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It was Tuesday night, June 15, 1948, and 24,124 Boston Braves fans packed the Wigwam hoping to see their team take over first place. They were not disappointed: Johnny Sain pitched a six-hitter and the Braves beat the Chicago Cubs, 6-3. Once again the Braves showed that they were very successful when playing under the […]

“You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard” — Leviticus 19:27 1 The House of David touring baseball team let their beards and long hair grow, because of biblical stricture and just because it made them look more like the way many have imagined Jesus and […]

“Peace in our time” dominated international headlines everywhere on September 21, 1938. The words were spoken by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after he signed a pact with Hitler giving Nazi Germany control over the German-speaking Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia. In the Northeastern United States, a more immediate disaster was headed its way – the […]

For the Washington Nationals, the drama of the 2008 season came at the very beginning of the season and at the very end. The grind of the in-between was punctuated by two losing streaks of nine games each, a 12-game losing streak, and a season-ending stretch of nine loses in 10 games. On opening night […]

The Chicago White Sox exploded, according to sportswriter Robert Markus of the Chicago Tribune, “like so many 4th of July skyrockets” on Wednesday, July 7th, knocking off the Detroit Tigers, 7-0.1 This game signaled the emergence of a new offensive threat, 23-year-old Harold Baines. The third-year player walloped three consecutive home runs, one of which […]

The New York Yankees did their best to intimidate the umpires and the opposition St. Louis Cardinals throughout the 1942 World Series. The Yanks saved some of their best rattling for Game Five. As the teams swapped lineups at home plate before the game, New York coach Art Fletcher told home-plate umpire Bill Summers that […]

The favored Cleveland Indians had succumbed to the homestanding Boston Braves in the World Series opener on October 6, 1948, and the stage was set for Game Two. If the Braves won, they would take a 2-0 Series lead to Cleveland. The pitchers were Warren Spahn for the Braves and Bob Lemon for the Indians, […]

The 1916 season began with the reigning world champion Boston Red Sox featuring much the same roster as the year before. The two major changes were the loss of Tris Speaker and Smoky Joe Wood. Considering their iconic status, one might have expected the losses to have hurt more than they did. Tillie Walker took […]

In the 1950s, a kid’s trip to a Dodgers game at Ebbets Field was a very special occasion and one of unimaginable joy. The atmosphere, the color, the noise, and the food challenged all the senses. The game was an opportunity to see Jackie, Pee Wee, Duke, Campy, and all the others. If you managed […]

When the American and National Leagues expanded from eight to 12 teams in the 1969, each league split into two divisions, the East and the West. The division winners would face each other in the League Championship Series to determine the league representative in the World Series. The new alignment in effect replaced the term […]

The summer of 1969 was a loud summer, but the loudest blast was from the rocket that sent three men to the moon and back. With so much to write about during that eventful summer, author Roy Hoopes focused on his hometown team and wrote a picture book about Ted Williams and the 1969 Washington […]

The 1970 Boston Red Sox had a trio of avid anglers—Reggie Smith, Carl Yastrzemski, and Gary Peters—who carried fishing tackle on road trips. An August swing through Minnesota gave the trio a chance to relax on a lake in Spicer, about 100 miles from Bloomington, Minnesota, where they would start a three-game series against the […]

Baseball was played at the Olympics for the first time as a demonstration sport at St. Louis in 1904; very little information on this game is available. Further Olympic baseball exhibitions took place in 1912 and 1924. Hoping to make baseball a sanctioned medal event, former major leaguer Les Mann petitioned the Olympic Committee to […]

Walter O’Malley is a bane or a blessing dependent upon which coast the person describing him resides. In Brooklyn, baseball fans remember O’Malley with contempt for transporting their beloved Dodgers to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. LA baseball fans are proud that O’Malley’s decision not only made the city a major-league metropolis, but also […]

Opening Day 1910 was quite a day for both of Boston’s major-league teams. The city’s National League team (known as the Doves at the time) was at home, the South End Grounds, against the New York Giants. After being held hitless by Red Ames through seven innings and trailing, 2-0, the Doves forced extra innings […]

One constant in the Boston Red Sox schedule each year is the Patriots Day home game. A Massachusetts state holiday since 1894, Patriots Day honors the first battles of the American Revolution in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Since 1969 the holiday has been celebrated on the third Monday in April.1 The Boston […]

Houston Astros reliever Billy Wagner confidently strolled to the Bank One Ballpark mound in Phoenix in the ninth inning on July 15, 1998, seeking his 23rd save of the season. The National League Central Division-leading Astros held an 8-7 lead over the expansion Arizona Diamondbacks and were three outs from concluding their seven-game road trip […]

Like almost every game played in San Diego during summer evenings, this Friday was no different: a comfortable 73 degrees Fahrenheit and “mostly clear.” But on this particular game night in July 2020, some things were different … wildly different. Every new year, baseball fans await Opening Day. It coincides with the arrival of springtime. […]

Perhaps the St. Louis Cardinals were taking out their frustration … or sending a message. On Opening Day 1982, the Cardinals blasted the Houston Astros, 14-3, at the Astrodome. It came on the heels of the 1981 split season in which the Cardinals finished second in the National League East in both halves and did […]

The largest Opening Day crowd in 1965 poured into cavernous Municipal Stadium on April 21, 1965, to see the return of Rocky Colavito in what the Cleveland Press dubbed “Welcome Back Rocky Day.” After a five-year absence, Colavito, one of the franchise’s most popular players and greatest home run hitters, was back in a Cleveland […]

On June 10, 1991, Major League Baseball awarded one of the two National League expansion franchises, set to begin play at the start of the 1993 season, to South Florida businessman H. Wayne Huizenga. Part-owner of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, Huizenga paid the $95 million expansion fee but looked at ownership of the Florida Marlins […]

A reconvening of the annual baseball meetings was held on March 4, 1890, at the Weddell House Hotel in Cleveland. The talk of the baseball world at this time revolved around a recently formed labor union called the Brotherhood. This organization was created in December of 1889 by a group of disgruntled professional ballplayers who […]

The bedraggled Boston Braves were already in their familiar abode—the National League cellar—at 8-19 and 11 games out when they played their 28th game of the 1935 season. The venue was Pittsburgh’s bucolic Forbes Field; the opponents were the home-standing Pirates. But the Braves had Babe Ruth, a free agent newcomer to the National League, […]

Hometown boy makes good. This time-honored cliché certainly applies to Orioles pitcher Tom Phoebus, who was born and raised in Remington, a predominantly Italian neighborhood in the northwestern section of Baltimore. After receiving a $6,500 signing bonus from the Baltimore Orioles in 1960, Phoebus established himself as one of the future stars in the Birds’ […]