Baseball History
This Day in Baseball History
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On July 6th, 1933, the first major-league All-Star Game was played at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Babe Ruth hit the first home run of the All-Star game, a two-run homer in the bottom of the third driving in Charlie Gehringer. The American League defeated the National League 4-2. Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez was the winning pitcher. Cardinals second baseman… Read more
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On July 5th, 1947, Larry Doby of the Cleveland (then) Indians became the first Black player in the American League (Jackie Robinson played in the National League for the Brooklyn Dodgers). Doby struck out as a pinch hitter. The Cleveland lost to the Chicago White Sox 6-5. I was born in 1960, 13 years after Larry… Read more
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On July 4th, 1905, in the afternoon game of a doubleheader, Philadelphia’s Rube Waddell bests Cy Young in a 20-inning marathon as the Athletics down Boston 4-2. A’s catcher Ossee Schreckengost worked 28 innings that day, a Major League record. The Baseball season is too long. It is in all sports these days. I went to the season opener in Oakland… Read more
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On July 3rd, 1968, Luis Tiant struck out 19 Twins in 10 innings as Cleveland defeated Minnesota 1-0. With that performance, Tiant set two major-league records: most strikeouts in a ten-inning game and 32 strikeouts in consecutive games (and he tied the record of 41 strikeouts in three successive appearances). Sometimes when I am bored,… Read more
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On July 1st, 1910, White Sox Park opened. The stadium, which became known as Comiskey Park, cost $750,000 to build. It was the oldest stadium in baseball when it was closed in 1990 and replaced by a new structure called then also Comiskey Park. I went to a lot of games at Old Comiskey in… Read more
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On June 30th, 1995, future Hall of Fame, Eddie Murray got his 3,000th career hit against the’s Minnesota Twins’s Mike Trombley in a 4-1 Cleveland win at the Metrodome. Murray became the 20th player to reach that milestone and the third in franchise history to do it wearing a Cleveland uniform. I was lucky enough… Read more
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On June 29th, 1990, Oakland’s Dave Stewart and the Dodgers’s Fernando Valenzuela both threw no-hitters. Stewart blanked the Toronto Blue Jays 5-0, and a few hours later Valenzuela did the same thing to the Saint Louis Cardinals with a final score of 6-0. The rareness of this event was possible because Stewart and Valenzuela were such absolute studs at their profession.… Read more
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We are told by many commentators of the game that as fans we should be angry at the players who “cheated” the game of baseball by using steroids. Their argument is that steroids and human growth hormones hurt the “integrity of the game.” Personally, I think the Yankees (beginning with the purchase of Babe Ruth)… Read more
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My concerns about the future of baseball—a $10 billion sport enjoying an unprecedented era of financial success and labor peace—are not based on misplaced nostalgia for a “pure” game that never existed. They are based on the dissonance between a game that demands and depends on concentration, time, and memory and a twenty-first-century culture that… Read more
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