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Nolan Ryan celebrates his 7th no-hitter on May 1, 1991. (MLB.COM)   A pitcher usually needs good command and quality stuff to toss a no-hitter.1 Stellar fielding and a dollop of good luck doesn’t hurt, either. A bad-hop single or a flare off the end of the bat that falls for a hit is all […]

1946 In 1946, 22 major leaguers—11 of whom were under contract to either the New York Giants or the Brooklyn Dodgers—bolted to Mexico in search of greener (baseball) fields.1 This article looks at the fate and fortunes of eight members from the 1945 New York Giants who left their New York counterparts to suit up […]

Baseball “common wisdom” says that in the days of yore, the shortstop was a defensive specialist whose bat was secondary, and that it is only in recent decades that we have seen the “rise of the offensive shortstop.” But the word “shortstop” alone conjures thoughts of some of the game’s greatest players, both past and […]

Tony Pena sat alone on the top of the dugout steps, his legs sprawled in front of him. He tucked the gold chains around his neck under his jersey and fastened the clasps on his shinguards. After staring at the dirt for a moment, Pena snapped to his feet. Peering into the dugout, he smiled […]

Every spring thousands of high school athletes try out for their school’s baseball team. Many have major league ambitions. With just 650 spots available on the 26 big league rosters, only a very small percentage will attain their lofty goal. High school baseball programs justifiably take great pride when one of their products reaches the […]

Editor’s note: This article is a fictional press release from our special issue of The National Pastime looking ahead to the future of baseball in the 21st century.  COMMISSIONER ANNOUNCES NEW ALIGNMENT AND ADDRESSES MLB 2041 SEASON INITIATIVES (NEW YORK, New York)—Major League Baseball Commissioner Roberta Clemente “R.C.” Goldstein announced today the changes for the […]

“Don’t tell me about Ruth; I’ve seen what he did to people…. I’ve seen them: kids, men, women, worshipers all, hoping to get his famous name on a torn, dirty piece of paper, or hoping to get a grunt of recognition when they said, ‘H’ya, Babe.’ He never let them down; not once! He was […]

San Francisco Giants Hall of Famer Willie Mays influenced the lives of two other Giants, Bobby and Barry Bonds, both of whom who had significant careers of their own. He was Bobby’s teammate with the Giants, while taking on the role of godfather for Barry as a youngster. When Barry later became a Giant, Mays continued […]

In late May 1957, the National League owners voted unanimously to allow both the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants to move out west, leaving a hole in the hearts of New York fans and in the market. Talks quickly developed about who might move in to take over the National League vacancy. A […]

1981 Kansas City Royals Goodwill Tour advertisement (Robert Fitts Collection)   For decades it had been the hope of Matsutaro Shoriki, the owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun Group, a conglomerate that produces the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and owns the Yomiuri Giants baseball team, that there would one day be a “true world series” played between […]

The problem of measuring batting skill is as old as baseball itself. The earliest statisticians were content to count the hits and runs scored by each batter, but the unfairness of this simple method to the stars of weak teams soon prompted invention of the batting average. Since then statistics have proliferated to the point […]

Telephone card souvenir from the 1986 Super Major Series (Robert Fitts Collection)   Opposing thoughts can complement one another and fill our lives with elegant contradictions. In ancient Chinese philosophy, this theory was known as yinyang. In Japan, the word is inyo. Although frequently associated with Eastern thought, inyo is a universal part of the […]

Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig formed the most feared batting twosome in the history of baseball. Batting third and fourth, they served as the heart of the great Yankee teams that won three World Series between 1927 and 1933. Despite their heroics, Ruth and Gehrig played a different type of baseball, led decidedly different lives, […]

Columbus Jets logo.   The state of Ohio has a rich baseball history. The city of Columbus has played a major role in that history, even though, unlike its sister cities Cincinnati and Cleveland, it has never hosted an American or National League team. It has been the home of an array of minor-league teams […]

In my years as a traveling baseball writer, namely 1946 through 1958, I believe I bridged the gap between the yesteryear of hero worship and the modern adversary era. When I came along, writers were just beginning to find warts on athletes’ faces. Now? Heck, they’re apt to see nothing but. Somewhere, of course, there […]

Introduction The 1983 Baseball Winter Meetings were held at the Opryland Hotel, in Nashville, Tennessee, from December 5 to 10. Trades and free-agent signings usually headline the agenda of the annual gathering of executives, managers, scouts, agents, lawyers, accountants, and media personnel. Going into the 1983 meetings, though, there were several unresolved issues, including the […]

In 1905, Tokyo’s Waseda University became the first Japanese ballclub to play on American soil. Under the visionary leadership of Isoo Abe, the man now celebrated as “the Father of Japanese Baseball,” Waseda played 26 games against American colleges and semi-pro teams, finishing with a 7–19 record (.269 winning average).1 In 1911, Waseda returned to […]

Triple Crown Winners: Champions of three different leagues for 1938. (Nikkei National Museum 2010-30-1-3-15 ab)   A curving pitch appears in slow motion from a hurler not in focus. The voice-over is somber, an older man, remembering. “We were born in Canada,” says Kaye Kaminishi. “We spoke English.” On screen, a batter pushes a bunt […]

This is (roughly) the tenth anniversary of the transfer of a unique and valuable baseball property. On September 6, 2000, Major League Baseball and Morgan, Lewis and Bockius LLP (a very big and very prominent Philadelphia-based international law firm)1 issued a joint press release announcing “that the law firm has transferred its domain name—mlb.com—to Major […]

As Willie Mays once said, “For (Sandy Koufax) to do all those things in five years, what guys take 20 years to do, that’s remarkable.” (SABR-Rucker Archive)   From time to time during his career, Sandy Koufax went head-to-head against other eventual Hall of Fame pitchers. Perhaps none was as significant as the last such regular-season […]

The media market in North Texas was changing in 1972, just as the rest of the country was. With the advent of television, newspapers had felt the pinch as advertising dollars shifted to the new medium. Now, a couple of decades after the arrival of television, newspapers were beginning to fold or merge with others. […]

Edwin Newman, who usually turns a wry eye to the world of words, recently diverted his gaze to the world of numbers in a New York Times article: “A World Series isn’t just a baseball contest. As the Yankee–Dodger series has demonstrated, it’s also a cause of statistics.” Among the “stupefying array of facts and […]