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He threw a ball as fast as Amos “The Hoosier Thunderbolt” Rusie, hit the ball as “hard as any man in the league,” and was versatile enough to play every position except catcher.1 His name was Jack Stivetts. In an 11-year major-league career that began with the St. Louis Browns of the American Association in […]

Jim McDonnell, a backup catcher for the Cleveland Indians who got into 50 games from 1943 through 1945, left Organized Baseball after one season (1948) as a minor-league manager, and then figuratively disappeared. Though there is a file on him at the Baseball Hall of Fame, his post-baseball activities are uncharted. James William “Mack” McDonnell […]

Like Babe Ruth, he was a savior for the major leagues when the game was at risk of losing fans. Like Jackie Robinson, he was a courageous pioneer who blazed a trail and opened new doors of opportunity for others to follow. Like Fernando Valenzuela, he was the pride of a specific ethnic community, yet […]

Walter Anton (“Wally”) Berger, whose hitting for power and average and steady center field play sparkled for 1930s Boston Braves clubs that had few other bright spots, set rookie home run and runs batted in standards that stood for decades. Until it was broken twice in the 2010s decade, Berger and Frank Robinson (1956) shared […]

On baseball’s biggest stage, Chicago Cubs right-hander Claude Passeau tossed the game of his life: a one-hit shutout against the Detroit Tigers in Game Three of the 1945 World Series. Though often overlooked in discussions about the best pitchers of his era, Passeau was a durable workhorse and five-time All-Star who averaged 15 wins and […]

“I got the name Show Boat in St. Louis with the Cards in 1930,” wrote George “Showboat” Fisher in a 1985 letter. “The show ‘Showboat’ was in St. Louis most of the summer, the fans liked what they saw, so they started to call me ‘Show Boat.’ I hit .374 to lead the club, and we won […]

Bobby Richardson played second base for the New York Yankees from 1955 to 1966, a key contributor during one of the Yankees’ most successful stretches in their legendary history. Richardson was by all accounts a slick, rangy glove man and a steady stick man. He won the Gold Glove Award five times, he batted over […]

Dante Bichette is one of the most important figures in Rockies history. Though his major-league career began with the Angels, and included stints with the Brewers, Reds, and Red Sox, it was in Colorado that Bichette made a name for himself as one of the game’s great sluggers in the mid-1990s.   Bichette holds a unique […]

As a boy, he rooted for the New York Yankees. Before he became an adult, he was playing for them. Although he left the club for a time, it never left him, and when he got the chance he did not hesitate to return. For the past twenty-five years, in one way or another, he […]

Eddie Lee Dixon was born on May 16, 1916, in Bonifay, Florida, in the Florida panhandle region, approximately 100 miles northeast of Pensacola, where Dixon spent most of his formative years. Except for his years in the Negro Leagues and while serving in the US Army during World War II, Dixon spent his entire life […]

Dave Jolly was 28 years old when he made his major-league debut as a member of the Milwaukee Braves. Both he and the team arrived in Milwaukee the same year, 1953. Over the ensuing five seasons the soft-tossing, durable right-handed pitcher became an integral member of the Braves bullpen, throwing 291 innings over that span, […]

Chris Welsh was a prodigal son who returned as a journeyman southpaw pitcher for his hometown club. When his days on the mound ended, he ventured into the booth and gradually transformed himself into a broadcast fixture in Cincinnati. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, on April 14, 1955, Welsh was the third of four children and […]

Despite three separate injuries that cut three years out of his professional baseball career, pitcher Stan Spencer persevered, making it to the majors for 23 games from 1998 through 2000. His best friend growing up, Tom Mattice, saw this quality at a young age, writing in his high school senior tribute, “Stan…proved to me that […]

Red Barber described how Graham McNamee helped break the ground for him and other great baseball voices, starting in the early 1920s. “There was no lamp of experience for the pioneer broadcasters. They had no past by which to judge the future. This is what made McNamee and the others so great. Nobody had ever […]

Written in blue ink on his minor-league questionnaire was Wayne Granger’s ambition in baseball: “To be a steady starter in [the] major leagues.”1 In a major-league career that spanned nine seasons and seven teams, the right-hander never started a game. But his sinkerball and lanky, 6-foot-2 build helped Granger become the model of durability as […]

Picture this: You are standing in a dugout in St Louis. It is the seventh game of the World Series. The team you have managed for most of the year is nursing a 3-2 lead over the home Cardinals as you enter the bottom half of the sixth inning. Your ace pitcher, the eventual Cy […]

Eddie Waitkus was a slick-fielding first baseman who in an 11-year big-league career for three teams batted a solid .285 and struck out only 204 times in 4,681 plate appearances. Although a fine ballplayer, he would today likely be little remembered but for what happened to him on June 14, 1949, in a room at […]

In 1935, The Sporting News captured in a few sentences the early (possibly entire) playing career of Joe Bowman: “[He] was something of a humpty-dumpty, with more ups and downs than [heavyweight boxer] Max Baer, when he started out to follow baseball as a profession. Indeed, at one time, the right-hander didn’t know from one […]

Larry Doby is best remembered for becoming the first Black player in the American League and the second in modern history. When Doby made his debut for the Cleveland Indians on July 5, 1947, he broke the league’s color barrier less than three months after Jackie Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.1 In the […]

For the two major-league baseball teams that called the Bronx home, the 1925 regular season was dreadful. The American League’s New York Yankees suffered their worst season in over a decade, finishing in seventh place, 16 games under .500. The Lincoln Giants won only 7 of their 50 games in the Eastern Colored League and […]

Jim Leyland spent more than two decades in professional baseball as a minor-league catcher and manager and major-league third-base coach before getting his first big-league managing job with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1986. In the third game of a career that spanned 22 seasons and resulted in his 2024 selection for the National Baseball Hall […]

This article was published in the SABR Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 21 (1992).   As your father shaved each morning with a Gillette safety razor and you watched the World Series in black & white on NBC-TV back in the 1950s, you probably never thought you were making it all possible for your fa­vorite player […]