Negro Leagues DB Update: 1910 & 1911 Negro Leagues

This week we’ve added the 1910 and 1911 Negro leagues to the DB.  This gives us the pleasure of presenting statistics for one of black baseball’s great teams, the Chicago Leland Giants of 1910.  Led by Pete Hill and John Henry Lloyd, both in their prime, a 37-year-old Grant Johnson, and the brilliant pitching of […]

White Sox May Need a Lesson in Their Own History

I was visiting Chicago recently on a trip from baseball’s “land of milk and honey,” also known as Philadelphia, and had the opportunity to take in a ballgame and cross another stadium visit off my list.. Chicago, baseball, Cubs, Wrigley is how the order of it all plays out in my mind when I think […]

Gambling on the 1917 White Sox-Giants World Series

The recent New York Times article about speculation that the Cubs threw the 1918 World Series to the Red Sox brings up the broader issue of how deeply major league baseball was corrupted by gambling and a money culture in the 1910s. A while ago I looked up how the Chicago Tribune covered the end […]

1920: Anything but Status Quo

All eyes stared at the Detroit Tigers dugout. If TV had existed in 1920, all of America would have been tuned in as well. Life began to blur in 1920. Some folks didn’t know what was what at the dawn of the Jazz Age, but baseball was baseball. Black or white, right or wrong, win […]

Aubrey Stewart: African-American Pitcher Killed in WWII

Aubrey Stewart was a semi-pro pitcher with the Piedmont Colored Giants who volunteered for military service in 1942 and became a victim of a WWII atrocity.

SABR 40 Convention Report

By all accounts, SABR 40 in Atlanta was a big success although registration was below the total in recent years.  I know I sure had a good time. SABR is clearly in a time of transition.  Executive Director John Zajc is resigning to pursue other interests.  His replacement is Marc Appleman who has had an […]

The Looie (Aparicio) Curse

The news that Luis Aparicio has let the White Sox unretire his jersey, number 11, to let Omar Vizquel wear it in tribute to his Venezuelan predecessor called to mind the story of the Looie Curse, said to have been pronounced on the Sox by Aparicio in revenge for being traded to Baltimore in January […]

Babe Ruth, Movie Actor

Many baseball fans already know about how Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season, apparently to fund his production of the play My Lady Friends in 1920, which became Frazee’s musical hit, No, No, Nanette, in 1925. But the superstar he sold did some acting of his […]

Lena Blackburne’s Playing Days

I first remember hearing of Lena Blackburne several years ago, when Mike Rowe on Dirty Jobs went over to New Jersey to gather some river mud with Jim Bintliff, the head of Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud. But his name only stuck in my mind last year, when I saw his name on a list of […]