Sox. The temperature was brisk (53 degrees) but Ben Oglivie was hot, entering the game hitting .323 with a .427 on-base percentage. His bat would play a deciding role on this evening. The […]

The Kansas City Star ran a headline on May 22, 1958, as the Boston Red Sox arrived in town for the opener of a three-game series with the Kansas City Athletics: “What’s Wrong with Ted?” Boston’s slugger Ted Williams had led the American League with a .388 batting average in 1957 – the year he […]

A small crowd of 4,611 braved the “steel gray day”1 at New York’s Polo Grounds to see history being made in a National League game between the hometown Giants and the visiting Boston Braves.2 Hoyt Wilhelm, a 29-year-old rookie right-hander for the Giants, homered in his first career at-bat and then went on to earn […]

“Peace in our time” dominated international headlines everywhere on September 21, 1938. The words were spoken by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after he signed a pact with Hitler giving Nazi Germany control over the German-speaking Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia. In the Northeastern United States, a more immediate disaster was headed its way – the […]

Acquired in an offseason trade with the Philadelphia Phillies, hard-throwing Kirby Higbe tied teammate Whit Wyatt for the NL lead in wins (22) to help lead the Dodgers to the NL pennant in 1941. (Photo: SABR-Rucker Archive)   The 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers got their season started on the wrong foot – and to add insult, […]

July 1976 was filled with breathtaking events. Operation Sail’s parade of Tall Ships in New York Harbor marked the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.1 NASA navigated the Viking 1 lander onto the surface of Mars to search for evidence of life.2 And Israeli commandos freed 103 hostages from a hijacked […]

After a one-year hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic, MLB All-Star Week returned in July 2021. The site was Denver’s Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies.1 Alongside the All-Star Game and Home Run Derby, one of the biggest attractions was the All-Star Futures Game, a seven-inning contest that showcases the most highly touted prospects […]

Both starters worked into the ninth inning, and it seemed like a game the Red Sox didn’t want to let get away. Three times they had to take the lead, even in those first nine frames. And then they had to do it once again in the 12th, with one swing from their venerable left […]

No one in baseball had a better view of Don Baylor’s 1982 season than Reggie Jackson, who usually followed Baylor in the California Angels batting order. And what he saw were a couple of different Baylor. “He can get with it in the clutch,” Jackson said. “Like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke: ‘He gets […]

In a nine-year career spent with three teams, outfielder Tito Landrum never received more than 205 official at-bats in a season. Yet he earned two World Series rings and was a League Championship Series hero for both the 1983 Orioles and 1985 Cardinals. Terry Lee Landrum was born on October 25, 1954 in Joplin. Missouri. […]

In 1954 Gus Triandos, a powerfully built catcher who hit a lot of home runs, was languishing in the New York Yankees’ farm system. To the one-year-old Baltimore Orioles, a team that had a severe shortage of talent, Triandos seemed plenty good enough. And he was: After being sent to the Orioles in a blockbuster […]

Baseball pioneer Abraham Gilbert Mills is remembered-if at all-today for heading the “Mills Commission” which concluded that the game of baseball was invented in America by Civil War General Abner Doubleday. However, this actually represents a very small piece of Mills’ fascinating life. Born March 12, 1844, in New York City, Mills lived there until […]

In the spring of 1970, a rangy 23-year-old right-hander stood atop the Los Angeles Dodgers’ minor-league pitching hierarchy. Sandy Vance, with a perfect name for Dodger fans to savor harkening back to Hall of Famers Dazzy Vance and Sandy Koufax,1 burst into the majors by happenstance that April, had solid seasons with both Los Angeles […]

At the end of the 2019 baseball season, 25 former major-league baseball players who had seen military service in World War II survived. One of them was Massachusetts native George Edward Yankowski, who served in the United States Army and saw combat with General George S. Patton’s Third Army. At age 96, this ex-catcher said […]

Mike Blyzka was part of one of major-league baseball’s biggest trades – a 17-player mega-swap between the Orioles and Yankees in the fall of 1954. Headlining New York’s acquisitions were future Cy Young Award winner Bob Turley and Don Larsen – the pitcher who later twirled the only (as of 2022) perfect game in World […]

The first player from “The Big Island” of Hawaii to make it to the major leagues was pitcher Onan Masaoka. The lefty’s 1999 Bowman baseball card aptly described his ability and his nemesis, command: “Pure power southpaw . . . Lively low-to-mid 90s heater . . . Gets outs with breaking stuff, too, when mechanics […]

“He’s the best I have.”1 So said Cardinals manager Red Schoendienst when asked about Reggie Cleveland being traded to the Red Sox in December 1973. High praise, especially considering the Cardinals staff still included Bob Gibson. Boston GM Dick O’Connell called Cleveland “one of the best pitchers around.”2 In the winter of 1973, it was […]

Some would call Paul Splittorff the “original Royal” because he was selected in Kansas City’s first amateur draft, started in the franchise’s first game and the first game at Kaufman Stadium, pitched for 15 seasons, and served as a broadcaster for 24 years. The bespectacled blond left-hander with the high leg kick appeared to squint […]

In the waning weeks of the 1962 season a player with a career .190-1-10 batting line played a crucial role in the National League pennant race. On August 23, San Francisco Giants’ infielder Ernie Bowman launched his only major league home run in New York’s Polo Grounds. Five innings later he delivered the game-winning single […]

Fear. Ballplayers don’t like to talk about it. Rarely is a pitcher so fearsome that he can’t be ignored. Walter Johnson was one. Bob Feller. Randy Johnson. Ewell Blackwell was one. Batters weren’t called cowards when they admitted they were afraid of him. Ewell Blackwell was “The Whip,” a long, lanky sidearming right-hander who threw […]

Bobby Hofman spent a lifetime in baseball. Over a career roughly divided into three distinct phases, he played major-league baseball for parts of seven seasons, and then managed and coached at various levels, including Oakland, for the next 20. He transitioned from there into a career as a big-league executive until his retirement in 1989 […]

On Saturday, September 27, 1924, with the New York Giants locked in a battle for the National League pennant with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Giants were set to meet the seventh-place Philadelphia Phillies at the Polo Grounds in a critical end-of-season game. Phillies shortstop Heinie Sand was standing on the field during batting practice when […]

Although he was overshadowed by four future Hall of Famers on the same team, shortstop Don Kessinger played an integral role on the pennant-contending Chicago Cub squads of the late 1960s and early 1970s. After a short stint with the St. Louis Cardinals afterwards, he ended his career on the South Side of Chicago as […]

Pitcher Nick Cullop had already turned in two strong seasons in the minors, but it was his performance in Cuba in the fall of 1912 that cemented his reputation. A group of New Orleans Pelicans players augmented with Heinie Groh went to Cuba for a 12-game series. They only won four of them; those were […]