History

The Boston Red Sox had few fans nearly 50 years ago. Fewer admit being fans back in 1963 and 1964. Few fans of today were alive back then. Those seasons were the Dark Ages of Red Sox lore. 

Jackie Robinson is one of baseball's all-time great players who is underrated by some of today's fans.

Robinson was a belligerent competitor who despised losing even more than he despised the New York Giants.

The general consensus today is the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and New York's other team, the New York Yankees, is the fiercest rivalry in sports. It is difficult for many of today's fans to imagine that a more intense rivalry existed, but it did.

The San Francisco Giants had a bad year in 1992.  The club finished 72-90, fifth place in the National League West, and were on the verge of being sold to a group of investors in Tampa, who had plans for moving the team to St. Petersburg.

This essay won the Society for American Baseball Research Negro Leagues Committee Scholarship contest in April 2010.

On April 14, 1947, Major League Baseball was a whites-only sport. Not since the expulsion of black players in 1888 had a non-Caucasian man swung a bat or thrown a pitch in the Big Show.

That changed on April 15, 1947—64 years ago today—when Jackie Robinson suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field.

Unbreakable records and feats are as intertwined with MLB history as metal cleats and pine tar.

Numbers like 56, 16, 1.12 and 41 are widely recognized as some of MLB's greatest and most famous stats and achievements, but every once in awhile a player or team will accomplish something that—due to styles of play or circumstances beyond their control—is so absurd it defies all logic.  

**This is an article I wrote after Harry Kalas passed away on April 13, 2009.**

Things certainly will not be the same in the Phillies' press box this 2009 season; despite the following-up of a most memorable championship campaign. Philadelphia, a city which has been gifted with the greatest of voices the world has seen, now have lost quite possibly the best of them all: Harry Kalas.

It was World Series schwag weekend in San Francisco, with rings and many other special commemorations for the defending champs' first homestand.

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Most of the self-proclaimed "experts" have already conceded the 2011 American League pennant to the Boston Red Sox. Some more conservative pundits have held back, predicting that the Red Sox will win only the Eastern Division crown, but cautioning their audience that, as Joe Torre was fond of saying, the playoffs are a crap shoot, meaning that a pennant cannot ever be predicted.

Many consider the 1927 New York Yankees the greatest MLB team ever assembled.

Most of this credit is given to the heralded “Murderer’s Row” lineup including Hall of Fame inductees Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, and Earle Combs—though having two Hall of Fame pitchers in Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt certainly didn’t hurt.

Others would argue for the 1961 Yankees—a star-studded roster in its own right with Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Elston Howard, and Whitey Ford.

It was the spring on 1996, and the New York Yankees had just had their hearts broken in the 1995 ALDS at the hands of the Seattle Mariners.

This article will tell a tale of how those same Mariners nearly broke the Yankees hearts in a much more profound and crippling way.

While preparing for the season, they got word of some bad news regarding infielder Tony Fernandez—who broke his elbow while filling in at second base for the already injured Pat Kelly.