Search Results

On July 8, 1984, before a reported crowd of 3,846 at Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium, the Pawtucket Red Sox swept a doubleheader with the Rochester Red Wings. The pair of wins, coupled with a split by the Maine Guides in their twin bill with the Syracuse Chiefs, propelled Pawtucket into a tie for first place with […]

Bob Forsch spent 15 years as a consistent anchor of the St. Louis Cardinals’ rotation, helping the team to three National League pennants. He won 163 games and had a WAR of 21.3 during his tenure with St. Louis. In addition to his accolades on the mound, Forsch, who was originally drafted as an infielder, […]

Bottom of the 11th. Runners at first and third. One out. Edwin Encarnacion digs in at the plate,1 ready to have one of the most memorable plate appearances of his career. Ubaldo Jimenez takes a deep breath and looks at catcher Matt Wieters for the sign as 49,934 people inside a cramped Rogers Centre create […]

It was a rough September 1991 for David Cone. The Mets right-hander had been sued for $8.1 million by three women who claimed that he had threatened them at Shea Stadium in August. Cone admitted to confronting the women but denied threatening them. “In a span of 15 seconds I must’ve dropped 90,000 F-bombs. I’m […]

The rising rafters of New Comiskey Park peered over the wall of the old ballpark across 35th Street, as though they, too, wanted one last look.1 It was the final Opening Day at Comiskey Park, kicking off the last of 81 seasons there. Sorrow for the storied park was somewhat tempered by the new one […]

Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey took a calculated gamble in the historic signing of Jackie Robinson in 1946, eventually enabling the integration of major-league baseball. Robinson didn’t disappoint the Dodgers. He was voted the game’s first-ever Rookie of the Year in 1947. Other spectacular seasons followed. Baseball fans soon grew to like his energetic, aggressive […]

The Chicago Cubs were struggling. For the first two months of the season, they were a cute story. Since mid-May, the lovable losers of recent years had spent much of their time in first place in the National League East. Starting on June 6, however, the team lost ten of 16 games. The lowlight was […]

On September 28, 1983, the Philadelphia Phillies were on the verge of clinching their fifth National League East Division title in eight seasons. That afternoon they were scheduled to play the rubber match of a three-game series at Wrigley Field against the Chicago Cubs. A victory against their division rivals would secure the title, and […]

The National Football League (NFL) is replete with famous games that have titles attached to them. Every serious football fan knows that the 1958 NFL championship match between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts became known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” and that the 1974 playoff tilt between the Oakland Raiders and […]

The Boston Red Sox seemed determined (or destined) to lose the second game of their August 23, 1938, doubleheader with the Cleveland Indians, but they kept coming back. They were down 6-0 before the bottom of the second inning. They were outhit by the visiting Indians, committed four errors while Cleveland made none, and doled […]

His first time up on August 20, 1960, in the final season of his 19-year career with the Boston Red Sox, Ted Williams drew a walk. It was career base on balls number 2,000.1 Only one player had ever walked more – Babe Ruth, who’d earned 2,062 walks.2 Ted got walk number 2,000 in his […]

Each team had one big inning in Game Four of the 2007 American League Championship Series, but the Cleveland Indians’ seven-run fifth-inning explosion outshined the Boston Red Sox’ back-to-back-to-back homer barrage in the sixth. With their 7-3 win in Game Four, the Indians took a three-games-to-one lead in the ALCS, putting themselves one win from […]

“Zero hits and 50,000 cheers.”1 That’s the best way to describe what took place on June 28, 2008, in a game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim at Dodger Stadium. Los Angeles manager Joe Torre described the game as “about as bizarre as you can get”2 but added, “It […]

The Los Angeles Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies were meeting for the second consecutive year in the 1978 National League Championship Series. LA took the series in 1977, ousting the Phillies in four games. “Three is my lucky number,” said Philadelphia manager Danny Ozark. “I wear number 3 and this is our third time here. […]

The race for the American League pennant had tightened considerably. The Boston Red Sox came into the game just 2½ games behind the New York Yankees. It truly was a race. The Red Sox had been 12 games behind on the Fourth of July, seven back at the end of July, and as close as […]

The third-place Brooklyn Superbas arrived in Philadelphia in late June 1913 for five games with the National League-leading Phillies. For the Superbas, it was the final stop on a 28-game road trip; Brooklyn had not played in its newly opened ballpark, Ebbets Field, since May 26. Both Brooklyn and Philadelphia were exceeding expectations. If Brooklyn […]

Brooklyn fans could barely believe what they were seeing. After losing the first two games of the 1947 World Series, their team rebounded to win the next two games at Ebbets Field. The fifth game, the last one to be played in Flatbush for the Series, was packed with fans hoping to see the Dodgers […]

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in SABR’s “The National Pastime,” Vol. 6, No. 1, Winter 1987. To read more from the TNP archives, click here.   Conceived and nurtured by Information Concepts Incorporated (ICI), a systems company, and published by The Macmillan Company, The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Official Record of Major League […]

On August 28, 2009, John Hester made his major-league debut in a way kids can only dream of, hitting a home run in his first major-league at-bat. Hester became, according to MLB.com, the 102nd player to start his batting career that way.1 But despite the dreamlike quality of his debut, his first home run was a […]

Baseball is a game of numbers, so it is fitting to begin this story with the number Four Thousand Two Hundred Seventy-Two. No one had ever taken longer to get to the World Series – 4,272 major-league games as player and manager before his first Series game in 1996. As Joe Torre stated in Chasing […]

“It exceeded all proportion, It could not be contained, It bloomed round like a dark sunrise, It glistened in the rain. The little boys with crew cuts Or blond locks oh so fair Would look and cheer with wonder At Oscar Gamble’s hair.” —Roy Peter Clark1   Oscar Gamble made his big-league debut in 1969 […]

White Sox manager, Ozzie Guillén once said of A.J. Pierzynski: “If you play against him, you hate him. If you play with him, you hate him a little less.”1 Pierzynski was a fierce competitor with a strong desire to win. This desire at times could rub teammates the wrong way and many times would get […]

In mid-May 1912, management of the Detroit Tigers confronted a strike by Tigers players angered by the indefinite suspension of star Ty Cobb by American League President Ban Johnson. To avoid forfeiting a May 18 game in Philadelphia and incurring a possible $5,000 fine, a group of mostly Philadelphia college and sandlot players was hastily […]

Being a member of the umpiring staff of the 1901 American League has earned Jack Haskell an entry in modern-day baseball reference works. But that one-season tour of duty represents only a short chapter in the life of an outsized character who embodied a species now vanished from the baseball landscape: the hometown minor league […]