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San Francisco Giants first baseman Will Clark was having a career year in 1989 as he helped lead the team to a division championship. He had been a model of hitting consistency throughout the season and heading into the final series of the year, against the San Diego Padres, he had a good shot at […]

The San Diego Padres have been in existence since 1969 and as of 2018 had played nearly 8,000 games but just nine games in the World Series. Of those nine games, fans of the Padres have only one World Series game victory to celebrate. That victory came at home in Game Two of the 1984 […]

Major League Baseball dates its inception to 1876, but nearly all of the men who played in the newly formed National League had played in its predecessor circuit, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Clubs, which operated from 1871 through 1875. The 1871 pennant race went down to the final day amid improbable and […]

After three consecutive seasons of finishing in second place in the National League, the 1921 New York Giants captured the pennant.1 The Giants began the season by splitting their first 12 games and then won 19 of 26 from April 30 to May 28. Further, they were victorious in 16 of 20 games played at […]

On April 8, 1960, the Los Angeles Dodgers traded infielder Don Zimmer to the Chicago Cubs for three minor leaguers and $25,000. Just four days later, on Opening Day, Zimmer hit a home run off Don Drysdale at the Los Angeles Coliseum in his first at-bat against his former team. After the home run, Zimmer […]

In 1987, his first season with the Chicago Cubs, Andre Dawson got his MVP season going with a 5-for-5 performance against the San Francisco Giants, including joining the ranks of those who have hit for the cycle. After 11 seasons in Montreal, he had signed with the Cubs as a free agent in March, taking […]

Baseball looked different in 1969 from previous years. The pitching mound was lower, the number of teams was greater, and the Chicago Cubs looked like a contender. The Cubs stormed to an early lead in the new NL East Division, a creation necessitated by the expansion that brought the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres […]

A single major-league baseball season spans … well, seasons … and for that reason alone both good stretches and bad can often seem never-ending. Just as players are prone to streaks and slumps, so too are teams as a whole or any component thereof. For the 2015 New York Mets, pitching and hitting were on […]

Shown sobbing just days earlier after receiving word of a trade from his beloved Mets, Wilmer Flores, who remained in Queens after the transaction fell through, stroked an even more dramatic than usual walk-off homer to power New York over Washington by a 2-1 score in 12 innings. Of the storybook tale, columnist Phil Mushnick […]

The 2000 National League Division Series against the NL West champion San Francisco Giants and the wild-card New York Mets was the first postseason series played at Pacific Bell Park. The Bayfront stadium was opened in April of that year. The Giants finished with a 97-65 regular-season record, 11 games ahead of the Los Angeles […]

Of the Cincinnati Reds’ 18 extra-inning games in 1969, none was more dramatic than the extraordinary comeback win they accomplished on July 19. The Houston Astros appeared to have the game in hand with a 9-0 lead after their at-bat in the top of the sixth inning. But the Reds bounced back and tied the […]

“This was the rarest of games,” wrote Frank Dolson of the Philadelphia Inquirer after the Phillies defeated the Cincinnati Reds to conclude one of the wackiest pennant races in NL history. “One team scored 10 runs and the other scored none. Yet both were losers. If anything, the team that scored the 10 runs took […]

The Reds were on the brink. Twenty years removed from their only World Series championship, against the infamous Black Sox in 1919, Cincinnati was poised to become NL champions. Hosting the second-place St. Louis Cardinals in the final home game on the 1939 schedule, the Reds could clinch the pennant at Crosley Field by defeating […]

In the long, often inglorious history of the Chicago Cubs, they have frustrated their fans by not only going 108 years between World Series championships, but by participating in bizarre, high-scoring games that often ended with the North Siders on the losing end. Take Game Four of the 1929 World Series against the Philadelphia Athletics […]

The third game of the 1999 World Series was a critical moment for the visiting Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees alike. The Yankees had burned Atlanta in the first two games in Atlanta, 4-1 and 7-2, so were now leading the World Series two games to none. A win in this game would […]

“When you win that kind, you’ve got to win the pennant. You appreciate that kind of game. The fellows really pulled me through today. It’s been a long time since I’ve won that kind of game.” — Vernon Law after the Pirates had scored three 10th-inning runs to come from behind and defeat the Giants 8-7.1 […]

The Associated Press referred to Joe DiMaggio as “Murderers’ row’s sophomore executioner”1 after he slaughtered the pitching of the Washington Senators in the first of a three-game series at Yankee Stadium before a Friday afternoon crowd of 5,625.2 In this, the first scheduled game after the 1937 All-Star Game, New York walloped the Senators, 16-2, […]

“Those homers all felt good. They all do. That second one was one of the hardest I’ve ever hit, and it came off a curve ball!” — Willie Mays.1   On the first Sunday of June in 1963, 22,857 fans arrived at Busch Stadium to see their second-place Cardinals try to tie the visiting Giants […]

It was a “Veeck” of a ballgame for the St. Louis Browns and their 1,115 managers in the stands at Sportsman’s Park on August 24, 1951, in yet another amazing stunt pulled by the Browns’ legendary owner Bill Veeck Jr. Since winning the American League pennant in 1944 and finishing third in 1945, the only […]

After the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals split two contests in the Motor City, the 1934 World Series moved down into the dry, dust-beaten heartland for Game Three. It was the first postseason game in St. Louis in three years, and an opportunity for those in the Midwest — far removed from the cluster […]

Goose Goslin was a dangerous hitter, suggested St. Louis sportswriter Charles Regan, especially for pedestrians walking along Grand Boulevard in front of Sportsman’s Park, located on the north side of the Gateway City. Regan wondered whether the future Hall of Famer “would hurt many people” with his next moon shot in a slugfest with the […]

The American League regular season consisted of 618 games in 1922, none of which exceeded the 16-inning matchup between the St. Louis Browns and Detroit Tigers on May 30. Hosting the Tigers and already in the thick of a pennant race, the Browns had suffered a narrow 6-5 loss in the morning game of the […]

From 1891 to 1917, Rocky Point was the site of dozens of Sunday baseball games hosted by the Providence minor-league team, numerous exhibition games played by major-league teams, and one official National League game in 1903. The Rocky Point peninsula is located on Narragansett Bay in Warwick, Rhode Island, ten miles south of Providence. The […]

Left-handed pitcher Charlie Whitehouse had a career in baseball that was like many marginal players in the early twentieth century. He had enough talent to attract offers from professional scouts, but was probably only given a crack at the major leagues due to the fact that he was a lefty and because of the formation […]