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The Milwaukee Braves and the Minneapolis Millers were both optimistic heading into their 1957 seasons. The Braves, who had finished one game behind National League champion Brooklyn in 1956, were the favorite to win the 1957 pennant, according to an Associated Press poll. “The club looks good,” said Braves manager Fred Haney, “I feel we […]

The Mets were playing poorly in July 1973. They arrived in Atlanta with a 6-10 record and their struggles continued when they lost the first game of the series, 8-6. The loss had led to speculation that Mets management might make some changes. Guido Cribari wrote in the White Plains Journal News, “One thing is […]

The Milwaukee Brewers experienced a lot of ups and downs during their 2008 season, which ended with a wild-card berth. After a 6-2 start, the Brewers found themselves four games under .500 on May 25 (23-27), only to be six games over .500 by the end of June (44-38). The Brewers raised their record to […]

The year 1971 was a good time to be a sports fan in Baltimore. The Baltimore Colts had won Super Bowl V earlier in the year, defeating Dallas 16-13. It was the Colts’ third NFL championship. Earlier in the spring, the Baltimore Bullets made it to the NBA finals before getting swept by Milwaukee. And […]

Entering the 1977 season, expectations were low for the Baltimore Orioles. After they won 88 games the season before and finished second behind the pennant-winning Yankees, many experts were picking the Orioles to finish in the lower half of the American League East. The lowered expectations were primarily due to major-league baseball’s first year of […]

Following a last-place finish by the Orioles in 1902, the city of Baltimore was left without a major-league franchise. The team packed up and relocated to New York, leaving disheartened Charm City fans rooting for a series of minor-league franchises for the next 50 years.1 The Boston Braves’ move to Milwaukee in 1953 began a […]

With his pitchers falling by the wayside on a seemingly daily basis, Cleveland Blues manager Jimmy McAleer figured there couldn’t be any harm in asking. After injuries to his other pitchers forced McAleer to put Bill Hart on the pitching slab for the third time in five days on May 14, 1901, less than three […]

The seventh-place Washington Senators concluded their 1942 Griffith Stadium schedule with what Shirley Povich of the Washington Post called, “a violent batting war” against the Boston Red Sox.1 It was a come-from-behind assault led by two apparently harmless perpetrators. At one time Jimmy Pofahl was the Senators’ future. Clark Griffith paid a hefty $40,000 to […]

19 hits, 11 runs. That’s the firepower provided by the Dodgers offense for Johnny Podres on June 11, 1959. But the lefty needed only a one-run cushion as he outmaneuvered the Phillies in a two-hit shutout at Connie Mack Stadium. A crowd of 15,819 inhabited the ballpark for this nighttime game. Philly’s rooters mourned the […]

What is a juggernaut? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, it is a massive inexorable force, a campaign or object that crushes whatever is in its path. Since April 20, 1939, when the American League season began for the New York Yankees, they had been a juggernaut. In the May 2 game, New York defeated the […]

The Baltimore Orioles went from no hits to 26 hits in the span of four days. After being no-hit by Hisashi Iwakuma and the Seattle Mariners on Wednesday, August 12, 2015, the Orioles exploded for 26 hits and 18 runs on Sunday the 16th against the Oakland A’s. In their intervening games, the Orioles got […]

The year 1908 in baseball gave us the invention of the electric scoreboard, the introduction to the public of Take Me Out to the Ball Game and Fred Merkle’s infamous “boner.” And on Friday, July 17, the game between the Detroit Tigers and Philadelphia Athletics provided four American League record-setting performances. In 2¼ hours’ work, […]

When Mel Ott smacked his 500th career home run, it was the latest in an outstanding résumé of achievements for the New York Giants icon, including being the NL leader in walks six times, home runs six times, on-base percentage four times, and runs scored twice. Ott’s output made him a Giants mainstay and a […]

Ted Williams missed a couple of games in Cleveland as he was fighting off a heavy cold, but he always loved to hit in Briggs Stadium. When the Red Sox arrived in Detroit for a Friday afternoon game, he was in the lineup. “The closer we got to Briggs stadium, the better I felt,” said […]

On September 9, 1921, the Chicago White Sox opened a three-game series with the Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park. The White Sox were in seventh place with a 56-77 record, 27 games behind the New York Yankees, and the Tigers were in sixth place with a 64-72 record, 20½ games back. The only question in […]

As the game of baseball began to grow in the twentieth century, a significant change in ballpark design occurred. Before 1909, most ballparks were located around recreation fields and built with wooden, one-level seating that did not fully enclose the field. These ballparks were subject to damage by fire and limited in seating capacity.  Shibe […]

When the Washington Senators obtained left-handed pitcher George Mogridge from the New York Yankees on December 31, 1920, Washington Star sportswriter Denman Thompson praised the Senators for acquiring a pitcher of considerable class; he also warned that the former Yankee was an inconsistent winner.1 Perhaps inspired by his new surroundings – or motivated to get […]

Lee Meadows spent the first 4½ seasons of his career with the St. Louis Cardinals trying to earn recognition as a pitcher, rather than for his fashion choices. At the time, Meadows was best known for being one of the few bespectacled players in the major leagues, even drawing the nickname Specs. He showed some […]

In his first at-bat after three years of military service during World War II, Ted Williams grounded out to first base unassisted on April 16. More befitting his legend was his second time up after returning to civilian life and the Red Sox lineup: a homer off Roger Wolff of the Washington Senators in the […]

When Harmon Killebrew signed with the Kansas City Royals in January 1975, he brought two decades of baseball wisdom honed by major-league experience dating back to the early days of rock and roll. To borrow from a popular song title in 1954, Killebrew’s first year in the big leagues, one might say that he shook, […]

Most Phillies fans have Father’s Day 1964 etched in their hearts and minds. In the first game of a doubleheader against the New York Mets in Shea Stadium, Jim Bunning pitched the seventh perfect game in major-league history and the first in the National League since 1880. Acquired from the Detroit Tigers in the offseason, […]

The Chicago Whales were in a three-way battle for the Federal League title during the second half of September 1915, when one of their victories involved a triple play involving their improbable rookie first baseman, Joe Weiss. Before one of the largest home crowds of the season, the Whales defeated the Buffalo Blues in a […]

A smooth-fielding, hard-hitting first baseman, Kitty Bransfield helped form the nucleus of the juggernaut Pittsburgh Pirates that dominated the National League from 1901 to 1903. Yet in the great tradition of baseball superstitions, his departure from Pittsburgh after a dismal 1904 season left such a void that the club’s decades-long quest for another adequate first […]

That Herb Bradley is the only major leaguer to come from Agenda, Kansas, is not surprising, given that the city about 160 miles north of Wichita had only 68 residents in the 2010 census. To be fair, there were 239 residents when the 1920 census was conducted. Herbert Theodore Bradley was born on January 3, […]