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Even when the Mets were at their most mediocre, dramatic victories were a common occurrence, and that trait carried over to the 1969 regular season. The Mets had their share of unlikely wins that season, including 11 in walk-off fashion. Mets Walk-Offs and Other Minutiae offers a closer look at those Amazin’ games.   April […]

Pre-game ceremonies for the 2019 Opening Day Series (Courtesy of Shane Barclay, JapanBall.com)   The two-game 2019 “Opening Series” between the Oakland Athletics and Seattle Mariners at the Tokyo Dome served as the eighth time – the fifth in Tokyo – that Major League Baseball opened the season abroad. To prepare for the season opener, […]

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 […]

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Spring 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 1).   Everyone, both those who cheered the Bronx Bombers and those who muttered, “Damn Yankees,” expected the pinstriped powerhouse to win the pennant again. It was a great time to be a Yankee fan. It was 1959. New York […]

At the end of the 1940 baseball season, all of the baseball men knew they would soon be facing the war’s demands. Shortly after the last game of the 1940 World Series, the order went out from Washington that all men ages 21-35 had to register with their local draft boards. Some men probably would […]

The 1954 Winter Meetings opened on December 6 at New York’s Hotel Commodore with an agenda filled with issues that had plagued the sport for years. They included the ongoing decline of the minor leagues, the increasing misalignment of major-league franchises with the national population, and player-management conflicts. Owners left the meeting two days later […]

On December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  The next day, December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. Three days later, December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy, supporting Japan, declared war on the United States; America in turn declared that a state […]

Gene Doyle’s 1920 All-Americans. (Rob Fitts Collection)   It began with big dreams and ended in chaos and farce. The 1920 tour was a lot of things all at once: a high profile, all-star tour that served as a diplomatic mission to engender positive relationships between two rising global powers, the United States and the […]

The excitement was electric, as crowds filled Yankee Stadium to capacity on October 10, 1923. For the third consecutive year, the Fall Classic was an all-New York affair, pitting the dominant National League Giants against the upstart Yankees, representing the American League. The latter fittingly christened their magnificent new ballyard in the Bronx by going […]

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume IV (1989).   Good afternoon, students. I am Professor Hailey, and this is Industrial Organization 162, “Baseball as a Business Enterprise” — which is better known around campus, I understand, as “Bats, Balls, and the Bottom Line.” In 1914 a New York court […]

Publicity photo from the Chicago Children’s Theatre production of Jackie and Me, featuring l. to r.: Kamal Angelo Bolden (Jackie), Patrick DeNicola (Ant), Sean Cooper (Flip), Phil Biedron, Vanessa Greenway (Mom), Rania Manganaro, Tracey N. Bonner (Rachel) and Tyler Ross (Joey). (Courtesy of Chicago Children’s Theatre, Michael Brosilow photographer)   Not only has Jackie Robinson […]

Babe Ruth, right, battled fiercely with Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert and manager Miller Huggins over the years. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   He filled the ballpark with fans who craved to see him hit the long ball. His home runs forever changed the game from scientific baseball to power hitting, and he helped […]

Nearly all accounts of the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies’ epic collapse, which would etch itself deep in the city’s historical psyche, focus on the Phillies’ 10-game losing streak that started on September 21, when they had a 6½-game lead with only 12 games remaining, and ended with them having lost eight games in the standings in […]

This article was selected for inclusion in SABR 50 at 50: The Society for American Baseball Research’s Fifty Most Essential Contributions to the Game. Author’s note: Jules Tygiel and I collaborated on this story for SPORT magazine in June 1988. Subsequently it appeared in SABR’s The National Pastime, in several editions of Total Baseball, and […]

This article was originally published in “The SABR Book on Umpires and Umpiring” (SABR, 2017), edited by Larry R. Gerlach and Bill Nowlin.   Umpires “Bullet” Rogan, Robert Boone, and Hurley McNair, Ruppert Stadium, May 2, 1940. (NOIR-TECH RESEARCH)   “What about our Negro baseball umpires? They are cussed, discussed, made the subject of all […]

Introduction and context It is a tale of precedent set and precedent broken. While the combined majors and minors confab would one day be called the winter meetings, minor-league meetings were first actually held in October, so Buffalo was among the first Northeastern cities to host the meetings in December (December 5, to be precise), […]

Oscar Charleston is shown here in the uniform of the Santa Clara Leopardos, circa 1923. The 1923-24 Leopardos, for whom Charleston played, were considered the best Cuban team in history—a team so dominant that halfway through the season the league simply declared them champions and then reorganized. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)   April […]

Pitcher Dick “Turk” Farrell was selected in 1962 to represent the expansion Houston Colt .45s franchise at both All-Star Games. In the expansion draft to fill the rosters of the new clubs in New York and Houston, the Mets elected to go with veterans, while Houston built on youth. Under manager Harry Craft and general […]

In February 1933 – when Jackie Robinson was 14 years old – Heywood Broun, a syndicated columnist at the New York World-Telegram, addressed the annual dinner of the all-White New York Baseball Writers Association. If Black athletes were good enough to represent the United States at the 1932 Olympic Games, Broun said, “it seems a […]