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Part I: The Great Glass Era In the damp and chilly spring of 1907, at the height of the great glass era, an erudite professor of languages, a polite young first baseman and an eccentric left-handed pitcher came to the Hilltop in Kane, Pennsylvania to play professional baseball. While their time together as teammates would […]

On a long, lonesome highway east of Omaha lies Norway, Iowa, birthplace of Hal Trosky, who broke into the major leagues 91 years ago in 1933, and spent his rookie season in 1934 with the Cleveland Indians. How did he get there? He was scouted in Iowa. He debuted with Dubuque in the Mississippi Valley […]

Teams that blow a 3-1 lead in the World Series or LCS are twice as likely to lose as to win. Star pitchers frequently are less effective in Game 7 than in their first two starts.   There can be little doubt that the outstanding feature of the 1985 post-season playoffs was the Kansas City […]

The 1956 Winter Meetings of the two major leagues were scheduled to be held December 10-12, 1956 at the Palmer House in Chicago. As was customary, the minor leagues met before the major leagues, and in 1956 the National Association Winter Meetings were held in Jacksonville, Florida, from December 3 to 6 at the George […]

This article presents those little known but important men who helped to launch so many players from the sandlots of Los Angeles to baseball stardom.  Southern California has long been fertile ground for major-league talent. Walter Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Bob Lemon, Duke Snider, Don Drysdale, George Brett, Tony Gwynn, and Ozzie Smith all began their […]

Luis Olmo played for Guayama against Enid in 1940. By 1943, he and Enid shortstop Red Barkley were teammates on the Brooklyn Dodgers. (National Baseball Hall of Fame and Library)   The town of Enid, Oklahoma, had minor-league baseball in the early twentieth century, with such teams as the 1922 Enid Harvesters in the Class […]

If Bob Sheppard, longtime public address announcer for the New York Yankees, was class personified, Tex Rickards, who held a similar slot with Dem Bums, reflected the spirit of the “woiking” class Brooklynite.1 And while Robert Merrill, the classy Metropolitan Opera baritone, often sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at Yankee Stadium, at Ebbets Field the […]

Excerpted from The Cool of the Evening by Paula Kurman, to be published in the first quarter of 2024 by Rosetta Books.   Dear SABR members, My beloved late husband, Jim Bouton, asked three things of me if I were to outlive him: to make sure his archives were well and safely placed, to donate […]

In the first years of the American League, its eight clubs added to their ranks by drawing away players from the older National League. Baseball had been slumping, a situation stemming from the country’s economic depression and the failed leadership of team owners. Attempting to snap out if it, the NL magnates had pared down […]

In Rob Neyer’s chapter on San Francisco in his Big Book of Baseball Lineups, he speculates that there aren’t really good baseball cities and that attendance more closely correlates with winning percentage than with any other factor. He also suggests that a statistically-minded person look at this. I took the challenge and have been playing […]

In the early 1960s, Seattle’s city fathers were confident their city was an attractive and growing market. Its cultural amenities in sports, however, were limited. Power-boat racing and University of Washington football were the major sports in town. The city had hosted professional baseball since 1903, but the teams were all in the minor leagues. […]

Probably almost everyone has heard of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) thanks to the movie A League of Their Own. Of course, the film did not deal with other professional leagues or an international girls’ baseball league. The idea for an international league was first proposed by Arthur Meyerhoff, a Philip K. Wrigley […]

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the April 2018 edition of the SABR Deadball Era Committee newsletter. One of the great and enduring achievements of the latter part of the Deadball Era was, in fact, literary: the 1916 publication of “You Know Me Al” by Ring Lardner. The book, which could today be […]

Baseball was booming in the years immediately following the Civil War. New clubs were forming in cities and towns across the country as established clubs created more excitement than ever. Major matches attracted unprecedented crowds. Competitive rivalries grew more heated. This environment led inevitably to controversies. One of the greatest was the claim that the […]

  Mike “King” Kelly, Arlie Latham, Cap Anson, and Albert Spalding were among the most popular and respected players of nineteenth-century baseball. But despite the players’ successes on the field, the public often viewed them as part of a working-class culture frequently associated with saloons and rowdy behavior. A minister in 1889 referred to ballplayers […]

From left, Coach Buck Bailey of Washington State, Umpire Jim Tobin of National Association of Professional Baseball, Umpire Lon Warneke of National League, Coach Bibb Falk of Texas, and Umpire Hank Soar of American League. (Author’s collection)   The Southwest Conference (SWC) was an NCAA Division I conference, 1914-96, which included colleges from Texas, Oklahoma, […]

  The 2014 Little League World Series left baseball fans everywhere awestruck. With her 70-mph fastball, a 13-year-old girl by the name of Mo’ne Davis pitched a complete-game shutout to lead her team, the Taney Dragons, to a 4-0 victory. In doing so, she was the first girl ever to pitch a winning game in […]

By 1920 the idea of matching two high-minor-league teams in a lesser version of the major-league World Series had finally taken root. Informal series had been staged in 1904, 1906, 1907, 1917, and 1919. In 1920, the pennant winners of the International League (IL) and of the American Association (AA) met in the Little World […]

In 1994, Dave Eskenazi traveled to Yoncalla, Oregon, to visit one of the Pacific Coast League’s all-time great pitchers, Harold “Hal” Turpin. As a ninety-first-birthday present, Eskenazi handed Turpin a packet of letters written to him by some of his former Seattle Rainiers teammates.1 A quiet, reserved man who shunned publicity, Turpin was visibly touched […]

  This story is about the first nationally telecast spring training game in major-league baseball history. It describes events that enabled this groundbreaking expansion in televising baseball games to occur. It then examines why the broadcast is best remembered for being suddenly and inexplicably stopped while the game was in progress, leaving TV screens dark […]