Sixty years ago, aboard a Gilligan’s Island–style cabin cruiser, 82 would-be revolutionaries somehow made it from Mexico to the Cuban coast. They landed in a swamp, where government troops had been tipped off to their arrival. Pinned down in a sugar-cane field, only 21 rebels made it into the surrounding mountains. From such an inauspicious […]
PROVIDENCE GRAYS
Major League Baseball has crowned 139 “champions” since 1876, of which 137 represented cities that still have a big league franchise. The sole exceptions thrilled fans of Providence, Rhode Island, more than 130 years ago. Inasmuch as Providence hasn’t fielded even a minor league club since 1949, it may be odd to think of Rhode […]
THE STRANGE STORY OF JOHNNY FREDERICK
Shortly after the Dodgers traded Johnny Frederick to Sacramento of the Pacific Coast League in December 1934, he spoke to Harold Parrott of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Parrott had covered the 32-year-old Frederick during his six seasons in the Majors, where he hit .308 with 954 hits for Brooklyn. By this point in fact, Frederick had […]
STENGELESE
July 30, 2016, marks the 126th anniversary of the birth of Casey Stengel, one of the truly legendary baseball figures of the twentieth century. First as a player and then as a manager, he was known as much for his ability as a baseball man as for Stengelese, the vocabulary and implausible brand of double […]
THE BIZARRE DEATH OF LEN KOENECKE
In 1931, Giants Manager John McGraw was so smitten by reports over a budding second baseman with the Louisville Colonels of the American Association that he left his team in Cincinnati and traveled 100 miles to scout him in person. It turned out to be a wash; McGraw declared the kid to be of insufficient […]