The New York Yankees were the first baseball team to wear numbers on their backs, in the 1920s. They initially wore numbers based on the batting order. Babe Ruth always hit third, hence his now famous #3.
George Herman Ruth, Jr. (Babe Ruth) was nicknamed “Babe” when a player saw Baltimore Orioles owner Jack Dunn with his new player and said, “There goes Dunnie with his new babe.”
The Los Angeles Dodgers, originally founded in Brooklyn, are named after the legendary skill of “dodging” the city’s trolley streetcar system that local Brooklyn residents mastered.
A “can of corn” is an easy fly ball. The term comes from when old-time grocers used their aprons to catch cans knocked from a high shelf.
The tradition of visiting teams wearing gray uniforms dates back to the late 1800s when travelling teams did not have time to clean their uniforms and wore gray to hide the dirt.
From 1995 to 2001, every seat at Jacobs Field was sold out nightly for 455 straight baseball games. The Cleveland Indians retired the number 455 in honor of their fans.
A major league baseball has exactly 108 stitches, a circumference between 9.00 and 9.25 inches, a weight between 5.00 and 5.25 ounces, and two pieces of cowhide laced together with red-waxed cotton stitches.
The life span of a major league baseball is 5–7 pitches. During a typical game, approximately 70 balls are used.
The first pro baseball game ever to be aired on television was on August 26, 1939. It was a doubleheader between Brooklyn and Cincinnati.
The longest game on record was between the Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers on May 9, 1984. The game lasted 8 hours 6 minutes and went 25 innings.
The oldest baseball park still in use is Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, which debuted in 1912.
In 1931, Chattanooga shortstop Johnny Jones was traded to the Charlotte Hornets for a 25-pound turkey. Equally bizarre was when Jack Fenton was traded to San Francisco of the Pacific Coast League for a bag of prunes.
In 2008, Dr. David A. Peters found that sliding head first into a base is faster than a feet-first slide.
The last major league ballpark to install lights was Chicago’s Wrigley Field in 1988. Until then, the Cubs did not have lights and played all their home games during the day.
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