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Following up on my 2008 article “The OBP Triple Crown” (Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 37), it struck me recently that there is one team in baseball which has a disproportionate number of OBP champions to its credit: the Boston Red Sox. In the 112 seasons of American League baseball from 1901 through 2012, a Red […]

The 1950 ManDak League Champion Winnipeg Buffaloes, featuring four Negro Leaguers: Hall of Famers Willie Wells (front row, fourth from left) and Leon Day (middle, far left), as well as Lyman Bostock (middle, far right) and Butch Davis (front, second from right). Third from right in the front row is John Kennedy, who never played […]

As major league baseball grew throughout the late nineteenth century, a limited number of players earned national recognition for their on-the-field prowess. From that small group emerged an even smaller number who also had charisma and became the equivalent of today’s rock stars. Especially noteworthy was Paterson’s Mike “King” Kelly, considered by some to be […]

All the poetry and folklore of “Tinker to Evers to Chance” notwithstanding, the great Chicago Cubs teams of 1906–10 won their four pennants and two World Series by way of outstanding pitching. The glories of Mordecai “Three Fingered” Brown, Ed Reulbach, Jack Pfiester, and Orval Overall have been widely recognized, and rightfully so. Sadly ignored, […]

Baseball milestones are as well known to fans as their own birthdays and addresses. True baseball fans know that 714-511-4256 is not a phone number, but Babe Ruth’s home run total, the career wins of Cy Young, and Pete Rose’s hit tally. Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak of 56 games is a sacred number, 2632 will […]

After several years of testing in Minor League Baseball, Major League Baseball introduced a regular-season extra-inning rule in 2020 by which teams begin each extra inning with a runner on second base. The rule was meant to reduce the length of extra-inning games and save pitching arms while bringing more action to the game.1 While […]

On September 6, 1954, more than seven years after Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond at Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Carlos Paula trotted out to left field at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. He was the first black to appear in a regular sea­ son lineup of the Washington Senators. This event, while […]

For the Astrodome to be built, many intricate pieces had to fall into place. In describing one of the most important factors, Craig Cullinan Jr. confidently asserted, “Baseball was the heart, lungs, brain, life blood of the whole thing. … Without it, there was nothing – no franchise, no stadium, no hotels.”1 Although Roy Hofheinz […]

While baseball’s origin story began on the East Coast, the Midwest has been a vital part of the growth of America’s pastime. Although a disastrous fire in 1871 temporarily stunted the city’s growth, Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century was a growing hub for commerce and culture. As the United States expanded westward, […]

Some teams today don’t even play a single game on a holiday, providing a stark contrast to the many years when the holiday doubleheader was a staple of the major league baseball schedule. From the 1890s through the 1950s, most major league teams were scheduled to play two games on each of the three national […]

Babe Ruth turned his cricket bat into a broken, splintered mess. Baseball’s great home-run hitter had just smashed an hour’s worth of bowling (cricket’s term for “pitching”). He whacked balls all over a “subterranean” field near the Thames River in London. Alan Fairfax, formerly a top Australian player, coached Ruth and marveled at his pupil’s […]

On November 11, 1918, minor-league owners from 40 teams, representing seven leagues, were preparing for a somber discussion about whether baseball would even be played in the 1919 season1 when word came down that the World War had ended. The “war to end all wars” had caused an existential crisis throughout the baseball world. The […]

Introduction Baseball had just completed perhaps its most profitable season ever, with every club in both leagues reportedly showing a profit. There was concern about the decline in hitting as well as questions about the length of the season. Even with these issues, the winter meetings of 1905 were expected to be routine affairs. However, […]

As outfielder for the New York Giants in the 1950s, Donald Frederick Mueller played in some of the most memorable games of the era. Now approach­ing his 80th birthday, he reflected on a career of some 50 years ago. Born in the St. Louis suburb of Mount Pleasant (now Creve Coeur), the young Mueller learned […]

Most fans with a sense of history know a fair bit about Johnny Sain. Of course, they know all about the doggerel that goes something like “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.” They know, too, that he won 20 or more games four times in his war-shortened career, and that he won one of […]

Though war clouds were gathering, it dropped peacefully out of the sky of Japan, seven years before bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and eleven years before atomic blasts destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It landed softly on the other side of the fence in right center field at a ballpark in Sendai, a city on the […]

In a blog post of March 23, 2008 (“Do Players Turn ‘Clutch’ When Chasing a Personal Goal?” sabermetricresearch.blogspot.com), I speculated about the anomaly, discovered by Bill James, that there are more 20-game winners than 19-game winners in the major leagues. That is the only case, between 0 and 30, where a higher-win season happens more […]

“It was my first spring training ever, at Jackson, Tennessee, in 1927, when I went up with Toledo. Casey Stengel, our manager, was trying to teach me how to turn and throw to first base in one motion. Well, we were playing Chattanooga later in the day and there was a man on first. I […]

Pitching, as the old cliché goes, is somewhere between 75 and 90% of baseball. The official averages issued each year provide us with a record for each pitcher. This article will present a summary of data compiled on 14 different measures for a group of 46 pitchers active in the 1957-78 period. The pitchers selected […]

The cover of The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson, illustration by Steve Carter & jacket design by Todd Radom. (Courtesy of Penguin Random House)   Consider this quote from eminent baseball historian Donald Honig’s 1985 book Baseball America: “For those who cared to pay attention, Robinson’s style of play should have been both threat and […]

One philosophy of pitching holds that pushing off the rubber as hard as possible and landing as far from it as possible generates the most velocity, while another holds that shortening stride length and “pulling off” the rubber will generate the most. In both theories, stride length is a critical component, both for establishing the […]

Entering the postseason, the 1975 Cincinnati Reds were widely considered to be baseball’s best team — but there was still the matter of winning the World Series. The Reds had lost the 1972 World Series and the 1973 NLCS to teams considered their inferior by most observers, and neither Sparky Anderson nor his veteran stars […]

Observing the similarity between two celebrated dynasties — the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s and the Cincinnati Reds of the 1970s — is hardly original, and hardly new. But the comparisons between the two teams are worth exploring in some detail. They were a ballclub well-known then and well-remembered today not just for their victories […]

On Larry Tye’s 2009 biography of Paige and Timothy M. Gay’s 2010 book on the barnstorming tours of Paige, Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller.