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A Sunday afternoon doubleheader at Comiskey Park pitted the hometown Chicago White Sox against the visiting Boston Red Sox. A crowd of 37,281 was on hand to watch the White Sox attempt a four-game sweep of last-place Boston. Just one week earlier (June 19), “the White Sox were encased in gloom”1 after a four-game losing […]

As the New York Yankees arrived at Dodger Stadium for the fourth game of the 1963 World Series, they knew no team had ever come back from a three-game deficit to win. “The knowledge of defeat could not be disguised in the quiet but calm Yankee clubhouse,” wrote the New York Times’s Leonard Koppett after […]

The 2015 ALDS between the defending American League champion Kansas City Royals and the upstart Houston Astros was the first time the two teams met in the playoffs. The Royals finished the regular season with a 95-67 record, winning the AL Central Division by a comfortable 12 games. The Astros, making their first playoff appearance […]

Motivated by the unusual antics of opposing rookie pitcher Mike Loynd, Kansas City Royals second baseman Frank White took a frenzied game into his own hands and powered the Royals to a come-from-behind win over Texas on August 19, 1986. However, White’s record-setting game would be squandered by the Royals in a disheartening season. Mired […]

The Kansas City Royals entered Game Three of the 1985 American League Championship Series against the Toronto Blue Jays in a postseason slump. The Royals had lost 10 consecutive playoff games, including the first two games of the ALCS. The Royals lost Game One of the ALCS, 6-1. They then lost a sloppily played Game […]

As of the start of the 2019 season, the San Diego Padres are the only existing major-league team that has not had a pitcher toss a no-hitter. While they have never had a no-no, the club has thrown 30 one-hitters.1 One of these one-hitters took place on Thursday, July 19, 2012, when journeyman Edinson Volquez […]

San Diego Padres fans had already witnessed three extra-inning games of 13 or more innings (including one for 22 innings) during the first seven weeks of the 2008 season, so when the game on May 25 against Cincinnati was tied after nine innings, it really wasn’t a big surprise. What the 36,508 Petco Park fans […]

10,561 days is a long time. And if you reduce that number to the major-league baseball seasons involved … 29 seasons is still a very long time. But September 26, 2014, had seen that much time pass since the Kansas City Royals had been a postseason team. It was long enough that four of the […]

The San Diego Padres advanced to the 1984 World Series by defeating the Chicago Cubs, 6-3, on October 7 at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium in front of a crowd of 58,359. After dropping the first two games of the best-of-five National League Championship Series in Chicago, the Padres came from behind in each of […]

On June 29, 1990, Toronto baseball fans got to witness a bit of history when Dave Stewart of the Oakland A’s threw a no-hitter at SkyDome, beating the Blue Jays 5-0. It was the first major-league no-hitter thrown in Toronto. However, it wasn’t the first professional no-hitter thrown in the city, which has a rich […]

For the first three weeks of the 1980 season, the St. Louis Cardinals’ bullpen provided anything but relief. To wit: an 0-5 record, one save and a ghastly 7.46 ERA with 51 hits allowed in 35⅓ innings through April 29.1 “If we had the relief pitching, we’d probably be in first place,” general manager John […]

It is not always that a star player gets to “come back” to his original team, to finish his career and take his final at-bats to the admiration of his hometown fans. In 2018, after spending six years away from the Seattle Mariners, including the last three with the Florida Marlins, Ichiro Suzuki was unsigned […]

Anyone can look at Baseball-Reference.com and see the offensive statistics Torii Hunter generated during his nearly two-decade career. But mention his name to any Twins fan and undoubtedly the first thing that will come to their mind is his defensive prowess. How many game-changing, gravity-defying catches in the outfield did he make over those 19 […]

The saying goes, “Once is a chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a trend.”1 The 1934 Philadelphia Athletics’ ability to win appeared to be by chance. On June 8 the seventh-place A’s started a three-game weekend series against the second-place New York Yankees. With a record of 18-26, a month had elapsed since […]

“I told my team, ‘We really don’t know how to deal with this because we’ve never had to before.’ — Joe Torre1 A generation — commonly referred to as the baby-boomer generation — and the generations that followed had been going to baseball games for many years and before each game the national anthem had […]

Wearing home pinstripes with powder blue logos and graphite caps, the Cubs defeated the Pirates for the 500th time at Wrigley Field in front of 41,024 fans and before a national television audience on Father’s Day 2016.1 The broadcasting crew of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball (Dan Shulman, Aaron Boone, and Jessica Mendoza) called the game […]

On August 18, 1957, came an anticipated yet numbing announcement. After 75 years in New York at various incarnations of the Polo Grounds, the Giants were moving to San Francisco. New York was without National League baseball for four long seasons. Four seasons of listening to radio re-creations of day games by Les Keiter on […]

After the 50-day players strike in 1981, in which about a third of the season was eliminated, major-league club owners elected to divide the season into two halves, each with its own division champions. The Los Angeles Dodgers ended the first half of the season with a record of 36-21, the best in baseball, a […]

“You could see the skyline without the towers. You could see the smoke. Eerie. An eerie feeling,” — Mark Johnson on flying past Manhattan en route to Pittsburgh on September 161   On the morning of September 11, 2001, the early morning calm in western Pennsylvania was shattered when an airplane crashed into the countryside […]

Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, shown with Jersey City officials, announced that, in 1956 through 1958, the Dodgers would play seven games each season in Jersey City and would have the option to continue the agreement for three years beyond that. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   On April 17, 1956, the Brooklyn Dodgers […]

On the day of Whitey Herzog’s first game as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, he found himself, somewhat baffled, in Marietta, Georgia, trying to get to the team hotel in nearby Atlanta. His misadventure began when he was given the wrong departure time for his flight. Then, after catching a later plane to Atlanta, […]

It wasn’t one of the storied Bill Veeck’s most creative promotions, but a “basketball-baseball doubleheader” featuring the Harlem Globetrotters put nearly 14,000 fans in the seats on Monday night, August 31, 1953, as Veeck’s moribund St. Louis Browns met the visiting Washington Senators.1 The eighth-place Browns were 46-85 and 41 games out of first, though […]

In the interrogation room at Cook County Jail, Ruth Ann Steinhagen said, “I had my first good look at him on April 27, 1947. All the time I was watching I was building in my mind the idea of killing him.”1 One of the largest crowds of the season came out for that cold game […]

Horace Wilds is pictured in the middle row, second from right, in a photo of the 1887-88 Oakland Tribunes baseball team published in the Oakland Tribune newspaper on September 6, 1908. (Courtesy of Stephen V. Rice)   Horace Wilds, an African American catcher, excelled on white semipro teams in Oakland and San Francisco from 1886 […]