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A note from the editor of The National Pastime.

Background As the 1969 baseball Winter Meetings approached, the central issues on the minds of most owners were the recommendations of the restructuring committee that had been created the year before. At that meeting, in San Francisco, the owners had fired William Eckert as commissioner, and had formed a group to examine ways to restructure […]

When Bill James first made his Game Score widely public in the Historical Baseball Abstract (1988), he humbly called it a “garbage stat.” He did feature a three–page essay on it and sprinkled it about that book, his last Abstract. Since then, it’s been broadly used, but only shallowly, as though through his description of […]

A fictional tale about a personal rivalry between a Minneapolis player and a St. Paul player in the late 19th century.

A note from the editor of the Baseball Research Journal.Every spring, the preparation of the year’s first issue of the BRJ gets me ready for the baseball season. The anticipation of the drama and action that will captivate the nation (or at least parts of it) only builds as I read about the game’s past, […]

In his 94 eventful years, George “Stormy” Kromer caught for the Wisconsin All-Stars, worked 54 years on the railroad, invented the railroad engineer’s cap, founded a manufacturing empire, and managed a minor league team to 35 straight defeats. And if that’s not enough, when he was 75, he managed a minor league team to an […]

Since the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota in 1961, the team has boasted many stars, including several of the greatest players in the game. Minnesotans have embraced these players differently, highlighting the changing nature of our complicated relationship with our sports heroes.  The team that Calvin Griffith moved to Minnesota featured a player who was […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1985.   “It is always wrong to consider that something which begins in a small way cannot rapidly become important.” — Plutarch On June 5, 1942, Doreston Luke Carmen Jr. became the thin end of a very large wedge. That […]

INTRODUCTION This paper has two parts. Part I: The Demise of the 20-Game Winner is a statistical analysis on the history of 20-game winners and possible factors contributing to their decline. Part II: A Tale of Two Pitchers is a qualitative analysis comparing two historic pitching seasons—Denny McLain’s 31 wins in 1968 and Justin Verlander’s […]

This paper explores potential areas of improvement in the JAWS statistic and proposes an alternative for evaluating candidates for the Hall of Fame. In 2004, Jay Jaffe created the Jaffe WAR Score system (JAWS) based on Baseball Reference’s bWAR.1 Its stated purpose is “to improve the Hall of Fame’s standards, or at least to maintain […]

The Yankees traveled to Florida for spring training in 1947 seeking their first American League pennant in four years.The spring of 1947 was one that saw the three New York area baseball clubs range far and wide geographically. The New York Giants held their spring training in faraway Phoenix, Arizona—the first major-league club to be […]

(Photograph by Duane Rieder.)   It was fitting that Nelson Cruz received the Roberto Clemente Award in 2022 as the 50th anniversary of Clemente’s untimely passing approached. Both Clemente and Cruz hailed from Caribbean islands, and each used his wealth and status derived from playing major-league baseball to help improve the lives of the less […]

Arlington Stadium before the addition of high walls atop the outfield bleachers to cut down the severe summer winds. Note the “Lone Star State” scoreboard beyond left field. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   “I just want to point out that if you want it, you can have it.”1 Speaking at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in December […]

In the spring of 2000, Ray Pecor, a prosperous Vermont businessman, emerged as a promising candidate to purchase the Ottawa Lynx. Team owner Howard Darwin said that Pecor, who built his fortune as the owner of a successful ferry company, first approached him in August 1999 to explore a potential sale. He claimed Pecor, who […]

Appendix 6 in Herm Krabbenhoft’s research on Hank Greenberg.

This is the third special pictorial issue of The National Pastime, following those devoted to “The Nineteenth Century” (1984) and “The Dead Ball Era” (1986). With this offering we bring SABR’s pictorial history of baseball from 1920, where we left on; to 1946. ‘The Big-Bang Era” on display in these pages was a remarkable period, […]

Recognized as one of the top umpires in Cuba for the past five seasons, Elber Ibarra Santiesteban has the satisfaction (or the luck, as he puts it) of never having called a play that would not let him sleep that night.1 Born in Tacajó, a settlement in the current municipality of Báguano, within the province […]

In 2001, economist George Akerlof won a Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on the theory of the “market for lem­ons.” The idea is this: suppose in the population of otherwise identical used Chevrolets, some will be defective “lemons,” while some will be very reliable “cherries.” The owner of the car knows, from his […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the SABR Deadball Era committee’s April 2016 newsletter. The announcement of the winner of the 2016 Larry Ritter Book Award, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen, provides an excellent opportunity to discuss the origins and history of the award. Now in its 15th year, the Ritter […]

  The major league baseball clubs of Cleveland and Cincinnati have much in common. They call the same state home. Both have established a proud tradition that dates back to the nineteenth century, and have enjoyed success and endured failure. They are mid-market teams who can afford to compete when managing resources wisely, but can’t […]

The Growth of the Society By the fall of 1974 the membership of the Society had risen from the original 16 members to 230. It climbed slowly but steadily through the ’70s, reaching 300 in October 1975, 350 at Society’s fifth birthday in August 1976, 410 in December 1976, and 634 in July 1978, before […]

Pete Browning: An Overlooked 19th Century Legend (2009) Editor’s note: In 2009, SABR’s Nineteenth Century Research Committee selected Deacon White as its Overlooked 19th Century Baseball Legend. This article first appeared in the Fall 2009 edition of the SABR Nineteenth Century Committee newsletter. By Joe Williams Louis Rogers “Pete” Browning was born during the early […]