Recently added articles from The Baseball Research Journal:

Pots & pans and bats & balls.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Thorn, John ... This essay is modified only slightly from the keynote speech delivered at the Ninth Annual Seymour Medal Conference, in Cleveland, April 27-29, 2007. The presentation theme of the conference was "How Did We Come to Understand the History of the Game?" The author took brief note of that ...

The summer of '14: almost a miracle: the Cardinals' first great pennant race.(1941, St. Louis Cardinals )(Reprint)(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Steinberg, Steve ... "St. Louis is one of the greatest baseball towns in the country. It has probably turned out more professional baseball players than any other city .... The youngsters of St. Louis know more about big league baseball than the adult fans of the average city." --Damon Runyon New ...

A statistical look at the men in blue.(umpire)(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Vincent, David ... Baseball fans love statistics. For more than a century, folks have talked about baseball numbers of all sorts around the water cooler and the hot stove, in the box seats and the bleachers, and, more recently, on call-in radio shows and the Internet. Batter numbers, pitcher numbers, and ...

The traffic directors.(base running)(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Fox, Dan ... "The main quality a great third base coach must have is a fast runner." --Rocky Bridges California Angels coach "It's frustrating. Your job is not to get in the way of a rally."--Rich Donnelly Dodgers third base coach after game One of the 2006 NLDS Most readers will ...

How much is a top prospect worth?(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Wang, Victor ... With salaries for major league free agents skyrocketing, teams are more reluctant than ever to trade their top prospects. These prospects are valuable because if they reach their upside, a major league team has a star caliber player under their control for six full seasons while paying ...

Can you hear the noise? The 1909 St. Paul Gophers.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Peterson, Todd ... Like the 1987 world champion Minnesota Twins, the 1909 St. Paul Gophers featured a home-grown first baseman, a hard-nosed leader nicknamed "Rat," and an outstanding center fielder from Chicago. Unlike the Twins, the Gophers were cruelly prevented from playing major league baseball because ...

More on streaks.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; McCotter, Trent ... You probably didn't hear about it, but in 2007 Derek Jeter came within two games of tying Joe DiMaggio's record 56-game hitting streak. How did he do it? From August 20, 2006, through May 3, 2007 (second game), Jeter played in 56 games and went hitless in only two of them. Those two ...

1899 National League strikeouts.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Frankel, Jonathan ... This article details my research and summation of 1899 National League batter strikeouts. Batter strikeouts from this period are not documented and summarized in any common source by individual batters. The team totals of batter strikeouts do exist in season totals as well as in the era's ...

The effects of integration, 1947-1986.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Armour, Mark ... This year marked the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson s first major league season, which brought an end to a 60-year ban on black players in the major leagues. The story of Robinson and the brave men who followed his lead and helped change the game has been told often and well over the ...

The empire strikes out: collusion in Baseball in the 1980s.

Jan 01, 2007; Beitler, Steve ... After a 1985 season in which he hit 29 home runs and drove in 97 runs, Detroit Tigers outfielder Kirk Gibson was the top position player of that winter's free-agent class. So when he accepted an invitation to go bird hunting with people from the Kansas City Royals, he believed the outing ...

The evolution of Japanese baseball strategy.

Jan 01, 2007; Fitts, Robert K. ... When Animal, sometimes known as Brad Lesley, decided to go to Japan in 1986, he was apprehensive. "I don't speak the language. I don't know the food," he thought. "Thank God baseball is baseball." After two months, he concluded, "The food is great, the people are wonderful. It's the ...

Baseball and briar.(pipe-smoking)(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Harris, Bruce ... Psychologists have long known that perceptions impact the way humans interact with each other. Stereotypical beliefs are attempts to organize the world and classify individuals into neat, predictable groups. For example, there is a tendency to generalize college professors as liberals and ...

Surprising Johnny Sain.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Finkel, Jan ... Most fans with a sense of history know a fair bit about Johnny Sain. Of course, they know all about the doggerel that goes something like "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain." They know, too, that he won 20 or more games four times in his war-shortened career, and that he won one of the most ...

An analysis of the gyroball.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Nathan, Alan ... Baseball has been around for over 150 years, and during that time many thousands of pitchers, hoping to find the unhittable pitch, have experimented with grip, delivery, and release of the ball. Consequently, rarely is there anything new under the sun in the modern game. When a potentially ...

Pitching behind the color line: baseball, advertising, and race.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Newman, Roberta ... Individually and collectively, baseball and advertising may be said to hold a mirror up to America. The image in the glass, however, is not always pretty. For the first century of its history, with very few early exceptions, "American" as defined by Organized Baseball, did not extend to ...

Faux real: dog and badger fighting during spring training in the Deadball Era.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Gripshover, Margaret ... The "sport" of dog fighting captured many headlines in 2007 with theconviction of Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons star quarterback who admitted to participating in the inhumane and illegal business of pit bull fighting as well as the execution of underperforming dogs. No major ...

How old is that guy, anyway?(understated ages of baseball players)(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Tucker, Walter Dunn ... Recently a friend recalled the first major league game that he ever saw, in which Joe Grace of the St. Louis Browns hit a home run off Dutch Leonard of the Washington Senators in Griffith Stadium. I saw my first major league game there, too, in 1947. Grace, playing outfield for the ...

A manifesto for defensive baseball statistics.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Bruschke, Jon ... Current defensive statistics are tar less meaningful than batting or fielding statistics, mostly because the correct information is not collected. Statistics that do exist tend either to be not revealing or incredibly complex. I propose the collection of a single new piece of information ...

Bonus clauses and the standard player contract.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Haupert, Michael J. ... During the 1998-99 off-season free agent Kevin Brown signed what was at the time the most lucrative contract in baseball history. It guaranteed him just over $106 million for seven years with the opportunity to earn another $8.4 million through bonus clauses. Brown's contract drew intense ...

Stolen victories: daring dashes that send the fans home happy.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Larson, Jan ... The slugger stands at the plate in the bottom of the ninth, the score tied. The crowd rises in anticipation. The windup. The pitch and ... there it goes! We've all see them. Game-ending or "walk-off" home runs are shown on SportsCenter almost every night and many fans consider them to be ...