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Those fans who don’t remember Bob Johnson as a member of the 1969 Mets can certainly be excused. Johnson, 26, pitched in all of two September games that season—notching one save in the team’s 100th win of the year and allowing no runs—before being rendered ineligible for postseason play. Still, those brief Mets appearances represented […]

A big, hulking 6-foot-3, 215-pound outfielder named Baby Doll?  There has to be a story behind that nickname.  More than one, as it happens, though they overlap. The story out of Jacobson’s own mouth is probably the right one. In his obituary, The Sporting News quoted him: “Everybody called me Bill until that day in […]

It took right-hander Johnny Welch more than five years to get his first major-league win for the Chicago Cubs. After 172 big-league games, he was 35-41 with a career 4.66 earned run average, all but two of the wins being for Boston Red Sox teams in the early to middle 1930s. He was born as […]

The shortest home run in major-league history? It was hit in 1929 by South Carolina’s Norm McMillan, who played every position except left field, catcher, and pitcher, but was remembered in his obituary for hitting that homer. He was born in the small town of Latta in northeastern Dillon County. His father, Sidney Alexis McMillan, […]

Wally Shaner was an outfielder and occasional first baseman who played a decade of organized ball, including stints with the Indians, Red Sox, and Reds in the 1920s. He appeared in 207 games, batting for a .278 average and drove in 72 runs. He later moved on to a career as a moving picture operator […]

Ty Cobb rounded third and, despite the stop sign from his coach, kept on going. Cleveland catcher Harry Bemis caught the relay and braced himself. Cobb could collide or evade. He chose collision and the ball rolled away from Bemis. Cobb was declared safe. In the heat of the moment Bemis began hitting Cobb in […]

Sam Wise teamed with Jack Burdock to form the double-play combination for the Boston Red Stockings for seven years during the 1880s. An unusual shortstop,i Wise was a Jekyll-and-Hyde player,ii a free swinger (“When Sam Wise offers at a ball and misses it he takes a turn like a prize fighter landing the pivot blow”iii) […]

Odell Hale had a few nicknames. First came “Sammy,” but early in his first year in baseball he became “Bad News” – and he was also sometimes called “Chief.” His death certificate indicates the nickname “Bing.” Hale himself listed his nationality as “Irish and Indian” on the questionnaire he completed for the Hall of Fame […]

Grover Cleveland Gilmore was born in Chicago on November 1, 1888. He was the son of William Gilmore, born in Chicago, a railroad engineer, and Catherine Nantz, born in New York City, the daughter of German immigrants. Grover Gilmore was a man with legends surrounding his life. Check out his few lines in Total Baseball […]

Perhaps there is something quintessentially American about the son of Slovakian immigrants, a ballplayer nicknamed “Leaping Mike” Menosky, who started his baseball career with a team named the Pittsburg Filipinos and who became the man the Boston Red Sox played in left field the first couple of years after Babe Ruth was sold to the […]

Rafael Palmeiro and Rich Becker were Baltimore Orioles teammates in 1998, but the similarities ended there. Palmeiro had signed as a free agent after the 1993 season and was finishing a five-year span in Baltimore in which he hit 182 home runs with 553 RBIs. Becker had been designated for assignment by the New York […]

The New York Mets were struggling to defend their World Series championship midway through the 1970 season. They fell into fourth place in the National League East before winning 22 of 31 games from June 9 through July 10 to move into first. But their inconsistent play kept them from holding the top spot for […]

The Twins-Senators game on June 18, 1968, had many ebbs and flows and featured almost every play you could imagine. Minnesota starter Jim Merritt had a no-hitter for 5⅔ innings, and then bullpen implosions by both teams led to four lead changes in the last two innings. Among the 26 hits in the game were […]

The final at-bat of Ichiro Suzuki’s career, against Lou Trevino of the Oakland Athletics, on March 21, 2019 at the Tokyo Dome. (Photo: Shane Barclay)   At the end of the 2017 season, shortly before his 44th birthday, Ichiro Suzuki claimed he intended to play until he was “at least 50” years old.1 But his […]

Like thousands of youth pitchers, Frank Castillo dreamed of winning a game in the major leagues. He was drafted out of Eastwood High School in El Paso, Texas, in the sixth round of the June 1987 amateur draft by the Chicago Cubs and progressed quickly through the minors. After reaching Triple-A Iowa to start the […]

Hall of Famer Ty Cobb said, “Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It’s no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It’s a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.”1 Observers could see that he meant it by the way he played. One fan of Cobb’s opined, “Few names have left […]

Dave McCarty entered the 2004 season at age 34, having played in the majors since 1993. Baseball America’s collegiate player of the year at Stanford University in 1991, then selected by the Minnesota Twins third overall in the amateur draft that June, McCarty was with his seventh big-league team, the Boston Red Sox, and he […]

In the days of two eight-team major leagues, “division” meant something quite different from the three regional designations currently used in the National and American Leagues. Back then, fans and writers alike tended to dwell at some length on which teams were in each league’s “first division” – among the top four teams in the […]

The American Association prepared to crown its final victor at the end of the 1997 season. Earlier that summer, Triple-A owners had announced the league would disband after the season, with teams moving to either the International League or the Pacific Coast League.1 This final championship series featured the Eastern Division-winning Buffalo Bisons and the […]

There’s no way of sugarcoating it: The 2009 Baltimore Orioles were a terrible baseball team. They finished last in their division, 39 games behind the eventual World Series champion New York Yankees, with the worst record in the American League, losing 98 games. An average-hitting team—with below-average power—when it came to pitching, the Orioles set […]

After beginning the 1875 National Association season with victories in their first 26 decisions, the inevitable first loss finally befell the three-time champion Boston Red Stockings in St. Louis on June 5. The 1875 Brown Stockings were the first professional baseball ever fielded in Missouri, and their hard-fought 5-4 comeback victory over Boston was an […]

The Chicago Tribune reports that only 68 fans attended the Boston Red Sox-Cleveland Indians game at Fenway Park on July 14, 1922. “Exactly sixty-eight people, and the figures are not exaggerated, sat in the grand stand this afternoon. … The turnout was the smallest of the season. This small attendance was approached other days during […]

Mexico needed to do more than just beat Venezuela in the final scheduled game of the 2017 World Baseball Classic’s Pool D in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco, Mexico.1 Exactly what was required, however, was the subject of confusion that extended an early-morning finish in Mexico’s 11-9 win into several […]

As much as the All-Star Game is a celebration of baseball’s history and a recognition of its current and future stars, it is also a celebration of place, and Oriole Park at Camden Yards played its role perfectly in 1993. The ballpark opened in 1992 as a reminder of classic ballparks of an earlier era, […]