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One of baseball’s most beloved and enduring mascots is Milwaukee’s Bernie Brewer. Fans at Miller Park thrill to the sight of Bernie celebrating a Brewer home run or victory by gliding down from his upper-level dugout on a giant yellow slide. The origins of Bernie take us back to the Brewers’ inaugural year of 1970. […]

Pete Vuckovich’s consistency contributed to his American League Cy Young Award season in 1982. Teammate Gorman Thomas had a consistent remark for Vuckovich after each of his victories that season. After Vuckovich went the distance in the Brewers’ 4-3, 11-inning victory over the Boston Red Sox on September 20, Thomas uttered the same remark to […]

The two-time world champions were in town. The Oakland A’s were “Kings of the Mountain” atop all of Major League Baseball. The A’s toppled Cincinnati in 1972 and the New York Mets in 1973. Many of that core group of players were on the 1974 squad: Vida Blue, Ken Holtzman, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Sal […]

Game Three of the 1982 World Series was the first Series game in Milwaukee since 1958. It was the first World Series for the Milwaukee Brewers, who had entered the league in 1969 as the Seattle Pilots, and the 13th World Series for their opponents, the St. Louis Cardinals. Milwaukee had a heavy-hitting lineup that […]

Right-handed reliever Ken Tatum was off to a brilliant start in his baseball career, a candidate for American League Rookie of the Year honors with the California Angels in 1969. The award had never gone to a relief pitcher, but Tatum’s stats (7-2, with a 1.36 earned run average) helped give him a Wins Above […]

The son of an All-Star, a two-time All-American at Harvard University, and a first-round draft pick, Mike Stenhouse seemed destined to thrive in the majors. But in a five-year career with three teams that never saw him play in more than half the schedule, Stenhouse never hit. While he did not make the postseason roster […]

He was as natural a ballplayer as you would ever want to see. His swing was as beautiful as a Michelangelo sculpture and his throws from right field were so powerful and accurate that a cartoonist for the Montreal Gazette drew a caricature of Ellis Valentine that had a cannon where his right arm should […]

Tim Murchison was a 23-year old left-hander who went north in the spring of 1920 with the eventual World Champion Cleveland Indians. He had excelled at Guilford College and logged about 600 innings in the minors. The St. Louis Cardinals had given him a brief look in 1917. But he worked only five innings for […]

If a player collects six hits in his first day in the majors and no one sees or reads about it, did it still happen? Unfortunately, rookie first baseman Guy Sturdy’s stellar doubleheader debut on September 30, 1927, for the seventh-place St. Louis Browns occurred on their last home date of the season, and one […]

Most people who have become baseball fans since 1990 have never heard of Cot Deal. If they look hard, they will find his major league career summarized in six lines of print in the baseball encyclopedias. If they look harder, they will find something about him as a minor league manager or major league coach […]

William Henry Zuber had a notable major league career for two reasons. First, he was born and raised in a German-speaking religious sect that banned sports and other entertainment. Second, the loss of talented players to service in World War II created the opportunity for him to play a prominent role in several pennant races. […]

Of all the many achievements that fill the Hall of Fame dossier of Walter Emmons Alston, perhaps the most impressive was the first, one that came with the final out of the seventh game of the 1955 World Series. That Brooklyn Dodger win in the final game of the season gave the city, and the […]

Young Tommy Long had quite a productive two-year major league run in the mid-1910s. In 1911 he jumped from the First District (Alabama) Agricultural School squad to the majors in five months. Later, still listed as a rookie in 1915, his 25 triples set the St. Louis Cardinals record for triples in a season, and […]

In addition to being a pretty good pitcher and the first German-born player in the major leagues, Charles Getzien had one of the better nicknames in nineteenth-century baseball: Pretzels or Pretzel Twirler. Before becoming a Boston Beaneater, Getzien gained prominence as a star for the Detroit Wolverines of the National League, winning a championship with […]

Granite City, Illinois was – despite its name – a city that specialized in manufacturing iron-based kitchen supplies and utensils. It was a planned community, a company town, and is part of the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area, just across the Mississippi River and six or seven miles north of St. Louis. The town was […]

Playing on seven different teams across 13 major league seasons, outfielder Tuck Stainback acquired a reputation as a player “who ought to be great, but never will be.” The weight of expectations affected him, as it did many other touted talents.1 During the 1930s, Stainback was considered one of the fastest runners in the National […]

An average major-leaguer and a professorial manager who tried to treat his ballplayers like grown men, Steve Boros was a baseball lifer whose career spanned over two dozen teams across six decades. Broadcaster Ernie Harwell called him “one of the most cerebral baseball men I’ve ever known.”1 Born September 3, 1936, in Flint, Michigan, Stephen […]

It may have been happenstance that made Ron Blomberg own a piece of history as baseball’s first designated hitter. After he overcame anti-Semitism in his hometown of Atlanta to become the number one overall pick by the New York Yankees in the free agent draft in 1967, his dream of playing in New York City, […]

Stunningly little is known about Norman Baker even though he was without question one of the most interesting characters associated with the sport of baseball in his day. From his photographs he appears to have been lean and lanky, but his height and weight are still unknown, as are the ways in which he batted […]

Bob Cooney pitched 110⅓ innings during a major-league career that included appearances in 28 games. He won one game. The game he won was scheduled to be played the day after he was given credit for the win. Robert Daniel Cooney was born in Glens Falls, New York, on July 12, 1907. He was the […]

Brooklyn boy John Franco grew up watching the New York Mets at old Shea Stadium, which became his home park for 14 of 21 seasons in the majors. There the pitcher entered games to the ringing chords of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Franco was good – he had to be, to play until the […]

Chris Von der Ahe, owner of the St. Louis Browns in 1892, was known for his irrational and confrontational behavior. Rookie Frank Genins had a puzzling run-in with Von der Ahe to start his career. According to a 1913 Baseball Magazine article by William A. Phelon, Genins was acquired from Omaha over the winter, but […]

George Kaiserling was born to a German immigrant couple, Frederick and Johanna (Becker) Kaiserling, on May 12, 1893, in Steubenville, Ohio. He was the sixth born of eight, six sons and two daughters. His father worked as a millhand in the basic steelmaking industry and his mother was a homemaker.1   There is only data […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 18, in 1998. For additional commentary about this story, read “The Veracity of Veeck,” by Robert D. Warrington and Norman Macht in the Fall 2013 Baseball Research Journal and Warren Corbett’s SABR biography of Bill Veeck.   Baseball is a game in […]