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Right-handed Jack O’Connor used his competitiveness and baseball intelligence, along with a penchant for playing multiple positions, to appear in the major leagues during 21 different seasons. His longevity includes him in the group of 29 players who have appeared in a game in four or more different decades. “Peach Pie” was his rookie handle, […]

The New York Yankees of 1946 had many of the same stars who made them the dominant team of the pre-World War II years, but they finished in third place, seventeen games behind the Boston Red Sox, under three different managers. After the season, Bucky Harris, an experienced and well-traveled skipper, was brought in to […]

Why didn’t Jeremy Giambi slide? Hindsight is always crystal clear, much to the chagrin of involved parties. The Yankees mystique built upon a century of dominance over major-league baseball. The ill-advised enthusiastic wave by third-base coach Ron Washington, perhaps blind to actions outside his tunnel of vision. The cruel spectacle of a slow runner attempting […]

Rick Manning, to quote journalist Steve Eby, “just might be the ultimate Cleveland Indian.”1 He was drafted by the Indians in 1972 and played center field for them from 1975 to 1983, when he was traded during the season to the Milwaukee Brewers. He played for the Brewers through 1987. Manning returned to Cleveland to […]

John Samuel “Jocko” Thompson pitched in 41 major-league games between 1948 and 1951. The 6-foot left-handed pitcher spent his entire major-league career with the Philadelphia Phillies. Overall, Thompson played 12 years of professional baseball between 1940 and 1955: four with the Boston Red Sox organization (1940-1941, 1946-1947) and eight with the Phillies organization (1948-1955). He […]

Blond-headed Wee Willie Sudhoff, although short in stature, was a solid, if mostly unspectacular, pitcher who spent all or parts of 10 seasons in the major leagues. He was the first Missouri-born player to appear for both the National League’s St. Louis Cardinals and the American League’s St. Louis Browns. The bulk of his career […]

Right-handed pitcher Chick Brandom reached the pinnacle of his professional career at the tender age of 22. A promising but little-used member of the 1909 World Series champion Pittsburgh Pirates, Brandom fared poorly the following spring and was promptly relegated to the minors by the pitching-rich Pittsburgh club. He remained there until reprieved by the […]

A tall (6-foot-2), brown-haired, blue-eyed, Christy Mathewson look-alike, Walt Smallwood finished two September games on the mound for the sixth-place New York Yankees in 1917 before heading off to Siberia and France as an army sergeant during the Great War. The Maryland native played in six more games with the Yanks in 1919, toiled in […]

Amiable but tough-minded, Frank Miller was a World War I-era pitcher who valued his own worth. At the height of his career, the hard-throwing right-hander sat out two full seasons when the Pittsburgh Pirates would not accede to his salary demands. Even a visit to the pitcher’s dairy farm in Michigan by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain […]

Gregory Winston McMichael was born on December 1, 1966, in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was the youngest of three children and a multisport athlete growing up. He always hanging around ballfields with his older brothers while they played. He enjoyed sports and competition and developed his skills as a ballplayer. McMichael’s father, Allen owned an insurance […]

Getting caught stealing forever links Ray Morgan to Babe Ruth and Ernie Shore. Getting out of jail — a month into a year’s sentence — when Clark Griffith showed up in court with a scouting job offer — is another reason Morgan has a place in the game’s lore. Morgan played second base for the Washington Senators in the final […]

“Whoosh … budap … snap … whoosh … budap … snap.” Vern Duncan’s earliest memory of baseball was of throwing a ball against the brick wall of a neighboring store in his back yard.1 His childhood efforts led him on a long baseball career highlighted by three seasons at the highest professional level, one in […]

A star athlete in high school and at the University of Michigan, Elmer Gedeon played a handful of games for the Washington Senators in 1939. He died while flying a bombing mission over France in 1944, less than a week after his 27th birthday. James T. Taaffe, a fellow officer in the U.S. Army Air […]

Joe Murphy was a major league pitcher at 19, a world-class sprinter at 21, and charged as an accessory to murder at 23. He then reinvented himself as a nationally respected figure in horse racing for more than 40 years. Joseph Aiken Murphy was born in St. Louis on September 7, 1866, the second of […]

“Who the heck is Eddie Lake?” That is the title of a booklet written and published by Karen Elizabeth Bush in 2003. Bush is Executive Secretary of the Eddie Lake Society, an invitation-only society originally founded by Hall of Fame sportswriter Joe Falls. “We are made up of people who in some way or another […]

In April 1933, Ed Coleman, who had shaved a full five years from his true age, entered his first full major league season tabbed as one of the Philadelphia Athletics rising young stars. “[He] is regarded as a sure-shot to bat far over the .300 mark,” The Sporting News wrote. “[H]e gave every evidence of […]

Catcher/first baseman Don Pavletich broke into the big leagues on April 20, 1957, but had to wait until April 29, 1962 — a little more than five years — before he got his first base hit. He was only 18 at the time of his debut with the Cincinnati Redlegs. Just a couple of months […]

In 1909 Joe Bernard was a bookkeeper for Springfield Marine Bank in Illinois, playing baseball two or three games a week for local amateur teams and a semipro club in Gillespie, Illinois. The 27-year-old, 6-foot-1, 175-pound righthander had never played a game in the minor leagues. His chances of ever pitching in the major leagues […]

Virtually every book or article on the St. Louis Browns during World War II portrays a team made up of colorful individuals variously described as alcoholics, carousers, or players whose careers had been resuscitated because of the exigencies of the worldwide conflict.  One of the players on the Browns roster during this era who did […]

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on September 28, 1949, Mario Miguel Guerrero Abud played over eight years as a shortstop and second baseman for four different teams. He was the younger brother of Epy Guerrero (born 1942), who is regarded as one of the greatest scouts in major-league baseball history and was responsible for […]

What possible reason would there be to include a Celtic-influenced punk rock band from Boston on the SABR BioProject site? Just ask former Red Sox outfielder Johnny Damon or pitchers Bronson Arroyo and Lenny DiNardo, who sang backup for the band on a song called “Tessie” in 2004. The superstitious members of Sox Nation will […]

As more major- and minor-league ballparks increase protective netting around their fields to protect people from foul balls, it’s a wonder to think that years ago the parks could have used the netting to instead protect the players from the fans. In the years before and after the turn of the nineteenth century, it wasn’t […]

It was the “first opening game since our energies have been actively hurled against the heartless Hun on the blood-stained and shell-bitten fields of France,” wrote the Cincinnati Enquirer somberly as the Pittsburgh Pirates took on the Reds at Redland Field to inaugurate the 1918 major-league baseball season.1 Given the news of the unimaginable destruction […]

As the resurgence of the Brooklyn Dodgers as a pennant-contending team in the 1940s moved into the next decade, there is one thing that scorekeeping fans could count on since 1949. Campy, Gil, Jackie, Pee Wee, Billy, Duke, and Skoonj. For the radio broadcast, you could pencil in their names into the lineup on your […]