Baseball

Although the ceremonies surrounding baseball’s Opening Day have been around since at least 1890, it took 20 years for the commander in chief to become part of the tradition. The first sitting president to throw a pitch was William Howard Taft. The corpulent commander in chief ...read more

1. The first spring training was a spa compared to today’s version. In one form or another, spring training has always been a part of organized baseball. In the early days of the National League, which formed in 1876, spring training was quite different than today. Teams ...read more

He was the son of German immigrants. Born Henry Louis Gehrig in New York City on June 19, 1903, the future sports icon was the son of German immigrants. His father and mother each arrived in America as young adults then met and married in New York City. Gehrig, the only one of ...read more

Just like peanuts and Cracker Jack, the seventh-inning stretch is a baseball tradition. Precisely how this custom came about is unknown, but there are several theories. According to one popular tale, William Howard Taft, America’s 27th president, is to thank for the ritual. In ...read more

1. Paige learned how to pitch in reform school. Leroy Robert Paige spent a hardscrabble youth working to support his family in Mobile, Alabama, and may have first earned the nickname “Satchel” during a stint as a porter at a local train station. He grew up loving baseball, but ...read more

The “American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language” cites the conventional wisdom that the word “southpaw” originated “from the practice in baseball of arranging the diamond with the batter facing east to avoid the afternoon sun. A left-handed pitcher facing west would ...read more

Just how the “Big Fix” of 1919 played out remains a subject of considerable debate among baseball historians. Accounts differ, but the scheme may have first materialized a few weeks before the World Series, when White Sox first baseman C. Arnold “Chick” Gandil and a gambler named ...read more

By the fall of 1921, Babe Ruth had become the brightest star in America’s most popular pastime. The New York Yankees slugger, who first broke into the major leagues in 1914, had set the single-season home run record for the third straight year and already smashed Roger Connor’s ...read more

1. Ruth first gained fame as a pitcher. Although best remembered for swatting a prodigious 714 home runs and slugging .690, which remains a major-league record, Ruth was one of baseball’s most dominant left-handed pitchers in the 1910s. He won 89 games in six seasons with the ...read more

As Hank Aaron strode to the plate, the sellout crowd of 53,775 packed into Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium rose as one. All across the United States, baseball fans stopped whatever they were doing and crouched a little closer to their glowing television screens. The umpire reached ...read more

1. Robinson’s older brother was a silver medalist at the Olympics. During Jackie Robinson’s youth in California, his older brother Mack was a star sprinter on the Pasadena Junior College track team. Despite struggling with a heart condition, Mack Robinson later clinched a spot on ...read more

You may have heard that a young man named Abner Doubleday invented the game known as baseball in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 1839. Doubleday then went on to become a Civil War hero, while baseball became America’s beloved national pastime.  Not only is that story ...read more

With the third-highest career batting average in Major League Baseball history (.356), Joseph Jefferson “Shoeless Joe” Jackson would certainly be a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame—if it weren’t for the Black Sox Scandal. He and seven teammates on the Chicago White Sox were accused ...read more

1. June 6, 1914: A Pachyderm Party Boston schoolchildren donated their pennies, nickels and dimes in 1914 to purchase three circus elephants for the city’s zoo, and Fenway Park was the venue for their coming-out party. A crowd small in stature, but not in size, turned out to ...read more

Hot Dogs The world’s first sausage may have been made as far back as 64 A.D., when Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar’s cook, Gaius, stuffed pig intestines with ground meat in a flash of culinary inspiration. After eating the sausage, the emperor is said to have declared, “I have ...read more

Opening day snowball fight On Opening Day in 1907, the New York Giants faced off against the Phillies at New York City’s Polo Grounds after a heavy snowstorm. When the Giants fell behind, disgruntled fans began flinging snowballs onto the field, forcing the umpire to call a ...read more

The Great Depression threw America’s pastime a serious curveball. Attendance at major league baseball games, which had skyrocketed during the 1920s, plummeted 40 percent between 1930 and 1933, while the average player’s salary fell by 25 percent. Fans who could still afford ...read more