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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 August 20, 1887, the Binghamton, New York Bingos (International League) folded. The Binghamton Daily Leader described the meeting which ended the Bings season: The directors met. . .and shook dice to see whether the Bingos should go or linger and the festive cubes said they should meander. And now we ain’t got any Bings. […]
That summer of 1949, at twelve, I got closer to baseball. I carried a ball and glove in the car in case I met someone who wanted to play. I judged people by their baseball connections: if they didn’t have any, they weren’t interesting to me. One of my grandmother’s neighbors, Mr. Martin, took on […]
Hillsboro Hops manager Shelley Duncan being ejected from the game against the Tri-City Dust Devils by short-season Single-A Northwest League umpire Joe Schwartz, August 26, 2015. (Courtesy of Michael Jacobs) The theater of baseball contains many acts and scenes, from the overarching storyline of a masterful pitching performance or offensive feat to the […]
Chattanooga Lookouts first baseman Jess Levan was the last man to be banned from professional baseball for trying to fix games. The uproar surrounding Levan’s banishment in 1959 revealed evidence linking other players to wide spread gambling in Southern ballparks. The Southern Association scandal was either, as The Sporting News dismissed it, “relatively insignificant;’1 or […]
Histories of the Philadelphia Phillies portray the club’s admission to the National League (NL) as a straightforward and swift process. Early in 1883, League president Abraham G. Mills informed former star player and old friend Alfred J. Reach that the Worcester franchise was moving to Philadelphia. Mills asked Reach — now a successful business entrepreneur […]
Editor’s note: All statistics published below are through the 1979 season. When the Phillies defeated the Cubs 23-22 in 10 innings on May 17, 1979 in the “friendly confines” of Wrigley Field in Chicago, it prompted research as to the other unusually high scoring games in the annals of baseball. The classic irony is that […]
“Has anybody else told you about Dobie Moore? Well, I’ll tell you something about him. That Moore was one of the best shortstops that will ever live! That fella could stand up to the plate and hit right-handed, he could hit line drives out there just as far as you want to see.” — Casey […]
“Long ago when the team was known as the Beaneaters.” On Wednesday afternoon, June 17, 1953, at Milwaukee’s County Stadium, Warren Spahn, one of baseball’s greatest left-handed pitchers, was on the mound for the Milwaukee Braves to take on the visiting Philadelphia Phillies. While the veteran Spahn already had a celebrated career with four 20-plus-win […]
Baseball is not only a “game of inches”, a thesis propounded by some mathematical phrase-maker, but it is also a game governed by inflexible rules. Throughout the history of the game, baseball’s lengthy code has caused or at least contributed to some of the most bizarre situations imaginable. Baseball has produced such oddities […]
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Deadball Era Committee’s November 2016 newsletter. Click here to read more newsletters from the Deadball Era Committee. Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg are among the Deadball Era Committee’s most accomplished members. Baseball historians and authors, they have not only garnered recognition in their own rights, but collaborated […]
The year 1922 was a truly exciting one for baseball. The revolutionary change from an emphasis on pitching to hitting and home runs had just taken full effect. As a result, team and individual batting averages soared; and crowds thrilled to the record-breaking home run bats of — not only Babe Ruth — but Rogers […]
This article was originally published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 19 (1990). Phoenix, Denver, Tampa, Washington, perhaps a dozen cities are all hoping to be tapped by major-league baseball’s magic wand and be initiated into the fraternities of American and National League clubs. Expansion has been a topic of discussion for at least […]
This paper examines competitive balance in the free agent era by comparing the old reserve clause system versus the modern collectively bargained system. Baseball’s reserve system began modestly on September 29, 1879, when the National League owners introduced a new rule that would eventually be incorporated into every player contract and would allow each franchise […]
The renovation of Yankee Stadium created Monument Park as a permanent home to monuments to Lou Gehrig, Miller Huggins, and Babe Ruth, as well as plaques to general manager Ed Barrow and others that previously sat in fair territory. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) Here’s a thought exercise: Get a piece of paper and a […]
This excerpt is from the SABR book, Yankee Stadium 1923-2008: America’s First Modern Ballpark. We are honored to include this reminiscence by longtime Stadium tour director Tony Morante of his time working in baseball. As a New York Yankees employee from 1958 to 2018, I had the good fortune to witness or par take […]
A note from the editor of the Spring 2014 BRJ.
An unusual major league game took place in Chicago on July 11, 1892. That was the year the National League played a split schedule- the only one in major league history. Boston had the first half sewed up and was in Chicago to wind up a series. Cap Anson, boss of the Colts, tried to […]
The 1963 baseball winter meetings were alive with discussion of important issues, including the permissible size of catcher’s mitts and the color of baseball bats. The clubs also made time to once again reconfigure the minor-league structure and adopt an amendment designed to assist the player-development efforts of expansion teams. The minor leagues kicked off […]
Red Springs, North Carolina, was a unique place for a 1960s minor-league baseball team. It is a small town of approximately 3,000 people in historically impoverished Robeson County, in the southeast part of the state. Robeson County, a unique place itself, is the homeland of the Lumbee Tribe, the largest tribe east of the […]
For a batter or pitcher, the best—or worst—of the “Three True Outcomes” is a home run or a strikeout.1 The rates of the both home runs and strikeouts have increased substantially over the years. To illustrate, let’s compare 1949 and 2019. In the National League in 1949, 42,711 at bats resulted in 935 homers and […]
Described by Edward Burns of the Chicago Tribune as “one of the most important meetings in baseball history”1 and “one of the most harmonious sessions”2 by New York Times sportswriter John Drebinger, the 1952 Baseball Winter Meetings took place in Phoenix from December 1 to 7. “Never before, perhaps,” wrote The Sporting News, “has the […]
Spike Lee, in his Jackie Robinson jersey, on the set of Do the Right Thing. (Courtesy of Alamy) In an Instagram post on March 29, 2020, Spike Lee announced that he would be sharing the 155-page fifth draft of a script for a Jackie Robinson biopic, which he wrote in 1996. The project, he […]
Introduction For many in the baseball world, the 2004 season marked the end of an era. Perhaps it was the Boston Red Sox finally breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” to end their streak of futility, or the Expos playing their final games in Montreal, or Barry Bonds’ career finally beginning to wind down as […]