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In 1966, The Sporting News quipped that “Tom Satriano has more gloves than [his wife] . . . not many husbands can make that statement.”1 “[N]o threat to [Olympic sprinter] Bob Hayes, or even [actress] Helen Hayes,” the slow-footed Satriano constructed a 10-year major league career with his adaptability at catcher and every infield position. […]
Prior to 1923, the largest attendance at a baseball game was 47,373 at Game 2 of the 1916 World Series. This record was shattered on Opening Day, April 18, 1923, when 74,200 fans filled the brand-new Yankee Stadium to see the New York Yankees play the Boston Red Sox. The Seventh Regiment Band, led by […]
On October 6, 1914, in the second game of a doubleheader, 20-year-old Bill Martin made his major-league debut against the Robins in Brooklyn. His performance was utterly unremarkable: He went hitless in three at-bats and committed an error at shortstop. No one at the time would have expected that this single game would constitute the […]
In a 15-year major-league career filled with great stories and accomplishments of various stripes, Earl Torgeson was well known for getting in brawls. Even before he reached the major leagues, in the winter before his rookie season, he had faced assault charges for decking two men on a Seattle street who had used vulgar language […]
In their work The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, first published in 1973, authors Brendan Boyd and Fred Harris looked back on the major-league players of their youth through the prism of their baseball cards. The book, an admixture of childhood reminiscences, statistical analysis, and caustic humor, discusses a wide […]
After nine years in the major leagues, Tommy Dowd’s tenth and last season of big-league baseball was with the Boston Americans in the very first year of the new franchise, 1901. This was the team that became the Red Sox. Dowd was, in fact, the first player to ever play for the team, the leadoff […]
For a brief time in the summer of 1961, Ken Hunt was mentioned in the same sentence with Sandy Koufax as the top two young pitchers in the National League. The 1961 Cincinnati Reds were expected to finish no higher than sixth in the eight-team National League.1 However, on the last day of June, Cincinnati […]
Boston president John I. Taylor enjoyed traveling and signing players for the team. In August 1904, he signed up Henry Olmsted, a right-handed pitcher who’d played for Milwaukee in 1902 and Peoria in 1903. We don’t have a record of his height, but he had a playing weight of 147 pounds. The Globe noted that […]
He lost more games than he won. He had trouble getting the ball over the plate, leading the National League in wild pitches five times and in bases on balls four years in a row. He was a minor figure in the most reviled trade in baseball history. Yet Jimmy Ring has been compared to […]
His professional playing career was brief, distinguished only by one of the most peculiar nicknames in major league baseball history. Otherwise, Mother Watson, a two-game pitcher for the 1887 Cincinnati Reds of the American Association, was a nonentity, a performer who left an impression on the game so indistinct that modern reference works cannot even […]
Kurt Bevacqua played in 15 major league seasons with the Cleveland Indians, Kansas City Royals, Pittsburgh Pirates, Milwaukee Brewers, Texas Rangers, and San Diego Padres from 1971 to 1985. Bevacqua crafted a career as a pinch hitter and utility player at a time when that role was needed on a major league roster and for […]
Billy Barnie touched all aspects of baseball before his untimely death in 1900 at age 49. This includes player trades, player contracts, home and away uniforms, three strikes and out, modern schedule making, five-pointed home plates, all-star teams, coaching boxes, overhand pitching, ballpark construction, championship rings, and daily game promotion. Barnie held every conceivable baseball […]
World War II ended when the Axis powers surrendered to the Allied powers in 1945. Men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces returned to an America deeply affected by years of war, and they sought to resume a simple, more pedestrian way of life. They looked to an America which embraced enterprise and entertainment, […]
My dear Mr. Whitman, While “days” for baseball players are in vogue, I would like to suggest some sort of a testimonial of appreciation to Fred Hoey for the splendid service he has rendered to baseball and to the thousands of fans who cannot always be at the game. I am sure that great numbers […]
Fenway Park hosted its first major-league game in April 1912, deep in baseball’s segregated period. Thirty-three years later, Jackie Robinson – then a member of the Negro American League’s Kansas City Monarchs – was one of three Black players at Fenway Park on April 16, 1945, for what is now generally considered a “sham tryout” […]
“You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard” — Leviticus 19:27 1 The House of David touring baseball team let their beards and long hair grow, because of biblical stricture and just because it made them look more like the way many have imagined Jesus and […]
It was the stuff of boyhood dreams. With two outs in the bottom of the 10th inning and the bases loaded, 25-year-old Tony Perez stepped into the right-handed batter’s box against veteran hurler Jack Fisher with a chance to send the 15,006 Cincinnati fans home happy. Perez had just won the All-Star Game for the […]
Over the course of his 13-year major-league career spent entirely with the Detroit Tigers, Gates Brown established himself as one of baseball’s all-time best pinch-hitters. Brown, nicknamed The Gator, possessed a classic profile for a pinch-hitter: a good but not great bat with questionable defensive skills. Brown’s first pinch-hit success came in his major-league debut […]
When the regular season ends on a Sunday afternoon in late September or early October, baseball fans are of two minds. Some try to relax their nerves readying for the postseason baseball of their favorite team. Others just go home, anticipating the “hot stove league”1 that helps alleviate the anxiety or boredom of the long […]
Going into the final game of the Kansas City Royals’ three-game series against the Boston Red Sox in July 1980, one word could be used to describe the weather, the Royals, and several of their hitters: hot. A 99-degree game-time temperature and 13 runs later, that word still applied, as the Royals thumped the Red […]
The baseball dream lasted six seasons in Holyoke, Massachusetts. But in the end, the Western Massachusetts city had to hang up its spikes and retire from the field, metaphorically speaking. In 1977 the economically challenged former mill city on the Connecticut River welcomed its first professional baseball team since 1913, a Milwaukee Brewers farm team […]
The National Football League (NFL) is replete with famous games that have titles attached to them. Every serious football fan knows that the 1958 NFL championship match between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts became known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” and that the 1974 playoff tilt between the Oakland Raiders and […]
On July 18, 1923, the Philadelphia Phillies rallied in the bottom of the ninth inning to win a see-saw battle with the Chicago Cubs at the Baker Bowl. The win pulled the Phillies out of last place, but had little impact on the fortunes of either team that season. Philadelphia sank back into the National […]
This article was originally published in Ebbets Field: Great, Historic, and Memorable Games in Brooklyn’s Lost Ballpark (SABR, 2023), edited by Gregory H. Wolf. The Brooklyn Eagle, beginning in 1946, staged its “Brooklyn Against the World” competition at Ebbets Field. The main forces behind the game were Branch Rickey of the Dodgers and Lou […]