Buster Keaton, Joe E. Brown, and the Olympics

Baseball’s nexus with Hollywood had a center point in Los Angeles’s Wrigley Field on February 28, 1932 for a charity game benefitting America’s Olympians; the ’32 Summer Olympics—which took place in Los Angeles—inspired two comedy icons to...

How Cooperstown Got Its Name

Cooperstown is a destination rooted in myth.  Abner Doubleday did not, most certainly, invent baseball on a grassy area while he was a military school cadet. And yet, it is that myth anchoring the village’s notoriety as the home of the National Baseball Hall of...

People Will Come

Yankee Stadium owns the patent on ballpark magnificence, Ebbets Field maintains an aura of magic decades after its destruction, and Wrigley Field possesses a charm honed throughout decades of unrealized hope between 1908 and 2016. An Iowa farm ranks among those and...

The Saga of Eddie Gaedel

On August 19, 1951, Eddie Gaedel strode to home plate in a St. Louis Browns uniform adorned with the fraction 1/8 rather than a whole number, signifying his physical stature similar to that of the folks who set Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road. Gaedel’s cup of...