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The New York Mets were trying to stay relevant in the National League East division race. After losing their previous three games, they needed wins to stay in second place behind the Atlanta Braves. Milwaukee had beaten the Mets in the first two games of the series but the Brewers still remained in the cellar […]

When the Chicago White Sox took the field for Opening Day in 1919, no one knew which version of the team would come to play.1 Charles Comiskey’s club had ended the previous season in a disappointing sixth place, following the loss of stars like Eddie Collins to the Marines and Shoeless Joe Jackson to the […]

Tim Wallach picked a pretty good day to have one of the best games of his big-league career. With his entire family in attendance at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego for a Mother’s Day matinée, Wallach went 4-for-6 with two home runs and a career-high eight runs batted in.1 It was a near-perfect homecoming […]

The Baltimore Orioles “carried the big sticks, blasting four homers for a 7-5 win”1 over the New York Yankees in a mid-May contest at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. A modest crowd of 25,740 turned out for the Sunday afternoon game. Baltimore’s rookie hurler Jim Palmer, making just the seventh appearance of his career, earned the victory […]

When fans of the St. Louis Cardinals woke up on the morning of April 30, 1950, they probably didn’t have much to look forward to that day. The Cardinals had been rained out the day before, and today didn’t look very promising. The team was not off to a great start, either, having gone 4-5 […]

The Mets and Yankees woke up on Friday morning and readied themselves for a day of traveling. They would be playing an unusual day-night doubleheader scheduled since the May 16th game at Yankee Stadium was rained out. The first game would be played in the afternoon at Yankee Stadium and the second in the evening […]

After the Houston Astros finished in second place in the NL Central Division for a third consecutive season in 1996, they hired Larry Dierker, the former Astros pitcher-turned-broadcaster, to replace hyper-intense Terry Collins as their new manager. Dierker’s hire was met with laughter and derision throughout the media and by a number of baseball insiders, […]

The New York Mets arrived in Florida in mid-June 2012 after losing three games to their crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees. They scored only seven runs against the Yankees but the bats came back alive and they won the first game of the series against the Tampa Bay Rays, 11-2. The Rays sent their […]

The first one didn’t count. If you want to get technical about it, the Astros’ first victory in the Astrodome was a 2-1 win in a 12-inning exhibition game against the New York Yankees that inaugurated the stadium on April 9, 1965. And according to Rusty Staub, that game had a Game Seven air about […]

Having won seven of their nine previous matches, including a huge come-from-behind win against Chicago four days earlier, the Boston Red Stockings prepared to meet their other main rival for the National Association championship, the Athletic club of Philadelphia, on Saturday, September 9, 1871.  The two teams had met thrice previously in the season, the […]

It goes by many names: the whiff, the punchout, or simply a K. If you don’t offer at it, you are frozen, caught looking, or in times gone by, window shopping. If you don’t catch up to it, you are fanned or blown away. According to Crash Davis, they’re boring, and besides that, they’re fascist.1 […]

After losing the first game of the NLCS, the St. Louis Cardinals hoped to bounce back and win the second game in front of their hometown crowd. Cardinals manager Tony La Russa chose rookie Rick Ankiel to start. Ankiel finished the season with an 11-7 record and 3.50 ERA, and later in the offseason was […]

After losing two games at home, the St. Louis Cardinals headed to New York in a deep hole in the National League Championship Series. No other team had come back from a two-game deficit in the NLCS after losing the first two at home (although it had happened several times in the World Series.) Mark […]

The 2007 Washington Nationals were plodding along a dozen games under .500 when the team arrived in Minnesota late on June 7 for an interleague weekend series. The Twins were playing .500 ball, clearly a disappointment a year after they had won the division behind Most Valuable Player Justin Morneau, batting champ Joe Mauer, and […]

The Pittsburgh Pirates spent most of the first 2½ months of the 1979 season struggling to play at the .500 level before they engineered a blockbuster trade that beat reporter Charley Feeney considered “too good to be true.”1 On June 28 the Pirates sent three pitching prospects (Fred Breining, Al Holland, and Ed Whitson) to […]

Entering the 1919 season, the strength of the New York Yankees was their “heavy-hitting and strong-defensive” infield: Wally Pipp at first base, Del Pratt at second base, Roger Peckinpaugh at shortstop, and Frank “Home Run” Baker at third base.1 The slugging quartet, together with outfielder Ping Bodie, formed a “Murderers’ Row” in the heart of […]

The Dodgers faced elimination in the National League Division series after losing the first two games of the series in New York. When the series continued in Los Angeles, they hoped to turn things around in the third game. Greg Maddux started for the Dodgers. Maddux had beaten the Mets more than any other team in […]

A County Stadium crowd of 34,146 sat through two rain delays and then a 12-inning game that took 3 hours and 20 minutes, but when it was all over, the Milwaukee Braves had beaten the St. Louis Cardinals in a thriller, 3-2. The Milwaukee Journal reported, “It took them until after midnight to do it, […]

Pete Mackanin has spanned the Western Hemisphere as a player, coach, and manager from Canada to Venezuela. He may be best remembered as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies from 2015 to 2017, although Bob Fowler of the Minneapolis Star once referred to him as a “non-fiction Casey at the Bat” for a feat Mackanin performed […]

When Jordan Zimmermann (12-8) took the mound on a warm late-summer afternoon, he could not have known that he would earn his final win in a Washington Nationals uniform. He knew, of course, that the season for the Nationals (76-71, eight games back of the New York Mets in the National League East) was coming […]

Dwight Gooden had been suspended from baseball when he tested positive for cocaine in 1994. After he failed a second test and was suspended for the entire 1995 season, the Mets released him. As his suspension drew to a close, Gooden was looking for a fresh start on his career. The New York Yankees decided […]

Major League Baseball introduced the wild card with the hope of allowing more teams to compete for a playoff spot and therefore sustain fan interest.1 That goal was succeeding in spades in 2003, during one of the wildest of wild-card races in baseball history; as eight National League teams were within three games of each […]

He was nicknamed Vlad the Impaler, and while he isn’t a bad guy — his 15th-century namesake, on the other hand, came by his nickname honestly — Vladimir Guerrero did some pretty mean things to baseballs thrown by National and American League pitchers during his playing career. The Expos were going through a terrible period […]

Monday, September 6, 1993, was Labor Day in Canada and the United States. The Expos were at home, and for the first time since Opening Day more than 40,000 patrons (40,066) had spun through Montreal’s Olympic Stadium turnstiles anxious to take in the game. It was the last month of the season and the red-hot […]