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SABR’s Larry Dierker Chapter held its monthly meeting on Monday, September 16, 2019, at the Spaghetti Western Restaurant in Houston. A variety of presentations provided an interesting evening. President Bob Dorrill reported on the annual SABR 49 convention in San Diego which was attended by three of our members. He noted the superior accommodations as […]

Twenty-two people attended the March 19, 2013, roundtable of the Bob Broeg SABR Chapter, held at the usual location, the Original Crusoe’s in South St. Louis. Special guest speaker was Fred Worth, a mathematics professor at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and a member of the Robinson-Kell SABR Chapter. His presentation was “A Necrological […]

Reaching the major leagues is the pinnacle of a baseball player’s rise through the professional ranks. A player whose uniform says “Philadelphia” rather than “Scranton” knows without being told that he is competing against the greatest players the game has to offer. For some, a long and fruitful career is in the offing. But for […]

Ben Shields threw left-handed but batted from the right side, rather than the more customary “bats left/throw right.” He was born in North Carolina, but died in South Carolina. He pitched for the New York Yankees and then for the Boston Red Sox. He almost lost his life to tuberculosis between his stints with the […]

John Fowler was one of the true pioneers of American baseball, one overlooked by the National Baseball Hall of Fame for more than a century after his death until he was elected in 2022 to Cooperstown — the same village where he had grown up as a teenager. In Black baseball history, he is the […]

Charles Bernard Lear, a pioneering knuckleballer for the Cincinnati Reds, was born on January 23, 1891, in Greencastle, Pennsylvania. He was Frank and Mary Lear’s first-born child; his sister Mildred followed nine years later. Frank Lear worked in the metal trades, with his census professions indicated as moulder and tinner. Greencastle, a small borough nestled […]

“He’s the best I have.”1 So said Cardinals manager Red Schoendienst when asked about Reggie Cleveland being traded to the Red Sox in December 1973. High praise, especially considering the Cardinals staff still included Bob Gibson. Boston GM Dick O’Connell called Cleveland “one of the best pitchers around.”2 In the winter of 1973, it was […]

From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, few players were as feared with the bat or possessed the brashness of Jack Clark. Twice he powered teams to the World Series. Four times he played in the All-Star Game. His prowess at the plate moved his manager to call him “the greatest fastball hitter of […]

“I don’t care for Rockefeller’s millions and I have no desire to share Wilson’s honors,” Heinie Wagner once quipped to a group of players during a long, hot train ride out west. “But I would like to be as good a pitcher as Walter Johnson and always be able to pitch for a team as […]

“In my mind’s eye, I can still see Joe Torre – he was playing third base for the Cardinals – jumping and the ball going over his glove. Jerry Reuss was pitching. He threw me a slow curve. It was a clean hit. A single down the left-field line. When you get only one hit, […]

On September 30, 1880, in his only appearance in a professional base ball game, a 24-year-old Chicagoan whose previous athletic accomplishments occurred in performances in local amateur base ball contests took the mound for the professional Chicago White Stockings in a game that had little relevance to anyone or anything beyond delivering a favor to […]

Frank Whitney was a reserve outfielder for Boston in 1876, the first year of the National League. Playing in only 34 games in his career, Whitney was better known in the Boston area for playing on the popular Lowell, Massachusetts, amateur team. His name rarely appears in newspaper accounts of the time, other than to […]

“The wildest pitching you ever saw would not make him weaken. Hot or slow, high or low, in or out, no matter where the ball came or how much the curve, it was all the same to Brown.” — Sporting Life1   Lew Brown probably could have stopped a cannon ball if one had been […]

Summoned straight from the amateur ranks to a major-league rotation, Arch McCarthy was the first of seven pitching recruits brought up by the Detroit Tigers in the summer of 1902. After his first two big-league starts — both complete games on consecutive days — McCarthy looked to have a good shot to stay at the […]

“That McKinnis is one of the best pitchers I have ever seen,” said future Hall of Famer Alex Pompez, owner of the New York Cubans, in mid-1943. Pompez had experience dating back to 1916, and the Hall of Fame describes him as an “adroit talent evaluator.”1 Therefore, his was high praise indeed for 29-year-old lefty […]

For the afternoon of July 29, 1914, baseball had two different John McGraws. In North Manhattan, the original John McGraw, the already renowned manager of the New York Giants, was orchestrating a 1-0 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates at the Polo Grounds. For the time being, the win kept his three-times defending National League champion […]

SABR Bibliography Committee Research Guide No. 9: Library Collections on the History of Baseball Editor’s note: This guide was first published by the SABR Bibliography Committee in 1988. To download the original in PDF form, click here. By Patricia PalmerDecember 1988 Baseball has enjoyed a rich and colorful history in America, reflected in a variety […]

It was scorching hot, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees in the Gateway City as the St. Louis Cardinals faced the Boston Doves in a Sunday doubleheader to conclude their four-game series as part of an 18-game homestand.1 The cellar-dwelling Cardinals, with the worst record in the big leagues (26-78), had taken the first three games […]

After 15 seasons of pitching for the New York Giants, many of them dominant, Christy Mathewson was clearly not himself as the 1915 season began. The revered “Matty” lost his first three starts, posting a 4.50 ERA over that span. He was reported to have taken up the spitball for the first time – though […]

Boston Red Sox right-hander Pedro Martínez threw his sixth career “pitcher’s cycle” on May 12, 2000. The concept of a pitcher’s cycle was devised by SABR researcher Herm Krabbenhoft, who presented it in the Fall 2024 Baseball Research Journal.1 It consists of a pitcher striking out batters from all nine batting slots, not necessarily sequentially, […]

The commute for Larry Dierker on Sunday, June 8, 1969, was longer than normal. He had just finished the first week of his annual two-week military obligation with the 95th Training Division of the Army Reserve at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and was given a pass to travel about 200 miles to Houston for his “day […]

The Fourth of July is a halfway point between the opening day of the baseball season and the last game of the regular season. History teaches us that the pairing of Independence Day and baseball is a vibrant part of the American fabric. John Adams, a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence, […]

The Boston Red Sox had just closed out the home-field portion of the 2004 season at Fenway Park with back-to-back wins over the New York Yankees. They finished the schedule with a seven-game road trip, beginning on Monday, September 27, with the opener of a three-game series against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays at Tropicana […]

The St. Louis Cardinals won a World Series championship in 2006, their first season at the new Busch Stadium. (Kevin Ward/Flickr.com. Used by permission: CC BY-SA 2.0.)   Introduction The St. Louis Cardinals have achieved a level of success in Major League Baseball that has been outdone only by the New York Yankees. Through the […]