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Appendix 5 in Herm Krabbenhoft’s research on Hank Greenberg.

The Detective (1968), starring Frank Sinatra and Lee Remick, featured Yankee Stadium transformed into a football field. (20th Century Fox)   “Baseball stadiums are never only about baseball. Their utility is both more dynamic and more poetic.”1 Some landmarks are so burned into our collective mind’s eye that their image tells the story of their […]

Move over, Charlie Finley and Bill Veeck – the old Browns’ owner was baseball’s first great promoter. And move over George Steinbrenner – Von der Ahe was a meddler supreme.   PERHAPS THE GREATEST DAY of Chris Von der Ahe’s life occurred in the spring of 1882, when he dedicated his new Sportsman’s Park on […]

The Annus Mirabilis that was 1884 left a massive fallout for the campaign of 1885. For the first time, there had been three major leagues operating simultaneously, and the messy multi-circuit milieu — especially the tenuous stability of the freshman Union Association, and the renewed tensions between the National League and the American Association — […]

For many, Jack Roosevelt Robinson is the most important and recognizable figure in the history of Organized Baseball. He is a cultural icon who revolutionized American sports when he took first base on April 15, 1947. But despite the impact that Robinson has had on sport and society, popular culture largely remembers him for that […]

Progressive Field at sunset in Cleveland, 2024 (Courtesy of the Cleveland Guardians)   After the Cleveland Indians initiated a name change in time for the 2022 season, there were fans who applauded the decision and others who were upset that they were abandoning the identity they had held since 1915. However, this was a club […]

Willard Brown debuted with the Kansas City Monarchs at age 22, and was 32 when he appeared in 21 games for the St. Louis Browns of the American League in 1947. When he was 38 he joined Dallas and spent four seasons in the Texas League, 1953-56. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   Most fans of baseball are […]

A mural in Montréal attests to Jackie Robinson’s popularity in the city. (Author’s collection)   “To the large group of Louisville fans who came here with their team, it may be a lesson of goodwill among men. That it’s the man and not his color, race or creed. They couldn’t fail to tell others down […]

The Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York (PONY) League was a Class-D (entry-level) minor league that operated from 1939 through 1956 before becoming the New York-Pennsylvania League. (Ontario no longer hosted any franchises.) The successor league operated from 1957 through 2020, when Major League Baseball restructured the minor-league system. As an entry-level league, its role as a pipeline to […]

Ebbets Field has been gone for nearly half a cen­tury, but the place still has a remarkable grip on our consciousness. Two recent books have been devoted to the lovable old ballpark in Flatbush. Yet even these in-depth works don’t shine much light on what happened after the Dodgers left Brooklyn. They touch briefly on some […]

The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, comprising 58 leagues, held its 47th annual Winter Meetings in Minneapolis December 7-11, 1948, to engage in, among other things, its yearly “carnival of buying and selling baseball talent.”1 More than 1,200 people in all, 1,100 of them officially registered delegates, attended.2 In advance, there was speculation that […]

The 2014 major-league season ended with the San Francisco Giants winning their third World Series in five seasons, beating the Kansas City Royals in a dramatic seven-game series on the shoulders of a staggeringly dominant performance by their 25-year-old southpaw, Madison Bumgarner. The Giants had established themselves as the decade’s model franchise, the Royals emerged […]

Andre Braugher (Robinson) and Ruby Dee (as Mallie Robinson) in The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson. (Courtesy of Alamy)   Seventy-five years ago, Jackie Robinson broke major-league baseball’s modern-day color barrier, ushering himself into the history books and helping open the doors for so many more. A few years earlier, while in the U.S. military, […]

The night of July 15, 1952, looked unpromising for baseball in Beaumont, Texas.1 Storm clouds and a forecast of rain kept attendance low as the visiting Tulsa Oilers prepared for a Texas League night game. Only 335 customers would eventually file through the turnstiles, the lowest crowd count of the year to date at Stuart […]

“In no other major league campaign did a team’s superiority show as it did in 1875.” — David Quentin Voigt1   In 1975 Cincinnati, dubbed “The Big Red Machine,” visited Boston in the World Series. It is doubtful anyone remarked “Well, it’s nothing like the ‘Big Red Machine’ Boston had in 1875.” Those 1875 days […]

In every sport and at every level, the home team wins more games than the visiting team. While this is true in baseball, it is less the case than in other sports. Throughout baseball history, the home team has won approximately 54 percent of the games played. Nearly every aspect of the game has changed […]

Over the past generation, sabermetricians have expended a great amount of time and energy studying the effects of free agency and long term contracts on player performance (Maxcy, Fort, and Krautmann 2002; Krautmann and Solow 2009; Krautmann and Donley 2009; Hakes and Turner 2011; Martin et al. 2011; O’Neill 2014; Paulsen 2020). How ever, they […]

Former Nebraska State League president Albert Felt umpired the September 13, 1915, contest between his fellow inmates at Leavenworth Prison and the Kansas City Packers when Federal League umpires missed their train.   In one way, everyone on the diamond was a prisoner. The nine Leavenworth federal prison convicts were obvious; those wearing the blue […]

Wow! Look at all those bright colors. The baseball field at the Astrodome suddenly resembled a Tequila Sunrise. Yellow, red, and orange floated over jade green Astroturf as the players took their positions. Perplexed fanatics couldn’t take their eyes off the gaudy new 1975 uniforms on the backs of their Houston Astros. Thankfully, the back […]

The race-based trials and tribulations that Henry Aaron endured on his way to breaking Babe Ruth’s home-run record in 1974 are well documented, but less well known or recognized are the no less inhumane trials that the then 19-year-old Aaron faced as a member of the Milwaukee Braves A-level farm team, the Jacksonville Braves, in […]

The media market in North Texas was changing in 1972, just as the rest of the country was. With the advent of television, newspapers had felt the pinch as advertising dollars shifted to the new medium. Now, a couple of decades after the arrival of television, newspapers were beginning to fold or merge with others. […]

  The flip side of Ken Holtzman’s 1968 Topps baseball card speaks to the 22-year-old’s accomplishments in 1967, his sophomore season in The Show: “While fulfilling his military obligations. Ken pitched for Chicago whenever he was able to get a weekend pass.” Conscription was a real factor in young people’s lives in 1967. As the […]