Search Results

A great deal of attention has been given to the baseball closer, particularly since the save was officially recognized in 1969. But the modern bullpen is now multidimensional, complete with analytics and new algorithms, and this should give a manager more weapons with a late-game lead. This paper discusses the evolution of the specialized bullpen, […]

The importance of psychology in the development of baseball players has been recognized for many years. But there is not much information on how professional baseball organizations began to utilize the services of full-time mental training consultants during the 1980s. Harvey Dorfman is perhaps the most celebrated of these consultants. For over 27 years, Dorfman […]

Many baseball fans of a certain age remember with some nostalgia the 1955 Bowman “TV set” of baseball cards, which featured a number of umpires. Television was new for many Americans at that time; it was maybe three years earlier that my family got the first set in the neighborhood I grew up in and […]

Let’s face it, in whatever quarters folks ponder baseball, be it in schoolyards or saloons, certain names come to mind. Babe Ruth. Hank Aaron. Bonds. McGwire. Sosa. Naturally. They are our home run heroes. And we all have our favorite home run memories. From the World Series telekinesis of Fisk willing his long hit fair […]

From 1901 to 2002, the average seasonal difference between a team’s home-winning percentage and its road-winning percentage was .082.1 But has it changed much over the last 100 years and has the change been significant? What teams have enjoyed an especially good home-field advantage? There is a slight downward trend over the century, but quite […]

Willie Mays smiles during the spring of 1951 shortly before his call-up to the major leagues. After hitting .353 with four home runs in his first season with the Class B Trenton Giants in 1950, he was batting .477 with the Minneapolis Millers in the first month of the 1951 season when he was called […]

Jackie Robinson’s major-league debut was more than just the first step in righting an historical wrong. It was a crucial event in the history of the American civil rights movement, the importance of which went far beyond the insular world of baseball. The Dodgers signed Robinson to a major league contract just five days before […]

This article was originally published in “From McGillicuddy to McGwire,” the 2000 SABR convention journal.   It was 1947, and Branch Rickey had two spring training problems, both of his own making. Bud Holman had one, but it loomed large for him. It took Rickey and Holman a while to find each other, but they […]

Satchel Paige, shown here in Miami uniform, was brought to the team by executive vice president Bill Veeck, for whom he had pitched in the major leagues with Cleveland and St. Louis. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)   At the end of the 1956 season, writer Oscar Fraley observed that Satchel Paige was “a […]

Packaging from the video release of Long Gone.   Had Henry David Thoreau been a baseball fan, his signature quotation might read, “The mass of minor leaguers lead lives of quiet desperation.” Such is the wont of the Tampico Stogies in the 1987 HBO TV movie Long Gone. “Now the Tampico Nine always has been […]

Fun facts and general observations about Little League Home Runs.Editor’s note: This is the Appendix to Chuck Hildebrandt’s article, “‘Little League Home Runs’ in MLB History: The Denouement.” There were originally 355 plays in consideration as Little League Home Runs: 329 have been confirmed by media accounts and are discussed here; one other has confirmation […]

Dick Hall was one of five players on the 1953 Waco team who saw major league service time. He would switch to pitching in 1955 and would play through 1971 with Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. (SABR-Rucker Archive)   This is a Tale of Two Cities. The Big State League was a Class B […]

“No sporting event so decisively enthralls the national consciousness as baseball’s annual October pageant.… There is something heroic about the pitched combat of two teams that are at once survivors and winners, meeting to decide the world championship.” – Donald Honig1 Even though the nature of postseason baseball has changed dramatically over the past 50 […]

1923 Eastern Colored League After the initial success in the Midwest of the Negro National League, which was launched in 1920, there began a drumbeat on the East Coast for a black league there. There were enough good teams to support one, and as early as the spring of 1922 rumors of an organization were […]

Examining the life span of a baseball stadium by profiling its first and last games is an interesting exercise—even more interesting when it becomes a number of different stadiums. This is the case with the Polo Groundses, four or five—depending on how one counts them—samely-named stadiums. Taking a look at ten different games over an […]

This is the musical score to one of the songs devoted to Mays in 1954, written by Willard Robinson and performed by Johnny Long and His Orchestra. (Courtesy of KeyMan Collectibles)   James S. Hirsch, a biographer of Willie Mays, wrote that even before his Rookie of the Year Award, his MVPs, batting title, numerous […]

New Cathedral Cemetery in southwest Baltimore is of some interest to baseball historians because it is the final resting place for six prominent baseball personages. Baseball greats are enshrined at Cooperstown, N.Y., but they do not live there, or die there, or are buried there. Their memorial stones are scattered throughout the nation. Therefore, it […]

1960 San Francisco Giants Goodwill tour program featuring Willie Mays (Robert Fitts Collection)   The San Francisco Giants enjoyed a banner year in 1960. After almost five years of planning by the city’s mayor and Board of Supervisors and two years of problem-plagued construction, the Giants’ new ballpark, Candlestick Park, opened in time for the […]

Leona Kearns was a young woman, a teenage pitcher during the Roaring Twenties. Eddie Ainsmith was once a major-league catcher. When their lives intersected, tragedy was the result. Back when automobiles were rare and baseball players heroes, Claude and Evalina Gard Kearns raised seven children in the small town of West Union, Illinois: Russell, Forest, […]

On September 23, 1908, as I wrote in The Un­forgettable Season, “the Giants and Cubs played the most celebrated, most widely discussed, most controversial contest in the history of American sports. The game was declared a 1 to 1 tie.” This was, of course, the game of the “Merkle blunder.” As Kurosawa’s film masterpiece Rashomon beautifully illustrated, the same event may be […]

Baseball didn’t just develop into the national pastime in the late 19th century. Baseball also developed into one word at that time from its roots as a two-word phrase. The one-word term “baseball” developed into its compound form from its previous spelling as two separate words, the adjective “base” preceding the noun “ball,” and an […]