This game, in particular 75-year-old Luke Appling’s homer off Warren Spahn, was one of the warmest memories baseball produced in a decade that featured a long strike in 1981 and Pete Rose getting banned from baseball in 1989. And it came not under the auspices of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and the rest of organized pro baseball, but because the people at Cracker Jack wanted to put on an exhibition game …

I recently did some Google Ngram charts for baseball and various kinds of drugs. Here’s a follow-up pairing some other terms. First, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox:

Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers:

New York and San Francisco Giants, keeping in mind that the football NY Giants still exist:

Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Duke Snider, the three scions of New York baseball in the ’50s:

Baseball, football, and soccer:

World Series and Super …

This is a little gallery of pictures from the Oregonian covering the Portland Mavericks’ first games, in June 1973. Here, manager Hank Robinson cheers on the team at its home opener on Saturday, June 23:

Here, the Oregonian headlines the no-hitter by Maverick Gene Lanthorn to cap a double-header in Walla Walla played the day before the home opener:

Here is the Sunday Oregonian’s full-page coverage of the Mavs’ first home game, …

I’ve seen some interesting graphs produced by Google’s Ngram tool for finding the occurrence of various words and phrases in books between 1800 and 2008, and decided to do a few about baseball and drugs. These graphs show what came up when I paired some words together.
This is what came up for baseball and steroids:

For home runs and steroids:

For baseball and cocaine, the pair that shows the closest link, especially …

In the wake of all the hoopla about 2010 being a Year of the Pitcher, mostly on the basis of a few no-hitters, two perfect games, and a return to a fairly normal level of offense, it’s worth noting that in 1989 many pitchers came within a few outs of no-hitters and perfect games. Of course, though, no one was labeling it as a Year of the Pitcher, and no …

In 1994, Todd Jones of the Cincinnati Post took a look at Wilson, his career and apparent suicide on January 5, 1975. Wilson’s one of the few major league pitchers with at least two no-hitters, and I believe the only such pitcher, aside from Addie Joss, to die in the midst of his career:
“He could throw hard – kind of like Bob Gibson,” said former Reds manager and player Tommy …

In 1994, Todd Jones of the Cincinnati Post took a look at Wilson, his career and apparent suicide on January 5, 1975. Wilson’s one of the few major league pitchers with at least two no-hitters, and I believe the only such pitcher, aside from Addie Joss, to die in the midst of his career:
“He could throw hard – kind of like Bob Gibson,” said former Reds manager and player Tommy …

The sweep of nostalgia for what I think is the first women’s professional sports league in the U.S. began in the early 1980s, about a decade before A League of Their Own came out. Dottie Collins, an ex-Fort Wayne Daisies pitcher, said, ”It wasn’t until we hit Chicago in 1982 for a reunion that it hit us. We were swamped with reporters . . . and we thought, maybe we …

A while back I gathered some remembrances of Vada Pinson following his death in October of 1995. His longtime friend, Curt Flood, died not quite a year and a half later, on January 20, 1997. Flood, of course, had a deeper impact on pro baseball, but along with that, he had a more turbulent life than Pinson. The L.A. Times’ obituary noted that Flood, who “made a lasting impact on …

By the way, none of these people are related, so far as I know, except for the baseball Uptons:
Canseco (Jose and Francisco, representing Texas’s 23rd district)
Lankford (Ray and James, representing Oklahoma’s 5th district)
Mack (Connie and Connie, representing Florida’s 14th district)
Matsui (Hideki, Kazuo, and Doris O., representing California’s 5th district)
Posey (Buster and Bill, representing Florida’s 15th district)
Rivera (Mariano and David, representing Florida’s 25th district)
Schilling (Curt and Robert T, representing Illinois’s 17th …

Alan Wiggins was the first mlb player to die from AIDS, and possibly the first well-known pro sports player to die from AIDS; he’d helped the Padres win their N.L. pennant in 1984, and was one of the better major league players of 1983 and 1984. But he died in an L.A. hospital about a month shy of his 33rd birthday, and had practically disappeared in the years since he …

One of the biggest themes of life in 2010 in the U.S. has been the worry that China is cleaning our clocks: that a government single-mindedly intent on achieving bold goals and untroubled by democracy and the mess of politics is spearheading the emergence of a Chinese century, and meanwhile a distracted, lazy, and ill-educated U.S. citizenry is not doing enough to overcome the obstacles of feckless politicians and selfish, …

Howser managed his last game as the A.L. skipper for the 1986 All-Star game on July 15. Two months later, in mid-September, an AP story said:
Kansas City Royals manager Dick Howser, who is battling a malignant brain tumor, has faith that he’ll be in Florida for spring training and will be managing the team April 6, 1987 when the Royals’ face the Chicago White Sox in a season opener.
”I know …

In its report on the death of Easter, United Press International wrote on Friday, March 30, 1979:
Luke Easter, former Cleveland Indians first baseman and one of the first blacks to break into major-league baseball, was shot and killed yesterday by two men who robbed him of more than $5,000 outside a bank in suburban Euclid.
The two men accused of stalking and killing the powerful home-run hitter, who played for the …

Back in 1978, Thomas Boswell checked up on Cuba’s baseball culture. Here, from the story he wrote about the visit, is the tale of how
the greatest batter in Cuban history, Wilfredo Sanchez . . . once came within inches of starting the only quadruple play in history (four outs) with a great outfield catch.
“Yes, we almost got four legal outs on one play,” Sanchez says, laughing. “But as it turned …

This blog is a member of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, an organization that started in April of 2009, and began robust growth that September, with about 230 members as of December 10, 2010. The BBA has chapters covering every MLB team, along with a handful of other chapters covering topics such as history (this blog’s chapter) and fantasy baseball. Baseball Bloggers Alliance Day, on Dec. 10, is an occasion for …

Scott Boras’s emergence as a super-agent over the past 25 years has deeply influenced the course of pro baseball. As an introduction to the man before he became (relatively) famous/infamous, here are excerpts from a couple of long profiles of Boras in the early ’90s. Since the off-season is the time when Boras and his peers are most influential, this is a good time to look at his early career. …

A little while ago I decided to look up some things on how talk about baseball emerged on the Internet, starting in the ‘80s with Usenet and moving into AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc., and then the first year or so after Mosaic and Netscape started the browser-based web experience and the term “information superhighway” started to be obsolete. Here, from Google Groups Usenet archives, is the announcement of apparently the …

I hadn’t known much at all about this story, so I went looking, and found this in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of Sunday, January 11, 1998:
On the saddest day of Kansas City’s baseball history, Dan Quisenberry watched Dick Howser say goodbye to the Royals through red, flooded eyes.
This was Feb. 23, 1987, three days after Howser had triumphantly returned to the Royals’ spring training headquarters in Fort Myers, Fla.
Seven months …

To complement the earlier post on the Expos’ last games, here is some material remembering the team and commenting on its departure. First, a Montreal Gazette editorial the day after the city’s last mlb game:
Depression was seeing the game come back from its 1994 strike with an economic model that made baseball not much fun anymore for small markets. Depression was seeing Larry Walker, Pedro Martinez, …