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Harry Stovey had the power to lead his league in home runs five times and the speed to lead the league in triples four times. Using that power and speed combination, Stovey hit for the first major-league cycle of the 1888 season in the Philadelphia Athletics’ 12-3 American Association win over the Baltimore Orioles on […]

Game Five of the 1917 World Series was back in Chicago and the winner would be on the cusp of a championship. Skipper Pants Rowland’s White Sox had taken the first two games of the fall classic in the Windy City, but John McGraw’s Giants came back to take Games Three and Four at the […]

Someone forgot to tell Dennis Martinez that he should be winding down his major-league career at his age of 41. Instead, it was as if he had found a fountain of youth and become invincible since the start of the 1995 season, as he remained undefeated in nine decisions after his complete-game win against Oakland […]

On Thursday, May 9, 1963, the cellar-dwelling Houston Colt .45’s faced the sixth-place Reds at Crosley Field in Cincinnati before a sparse ladies night crowd of 7,008 (5,870 paid). Though the game had little meaning in the standings at this early stage of the season, it would be a career day for future Triple Crown […]

On a warm Saturday afternoon in May, with the nation’s list of war dead growing as the country battled in two theaters of war, the baseball fans of St Louis were given a rare treat. Big-league black baseball came to town and put on a show at Sportsman’s Park. The New York Black Yankees defeated […]

Conspiracy theorists love coincidences. They point out that John F. Kennedy’s secretary’s name was Lincoln and Lincoln’s secretary’s name was Kennedy and somehow see that as connecting two presidential assassinations that occurred almost 100 years apart. What, then, to make of the fact that Tim Foli, the first Expo to hit for the cycle, was […]

Many of the Athletics faithful in the crowd of over 10,000 who watched the final exhibition game of the spring between their American Association heroes and the new Philadelphia team in the National League must have left the Jefferson Street Grounds in Philadelphia not knowing quite what to make of their team’s prospects for the […]

On July 13, 1991, the Baltimore Orioles celebrated “a baseball version of finding a million dollars lying in the street.”1 Four Baltimore pitchers combined to no-hit the Oakland Athletics on a Saturday afternoon at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, before a crowd of 40,047, in a game that was termed “downright freaky.”2 The Orioles were sitting in […]

The 21st-century baseball devotee has at his fingertips an abundance of statistical trivia the likes of which were undreamed of by his 19th-century counterpart. He is duly advised by the media when So-and-so has collected his 700th hit or Whatzizname has notched his fifth straight season of 20 stolen bases. In the first decades of […]

1882 Providence Grays. Back: Paul Hines, Jerry Denny, Hoss Radbourn, Jack Farrell. Middle: Tom York, Joe Start, Harry Wright, George Wright, John Ward. Front: Charlie Reilley, Sandy Nava, Barney Gilligan.   Harry Wright had seen dozens of electrifying games over the years, both as a star player and brilliant manager—leader of the undefeated Cincinnati Red […]

Coming off a third-place finish in 1900, the Philadelphia Phillies faced a threat in the coming season not from the Brooklyn Superbas or Pittsburgh Pirates, but from a new ballclub in the City of Brotherly Love. Ban Johnson had placed a franchise in Philadelphia in his new American League, and the Phillies’ star second baseman, […]

On April 15, 1972, New York Mets fans filed into Shea Stadium with somber faces on Opening Day, an occasion usually inspiring smiles, laughs, and hopes. But rooters in blue and orange from Montauk to Monmouth County felt the weight of absence; Mets manager Gil Hodges had died on April 2, when a fatal heart […]

Early on Sunday morning, May 2, 1954, a group of 37 people from Chillicothe, Missouri, boarded a chartered bus for the first leg of a round trip to Busch Stadium1 in St. Louis to see a doubleheader between the Cardinals and New York Giants. The Midwestern town’s depot agent, J.E. Brotherton, had arranged the excursion, […]

The iconic main entry of Ebbets Field was located at the intersection of Sullivan Place and Cedar Street (later renamed McKeever Place). (Photo: SABR-Rucker Archive)   On an October afternoon in the 1950s, while the Dodgers prepared for the first game of the World Series, an elderly man walked into Ebbets Field. On the surface […]

  The history of Maple City Park in Hornell, New York, spans everyone from Babe Ruth and Maury Wills to minor-leaguers with a single season’s statistical line. There’s a hefty portion of Brooklyn Dodgers nostalgia mixed into the story, as well as memories of the long-ago days when everyday people could pool their cash donations […]

Illinois native Del Howard wasn’t as well-known as Hall of Famers Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance, but he was a valuable backup first baseman, outfielder, and pinch-hitter on the Chicago Cubs’ world championship teams of 1907 and 1908. “Del [Howard] has been carried two years with the Cubs and is as full of […]

Russell J. “Russ” Cowans was known in Detroit as the “Dean of Black Sportswriters.”1 In fact, during the 1920s and 1930s, he was that city’s only full-time Black sports reporter. The Detroit Tribune, the newspaper for which he wrote during that era, was located on St. Antoine Street, and because he was so knowledgeable about […]

During a five-season career (1963-1967) spent mostly with the Washington Senators, right-hander Buster Narum tossed shutouts at Yankee Stadium and White Sox Park, and he struck out six future Hall of Famers.1 But Narum, owner of a .059 career batting average, is perhaps better remembered for homering in his first major-league at-bat. He was just […]

Venezuelan catcher Bo Díaz played for all or part of 13 seasons in the majors, plus 14 more in his homeland’s winter league. He helped the Philadelphia Phillies win a National League pennant in 1983 and was part of six champion teams with the Leones del Caracas. Díaz made it to the majors on the […]

On October 28, 2011, the St. Louis Cardinals prepared to play Game Seven of the World Series against the Texas Rangers at Busch Stadium. The organization asked Whitey Herzog, the manager of the last Cardinals team to play a World Series Game Seven at home, to throw the ceremonial first pitch. He had fallen ill, […]

To many who saw Al Luplow dive over the right-center field fence at Fenway Park on June 27, 1963 to glove a potential game-winning home run, it was the greatest catch they’d ever seen. An outfielder with the Cleveland Indians, Luplow was instinctively doing something he’d done as a Michigan State running back — launching […]

The New York Yankees dynasty began with Jacob Ruppert Jr. When Ruppert purchased the franchise in January 1915 with his partner, the improbably named Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, it was one of the American League’s most hapless teams. The previous owners, a gambler and a shady ex-police chief with Tammany Hall connections, had run a shoestring […]

Perhaps no other player in major-league history has been blessed with as much talent and at the same time burdened by such erratic impulses as José Canseco.1 Amassing borderline Hall of Fame numbers with 462 home runs and 1,407 runs batted in during a 17-year major-league career, the former American League Rookie of the Year […]

As a teenager in the late 1930s, Ed Sanicki and his brother Emil would travel by train from New Jersey to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. At the ticket office they would buy bleacher seat tickets, which was all they could afford. Occasionally Dodgers players would walk past the ticket office, and sometimes sign autographs. Babe […]