Tag Archives: History

May 30: Helluva day in history for shortstops

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May 30 is notable as a day for shortstops: It was the day of a unassisted triple play, and the day where some of the most notable achievements by shortstops started. Take a look:

May 30, 1927: Jimmy Cooney, Cubs’ shortstop, catches a Paul Waner liner, steps on second to get Lloyd Waner (Paul’s brother) out and then tags Clyde Barnhart for a unassisted triple play.

May 30, 1982: Cal Ripken, playing third, goes 0-2 with a walk and a strikeout. He doesn’t take a day off after that until Sept. 20, 1998.

May 30, 1995: Derek Jeter, batting ninth, gets a single off Mariners’ pitcher Tim Belcher, the first of 3,158 and counting.

Predictions from history: The 1950 World Series would be between the Tigers and Dodgers

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From the November 1949 issue of Baseball Digest:

Actually, it ended up being the Yankees vs. Phillies. They were close though: both the Tigers and Dodgers finished second in their leagues!

Great Mysteries in Baseball

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Baseball is a sport where there are a lot of thing that are unexplained or unknown. For example…

  • Where, exactly, does Lena Blackburne’s Rubbing Mud come from?
  • How and why did Big Ed Delahanty fall over Niagara Falls in 1903? Was it suicide? An accident? Murder?
  • What happened to the ball Bobby Thomson hit in the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World”? I seem to remember reading somewhere that a nun caught it, and I think there might be a book out there about the quest for it, but I don’t think anybody really knows for sure.
  • Did John Smoltz really get injured while trying to iron his shirt while still wearing it?
  • Did Babe Ruth really have a piano of his fall into a pond in Massachusetts? And if so, is it still down there? (It’s a long story.)
  • Did Wade Boggs really drink over 50 (possibly as many as 64) cans of Miller Light during one cross-country flight?
  • Does, as the result of an agreement in the early 1880s, the National League (and, as the result of the merging of the AL and NL into one legal entity in the late 1990s, MLB) owe the cities of Troy, NY and Worcester, MA hundreds of exhibition games? (Essentially, the agreement was that Troy and Worcester would lose their NL teams, but as compensation would get at least two exhibition games against NL teams each year… I don’t think that’s happened anytime in at least a hundred years, and I have to figure it’s a lawsuit or publicity stunt waiting to happen.)
  • Was William White, and not Fleetwood Walker or Jackie Robinson, the first African-American ballplayer in the bigs?
  • Who put the obscenity on the bat in Bill Ripken’s infamous baseball card? Was it him trying to pull one on the card company? Was it a bat-boy? His brother Cal? Someone else?
  • Did Babe Ruth call his shot? It’s obvious from video and stills from that day that he was pointing at something, but we probably will never know what, exactly, he was pointing at.

And there are no doubt many more as well….

Headlines from the past: Black Sox acquitted… but still banned.

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Often forgotten is that the “Eight Men Out” actually were acquitted of their role in the scandal by the jury (it is a bit complicated as to why- it includes confessions going missing, amongst other things). Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis didn’t care though, and let everyone know it, as this headline from the Owosso (Michigan) Argus-Press from August 3, 1921 says. And Landis kept his word: Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Lefty Williams, Chick Gandil (the ringleader of the player side of the fix, who had already mysteriously retired to play semi-pro instead), Fred McMullin (who was a scrub who only was a part of the fix because he’d heard about it and wanted in), Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch and Buck Weaver (who didn’t take part in it, but had known about it and didn’t tell anybody) never played professional baseball again.

Great Bats in History

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Josh Hamilton’s bat is dead.

No, I don’t mean his hitting ability, I mean his bat. Literally. It cracked a bit over the weekend. But this was no ordinary bat. It will go down in history as one of the great bats of baseball lore. It hit eight home runs, including four in a game, during one of the greatest weeks in hitting history. Such was it’s reputation that, before being sent to Cooperstown, the Rangers let people pay $5 (to charity) to pose with it on Monday. 

A few things about the bat:

-It’s a H359 Louisville Slugger. It was made to Hamilton’s specifications after he signed an exclusive deal to use the company’s bats. It’s made of M9 maple and is 35 inches long.

-Befitting Hamilton, who credits his religion with helping him defeat the substance abuse that nearly killed him, he has a Bible notation emblazoned upon his bats: Jeremiah 29:11. I looked that up, and here it is-

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”

So now that we know of this great baseball bat, what about some of the other great baseball bats in history? Read on to find out about some of them.

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A little thing about Sexism, Racism, Anti-Semitism and Bigotry in general

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A few days ago, there was a news story that Our Lady of Sorrows, an Arizona high school run by a breakaway sect of the Catholic Church, had forfeited a game against Mesa Prep due to the fact that Mesa’s second baseman is female, citing religious beliefs. This is, of course, something that goes against every bone in my and most Americans’ bodies. It also is shameful in how it echoes past prejudices held in sports. Continue reading to see what I mean:

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Cool Old Baseball Headlines: The Beginning

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Huzzah, internet! Google used to scan a bunch of old newspapers, and although they stopped doing it, the ones they did before they ceased the scanning are still there. Thus allowing us to see such headlines as this beauty from the Boston Evening Transcript July 10, 1914:

Kind of different from the reaction of Bryce Harper coming up to the bigs, huh?

Texas + Baltimore= Wackiness

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On May 10, 1972, the Texas Rangers (formerly the Washington Senators) faced the Baltimore Orioles for the first time. The game was a tight pitching duel between Dave McNally and Pete Broberg, who both went the distance. In a strange circumstance, the Orioles would win when, in the bottom of the ninth, Merv Rettenmund would score on a error by Rangers’ catcher Ken Suarez. In other words, not a single earned run was scored in the 1-0 Orioles victory.

This set the tone for the future of the two most bizarrely matched teams in baseball. When the Red Sox and Yankees face off, the games go forever. When the Orioles and Rangers face each other, games go to the Twilight Zone. So after that first game, where no earned runs were scored, here are some notable occurrences since then:

Interestingly enough, the weirdness magnet that is Texas-Baltimore did not start when the Rangers moved their from DC. On Sept. 12, 1962, Senators pitcher Tom Cheney went 16 innings and had a record 21 strikeouts.

Know of any other weird Texas-Baltimore games? Let me know.

Great Predictions in History: Kiko Garcia will be the Orioles’ shortstop of the future (in 1980)

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Google Books has lots of old Baseball Digest issues available. It is interesting to see how previous generations thought. And, so often, it is fun to see how wrong they were. Take this headline from March, 1980.

Kiko Garcia had an okay career and was able to stick around baseball for parts of 10 seasons, but ultimately he ended his career with a middling .239 BA, .286 OBP and .323 SLG. He had a total of 12 career home runs.

Funnily enough, at the time this was published in Baseball Digest, there was a third baseman in Orioles camp who, just the year before had hit a respectable .286 between Miami and Charlotte. He was headed towards a breakout 1980 season, where he’d hit .276/.367/.492 and hit 25 home runs. The year after that, he was in Rochester. And the year after that, he was Rookie of the Year in Baltimore… as a shortstop. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He was Cal Ripken Jr.

Kiko Garcia, by the way, was sent to Houston in 1981 and never played in more than 100 games again.