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Throwing sinkerballs with his right-handed, three-quarters delivery, John Flinn pitched a dozen seasons of professional baseball, but only 42 games in the majors. As a big-leaguer, Flinn won five, lost two, posted a respectable 4.17 ERA and held Hall of Fame members to only two hits in 23 at-bats (Carlton Fisk notched both). But it […]

Art Shires arrived on the major league scene in 1928 with much fanfare, almost all of it of his own making.  The Italy, Texas native nicknamed himself “Art The Great,” once boasted that, next to Babe Ruth, he was the biggest drawing card in the American League, and frequently stopped passersby on the sidewalk to […]

Anyone who has met a Braves fan in Boise, Idaho, has Ted Turner to credit. After purchasing the Atlanta Braves, Turner’s satellite television superstations offered the first nationwide sports telecast and made Braves fans out of people all over the United States, while setting a model for sports broadcasting in the twenty-first century.   Robert Edward […]

  “Braves Win! Braves Win! Braves Win! Braves Win! … Braves Win!!” That call still gives fans of the Atlanta Braves goosebumps.1 That’s how Skip Caray ended his description of the play that sent the 1992 Braves to their second consecutive World Series. He repeated his signature “Braves Win!” line a few times more than […]

Tom Zachary pitched in the majors from 1918 through 1936, logging 186 victories.1 The Guilford College star — who took part in one of the greatest collegiate pitching duels ever waged — never played a minor league game, a rare occurrence in those days. He picked up three World Series checks and was on the […]

Artie Wilson’s career makes just the barest impression in the old Baseball Encyclopedia: 19 games and 24 plate appearances spread across five weeks in the spring of 1951. But both before and after that short stint with the famously fated ’51 Giants, Wilson ranked for years as one of the biggest stars in two big-time […]

“He’s either the poorest great third baseman or the greatest poor third baseman.”1 In perhaps one of the best non-Yogi-Berra quotes in baseball history, this was Branch Rickey’s assessment of Frenchy Bordagaray, a colorful outfielder/third baseman who played for several teams in the 1930s and 1940s. He was free-spirited enough to fit in with both […]

Throughout baseball history, careers have often been defined by a specific play or events. Joe DiMaggio is recalled for his 56-game hitting streak; Willie Mays for his catch in the 1954 World Series. Likewise, players can be maligned for ineptitude, real or perceived. Fred Merkle’s race-altering baserunning gaffe in 1908 and Bill Buckner’s inability to […]

Ornery, rambunctious, and immensely talented, Leslie Nunamaker became one of baseball’s stoutest hitting and best throwing catchers during the last decade of the Deadball Era—and one of the game’s colorful personalities. Cut from the same temperamental cloth as contemporaries Ty Cobb and John McGraw, Nunamaker was prone to explosive on-field behavior that resulted in an […]

After a difficult childhood, a traumatic year in Vietnam, and replacing a legend in San Francisco, Garry Maddox came to Philadelphia in 1975. The “Secretary of Defense” proceeded to win eight consecutive Gold Gloves in center field. As a Phillie, he experienced great depths (an inexplicable error that ended Philadelphia’s 1978 pennant aspirations) and scaled […]

The first thing one notices when looking at the statistical record of left-handed pitcher Rudy Sommers is the 11-year gap between big-league appearances. And if you don’t count the Federal League as a major league, there were 13 years between stints in the majors. Sommers began with the Cubs in 1912 (just one game), then […]

America loves an underdog. It favors stories of players who weren’t given a chance because they were too small or didn’t have a traditional background, but they pushed and persevered and in the end made the team. Wayne LaMaster’s baseball career isn’t widely remembered today, but it is the classic underdog story of a player […]

Infielder Jeff Richardson played in the major leagues every other year from 1989 through 1993: in 53 games with the Cincinnati Reds from July 14, 1989, through the end of the season, and then brief stints with the Pittsburgh Pirates in May 1991 and the Boston Red Sox in April and May 1993. All told, […]

Nino Espinosa was a right-handed pitcher with good control whose career ended prematurely because of a shoulder injury. After that, he became a scout in his native Dominican Republic until his tragic death from a heart attack at age 34. Arnulfo Acevedo Espinosa was born on August 15, 1953, in Villa Altagracia, about 30 miles […]

Best known as the host of the 1960 television series, Home Run Derby, Mark Scott’s career encompassed acting, serving as a television broadcaster for the Cincinnati Reds in 1956, and five-seasons (1952-55; 1957) as the radio play-by-play voice of the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League. Scott was born Samuel Marks Solomon on February […]

Cliff Floyd spent 17 years (1993-2009) in the major leagues and played for seven different teams, including the 1997 World Series champion Florida Marlins. Primarily a left fielder after breaking in as a first baseman, he regularly showed tremendous power and speed, placing himself amongst the best players of his time. But injuries regularly interrupted […]

Here is one of the most moving, human-interest stories in the entire history of the game—a story that exemplifies the spirit of baseball and America . . . It is the . . . dramatic story of the skinny, under-nourished, weak-visioned kid, the son of a poor immigrant family, a product of New York’s tough […]

Born into a baseball family on September 2, 1933, during the first year of the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, Glenna Sue Kidd grew up playing ball and working with her close-knit family on the Kidd farm near Choctaw, Arkansas. She had three brothers – the youngest was Joe – and two older sisters, Juanita and […]

Bill Hutchison was among the last of a breed. Over a three-year stretch, from 1890 to 1892, the ironman right-hander averaged 40 wins, 595 innings, 63 complete games, and 65 starts per season. He led the NL in every one of those statistical categories each season during a time when the pitching distance to home […]

The routine remains one of the enduring spectacles in modern baseball history: In a heavy downpour, with the infield covered by a tarpaulin and the fans huddled beneath umbrellas or hunched over in ponchos in an attempt to ward off the rain, the second coming of Babe Ruth approaches home plate with the same small, […]

“There are a lot of men like Harry Warner at the fringes of the game,” observed Minneapolis Tribune columnist Doug Grow shortly after the 1982 World Series. “The game grabs them young and holds on forever. And it doesn’t give them a whole bunch in return.” Be that as it may, Warner certainly appreciated what […]

For a player who appeared in only 19 games during part of a nineteenth-century season, Daniel Albion Jones Jr. received an inordinate amount of notoriety. Among the many cameo players who flitted briefly across the major-league scene, Jones was perhaps the most unique. He was a Yale man who sang in the college’s glee club. […]

This article appears in SABR’s “Harvey’s Wallbangers: The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers” (2020), edited by Gregory H. Wolf.   On December 12, 1980, the Brewers and the St. Louis Cardinals made a seven-player trade. Three central figures on the 1982 AL pennant-winners came to Milwaukee: closer Rollie Fingers, starting catcher Ted Simmons, and frontline starter Pete […]