When I first starting collecting baseball cards back in the 1970s, Topps had a virtual monopoly on the industry. There were a few other companies putting out their own cardboard collectibles, but they made up a microscopic portion of the market. Hostess, for example, occasionally printed a trio of “panel” cards on the bottoms of […]

On October 11, 1902, the closest thing to a World Series that year reached its anticlimactic finish. In front of 4,768 fans at Pittsburgh’s Exposition Field, Cy Young pitched a five-hit shutout to lead a team of American League All-Stars to victory over the National League–champion Pittsburgh Pirates. Pittsburgh had already clinched the four-game exhibition […]

Part 3 Now that we’ve established how gambling was entrenched in baseball culture as far back as the 1860s and how baseball officials had numerous opportunities to get rid of its worst offender, Hal Chase, let’s take a look at the most farcical game-fixing incident of the Deadball Era. If there was ever any doubt as to how […]

In part 4 of his five-part series on the MLB draft, Rob Neyer describes how the rising cost of bonuses helped the Yankees sign Derek Jeter in the 1992 draft. For want of $50,000, a Hall of Fame shortstop was lost. That’s how the story goes, anyway. For as long as the draft had been […]