Category
Business & Labor
Ownership, money, labor battles, governance, and the economics behind the game.
The Owners' Secret Agreement
May 9, 2026
For three consecutive winters in the mid-1980s, major league baseball owners secretly agreed not to sign each other's free agents. The scheme was illegal, the damages totaled $280 million, and the consequences reshaped labor relations in the sport permanently.
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
April 29, 2026
Philip Wrigley launched the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943 to fill empty wartime ballparks, and for twelve seasons it drew hundreds of thousands of fans to watch women play professional ball. The league folded in 1954 and was largely forgotten until a Hall of Fame exhibit and a Hollywood film brought it back.
Bonds, McGwire, and the Summer of '98
April 29, 2026
Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased Roger Maris in 1998 and saved baseball from the wreckage of the 1994 strike. Within a decade, the home runs that rescued the sport had become the evidence against it.
The Curse of the Bambino
April 29, 2026
The Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in January 1920 and did not win a World Series for the next 86 years. The drought produced so many near-misses, so many collapses in exactly the wrong moment, that it stopped looking like bad luck and started looking like something else.
Free Agency and the Messersmith Decision
April 29, 2026
For a century, baseball's reserve clause allowed teams to control a player's career indefinitely. It took a Cardinals outfielder willing to sacrifice his own career, a Supreme Court loss, and two pitchers who played a season without contracts to break it.
The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues
April 29, 2026
For three decades, the Negro Leagues produced some of the best baseball ever played in the United States, built a parallel economy of black-owned teams and venues, and developed talent that white baseball refused to acknowledge until it could no longer afford to ignore.
Moneyball and the Data Revolution
April 28, 2026
A night-shift security guard in Kansas started writing about baseball statistics in the 1970s. Three decades later, a small-market general manager used those ideas to build a 103-win team on a third of the Yankees' payroll.
1791 in Pittsfield: Baseball's Earliest Written U.S. Reference
April 27, 2026
A Massachusetts bylaw from September 5, 1791 contains the earliest known use of the word 'baseball' in an American document, and it reshapes how we think about the game's beginnings.