Major League Baseball is the highest-level professional baseball organization in America, and the oldest professional sports league in the US, dating back to the Civil War. It generates the second-highest revenue among the Big Four US sports organizations and features the longest season in professional sports.
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This visual analysis of baseball lineups from 1970 through 2024 identifies a few fascinating trends, including the altered role of the lead-off batter and the metaphorical death of the clean-up spot. Thanks to an abundance of data and some sleek design, this doesn't read like a standard data-driven presentation about sabermetrics. Instead, you're able to click through iconic batters' stats like you would flipping over a pack of baseball cards.
In the spring of 1984, a reporter at Sports Illustrated answered a call on the newsroom tip line claiming player/manager Pete Rose was gambling on baseball games. That March, the magazine published the bombshell report that led Major League Baseball to investigate and then ban Rose for life.
Only one team can win it all each season, which means the majority of fans are disappointed. This bot mines the data on how your teams have performed in recent years and measures your misery index (the higher, the more miserable).
Few baseball stars are more infamous than "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, one of the game's greatest hitters. Jackson was part of the Chicago White Sox team (notoriously dubbed the "Black Sox") accused of fixing the 1919 World Series. This resource breaks down the criminal trial that investigated those allegations. Curiously, Jackson and his teammates were acquitted, but Major League Baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis still banned them from the league for life.
The song is often played at the start of amateur and professional sports games, a tradition that historians say became popular during World War I. During the seventh-inning stretch of the first game of the 1918 World Series, a band started an impromptu version. Red Sox player Fred Thomas, on leave from the Navy, turned to salute the flag, and the crowd followed his lead.
In the mid-1950s, Wilfred “Bill” Winkenbach, a part-owner of the Oakland Raiders, concocted two fantasy sports games: one for Major League Baseball and one for the Professional Golfers’ Association. In 1962, he invented fantasy football alongside two writers from the Oakland Tribune.
This is the story that took down Pete Rose. It’s the culmination of five years of investigative journalism by a team of reporters at Sports Illustrated. Major League Baseball spoiled the scoop just days prior to this cover story printing, but the story shocked the sports world and earned Rose a lifetime ban. Three months after this was published, SI followed up with another cover story that included explosive quotes obtained under oath by a former bookmaker saying Rose bet on games he managed.
Colin Kaepernick’s protests during NFL games weren’t the first instances of athletes using the pregame tradition to make a political statement. This history walks through several similar instances, highlighting several lesser-known instances.
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