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Magnates attending the 1899 winter league meetings in New York had a full docket: Contraction of the National League The gathering threat of other circuits aiming to claim major-league status; Various internal headaches, chief of which was mollification of angry and vindictive New York Giants owner Andrew Freedman.1 In the end, the progress achieved on […]

The Fall Meeting — November 16-17, 1894 The first conclave after the 1894 season convened in Parlor F of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City.1There were no hot-button issues facing the magnates, but there were still critical details that required the group’s collective attention.The largest single administrative action came in reappointing the Board […]

The stolen base is an exciting play which has many supporters in the ranks of managers as well as fans. However, the true effect of base stealing activity, including the negative components of caught stealing and pickoffs, has not received detailed analysis. There are three main reasons for the lack of detailed study. First, the […]

The 1927 Pittsburgh Pirates are generally remembered for losing in the World Series to the New York Yankees’ Murderers’ Row, a juggernaut highlighted by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at their offensive peak. Although the Yankees did sweep the Pirates in four straight games, two of them — Games One and Four — were decided […]

In 1939 the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, winners of seven consecutive International League pennants from 1919 to 1925, endured a losing season under first-year manager Rogers Hornsby, the 43-year-old future Hall of Famer. Still, without a successful Orioles season to celebrate, the achievements by the other hometown team, the Elite Giants, did not seem to offer […]

Stan Musial batted .365 in 1946 and won his second NL MVP award. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   INTRODUCTION Stan Musial is undeniably one of the greatest baseball players of all time. With 24 All-Star appearances, just one behind Hank Aaron for the most ever, and three MVP awards – while finishing in the top 10 a […]

The end of the Brotherhood war restored the status quo ante: two major leagues, the National League and the American Association, atop the sport’s pyramid. Yet, the principals of both leagues spent more of 1891 continuing war rather than securing an enduring peace. The restoration of the two-league system proved untenable for the longer term. […]

Nineteen twenty-one was a remarkable baseball season, one that signaled that a seismic shift in how the game was played was underway. Baseball was moving from low-scoring contests dominated by pitching to a power game with more hits, runs, and home runs. It was the year that New York City rose to the top of […]

Many amusement parks had seen their fortunes intertwined with minor-league baseball, and both faced hard times in the post-World War II era. The amusement parks that had survived to the 1950s— many of which started life at the turn of the century as “trolley parks,” built at the end of a streetcar line— were starting […]

Sandy Koufax (top row, second from right) finished fourth in scoring on the University of Cincinnati’s freshman basketball team in 1953-54. (Courtesy of University of Cincinnati Athletic Department)   In his early teen years Sandy Koufax, like most like-minded kids of his era, played the sport of the season, stopping only for dinner and maybe […]

Sandy Koufax speaks at the Baseball Writers Association of America dinner in 2014. (Photo: Arturo Pardavila III from Hoboken, New Jersey.)   Just two years after Sandy Koufax’s shocking retirement from baseball, the headline in The Sporting News on April 20, 1968, read: “New Koufax? It Could Be Cubs’ Holtzman.”1 “Holtzman is regarded by many […]

  On May 2, 1963, the Minnesota Twins and Cleveland Indians completed a swap of starting pitchers. Southpaw Jack Kralick was headed to Cleveland while right-hander Jim Perry was on his way to the Twin Cities. Kralick (34–32, 3.64 ERA) and Perry (52–49, 3.87) had similar career numbers. Perry, however, had been used more out […]

The headline in the March 13, 1903, edition of the New York Times read “Baseball Grounds Fixed.” The nonbylined article described an agreement, announced by American League President Ban Johnson, that a plot of rocky land was leased for the construction of a ballpark to be occupied by the newly minted New York American League […]

Following the events of Pearl Harbor and in Europe, on January 15, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis: “I honestly feel it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.” Thus, through 1945, the heroic military efforts of Americans in World War II would be complemented and […]

At Fenway Park, the umpires take the field through the same runway as used by the visiting team.   All professional umpires use the same basic mechanics on the field, from rookie ball to the major leagues. This includes positioning behind home plate and on the bases, as well as how to indicate “out,” “safe,” […]

In baseball there are many kinds of excitement. Seeing great catches and timely hits by legendary players, watching your favorite team crush the opposition, having a record set-most fans would be excited by such occurrences. However, we are interested here in the “edge-of-your-seat, who’s going to win the big game” type of excitement. The reader […]

It has been over 20 years since Baseball Prospectus developed the statistic “Wins Above Replacement Player” (WARP), and 12 years since Sean Smith’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was first posted on Baseball-Reference.com.1 WAR now is widely recognized as a useful metric for assessing a ballplayer’s overall performance. Several performance-based awards are given to players each […]

Sandy Alomar Jr.’s career has been marred by frequent injuries, and one could argue that he has not lived up to the expectations most people had for him back when he was one of the most promising young catchers in the game. But no one was disappointed in him on the night of July 8, […]

[I]n my book the most exciting play in baseball is a three-bagger. […] You used to see a fair number of them in the old days, but now they’re the rarest plays in baseball. For sheer excitement, I don’t think anything can beat when you see that guy go tearing around the bases and come […]

In 1948, the St. Louis Cardinals farm system was a model for other big-league teams. When one of the Cardinals’ 21 farm teams was struck by tragedy in July 1948, organized baseball rallied around the organization. On July 24, 1948, a bus carrying the Duluth Dukes, a Cardinals’ affiliate in the Class C Northern League, […]

  In June 1972, the Detroit Tigers selected Harvard University’s Rick Wolff in the 33rd round of baseball’s amateur draft.1 Wolff played two seasons in Detroit’s farm system, batting .236 in 196 Class A games before retiring to attend law school, and then pursue careers in publishing and sports psychology. Wolff’s time in the Western […]

  Mother’s Day, 1972. Willie Mays had just smacked his 647th home run. For the 35,505 fans braving the rain at Shea Stadium on Mother’s Day in 1972, it signaled that, for a brief moment, the aging Mays could still delight fans. The 5-4 victory for the home team over the San Francisco Giants was […]

Introduction The 2013 Baseball Winter Meetings were held December 9-12 at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort, in Orlando, Florida. The meetings came only 40 days after the Boston Red Sox’ Koji Uehara pitched a perfect ninth inning in Game Six of the World Series, striking out Matt Carpenter of the St. Louis […]

From Rube to Robinson: SABR’s Best Articles on Black Baseball Edited by John Graf Associate editors: Duke Goldman and Larry Lester Publication Date: February 16, 2021 ISBN (paperback): 978-1-9701-5941-7, $24.95 ISBN (ebook): 978-1-9701-5940-0, $9.99 8.5″ x 11″, 218 pages From Rube to Robinson brings together the best Negro League baseball scholarship that SABR has ever produced, […]