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The Pittsburgh Pirates, two-time defending National League champions, opened the 1903 season with four games at Cincinnati, which they swept, outscoring the Reds 27-11.1 The second four-contest series between the two clubs started on May 7, this time at Pittsburgh’s Exposition Park. Pittsburgh had won eight of the 14 games since the initial series and […]

Hank Sauer’s major-league career didn’t flourish until he was 31 years old in 1948, but then he proceeded to become one of the most prodigious home-run hitters (225) in the National League through 1954, second only to Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner (277). On August 28, 1950, the Chicago Cubs outfielder highlighted his propensity as […]

Every once in a while, a marathon — 26.2 grueling miles of running — will come down to the final 400 yards or so, with the top two competitors sprinting head to head for the tape with every bit of energy they have left.1 And every so often, a baseball season — “a marathon, not […]

Baseball is different. Among the worldwide variety of stick and ball games, baseball (along with its cousins cricket and rounders) is different in that it is the player, and not the ball, who does the scoring – and the ball is often far away when the scoring is done. In field hockey, hurling, lacrosse, shinty, […]

The World Series returned to Philadelphia for the second year in a row in 1911, and 26,286 baseball fans swarmed a wet Shibe Park on October 16, 1911, for Game Two of the 1911 World Series between the New York Giants (99-54) and Philadelphia Athletics (101-50). Despite their losing Game One, 2-1, at the Polo […]

In a game played before a Fenway Park crowd of 34,113, the Minnesota Twins turned two triple plays against the Boston Red Sox, a feat that had never happened before in the major leagues. Despite the rare accomplishment, the Twins lost to the Red Sox, 1-0. Left-hander Tom Bolton, a veteran of the Red Sox […]

The Tuesday afternoon game at Bank Street Grounds was the middle game of a three-game set between the Philadelphia Athletics and Cincinnati Red Stockings. The two teams and the St. Louis Browns had been locked in a season-long pennant race. As the season wound down, the Athletics, with a record of 62-27, held a 3½-game […]

Thanks to sterling pitching, no clutch hitting, and two umpiring controversies, the Braves and the Reds settled for a memorable tie featuring a bizarre 2-3-5 double play concluding at home plate that extended the contest so that it ended as the longest scoreless duel in major-league history to date. Cincinnati’s Fred Toney yielded only two […]

After the famous tour of the Brooklyn Excelsiors in 1860, which took them as far north as Canada and as far south as Baltimore, the outbreak of the Civil War quashed any thought of new junkets. Then, in baseball’s boom year of 1867, the Washington Nationals, a club that had formed prior to the war, […]

If Bobby Ojeda tantalized the team he once played for in Game Three of the 1986 World Series, Ron Darling tortured the team he grew up rooting for in Game Four. A night after Ojeda got the New York Mets on the board for the first win of the Series by holding Boston to 1-for-7 […]

Neither team had much of a problem getting runners on base during this Wednesday Ladies Night game between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Browns at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis in August 1951. It was scoring that presented the problem. Manager Zack Taylor’s eighth-place Browns were already well out of the pennant race […]

On April 15, 2013, Mike Napoli’s bat and Dustin Pedroia’s hustle gave the Boston Red Sox a 3-2 win in their traditional late-morning home game on Patriots Day and Marathon Monday, the Red Sox’ second walk-off in three days over the Tampa Bay Rays. Just minutes after this game ended, the day’s significance was forever […]

No one won. No one lost. Game Two of the 1912 World Series ended in a 6-6 tie after 11 innings. There was strong suspicion that by starting Jeff Tesreau against Boston’s best pitcher, Joe Wood, Giants manager John McGraw may have partially conceded Game One so that he could throw his two big guns […]

On June 20, 1972, well-traveled baseball clown Max Patkin came to Dunn Field in Elmira, New York, to entertain 927 fans of the Elmira Pioneers of the Double-A Eastern League. The Pioneers, a Cleveland Indians farm team, did their part to entertain the fans by beating the Pittsfield (Massachusetts) Rangers 8-5. The teams were scheduled […]

At the opening of the 1963 major-league season, the Cincinnati Reds projected pitcher Jim Maloney as the team’s number-four starter, behind Bob Purkey, Joey Jay, and Jim O’Toole.1 Purkey and Jay were 20-plus-game winners the previous year, while O’Toole won 16.2 For his part, the 22-year-old Maloney, a 6-foot-2, 190-pound right-hander, had gone 9-7 after […]

On August 24, 1918, the Chicago Cubs hosted the fifth-place Brooklyn Robins, who were 24½ games back of first place but had won nine of 15 games against the front-running Cubs. The second-place New York Giants were 10½ games out of first with a little more than a week left in the season and the […]

The 1930s Chicago Cubs often fielded outstanding teams. They won pennants in 1932, 1935 and 1938. They won with solid hitting, fielding – and pitching. Anchoring the staff was a right-handed pitcher from Arkansas named Lon Warneke. Years later, teammate Phil Cavarretta had this to say of him, “To me, during the years I saw […]

The New York Yankees of 1946 had many of the same stars who made them the dominant team of the pre-World War II years, but they finished in third place, seventeen games behind the Boston Red Sox, under three different managers. After the season, Bucky Harris, an experienced and well-traveled skipper, was brought in to […]

Jerry Moses aspired to become a major-league ballplayer, and declined football scholarships at Southeastern Conference (SEC) universities to pursue his dream. A 1970 American League All-Star, Jerry became the youngest Red Sox to hit a home run, at age 18 and 289 days, with a pinch-hit rocket off Jim “Mudcat” Grant on May 25, 1965. […]

The National Baseball Hall of Fame has an extensive library, packed with research materials. Most players have a file at the Hall, whose contents are made available to researchers. Some files are fairly thick. Most contain some basic information about the player, including a certificate of death for a deceased player, and newspaper clippings that […]

Nicknamed the “Iron Man,” the remarkably durable Ray Mueller caught an average of 153 games per season between the Pacific Coast League and National League from 1942 to 1944. He set the NL record by catching 233 consecutive games, including all 155 for the 1944 Cincinnati Reds. Mueller was a backstop for 1,598 total games […]

Dave Shean was the epitome of the Deadball baseball player on the field—he sacrificed runners to the next base, played a steady second base, and collected his share of singles. Off the field, Shean was the opposite of a hard-charging deadballer – he didn’t smoke, drink, chew tobacco, or swear, and regularly attended Sunday Mass. […]

Mike Mitchell was a strapping 6’1″, 185-pound right fielder with speed, power, and, according to noted baseball historian Bill James, the best outfield arm of the Deadball Era’s first decade. In addition to stealing 107 bases from 1909 to 1911, Mitchell led the National League in outfield assists in 1907 and triples in 1909 and […]

Marty McManus lived a life in baseball, spanning the years 1920 through 1948. He played as a major-league infielder for 15 years and was player-manager for the Boston Red Sox for most of the 1932 and 1933 seasons. When women began to play pro baseball during World War II with the launch of the All-American […]