Sports Archives - Pittsburgh Quarterly

Just before the beginning of the 1946 All-Star game, played 80 years ago in Boston’s Fenway Park, Ted Williams approached Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell and said, “Hey Rip, you wouldn’t throw that damn crazy pitch in a game like this, would you?” Sewell responded, “I’m gonna throw it to you, Ted, so look out.” That …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

“Hey, Kraut Head: I’m Comin'”

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

In a 1944 interview with Chet Smith, the long-time sports editor of The Pittsburgh Press, Honus Wagner was asked to name his greatest day in baseball. Wagner went back to the final game of the 1909 World Series between the Pirates and the Detroit Tigers and the moment that Ty Cobb, leading off first base, …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

When the Steelers Hired Three Coaches — In One Season

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

As Mike McCarthy takes over as coach of the Steelers, sportswriters across the country remarked about the Steelers’ “unprecedented stability” with just four head coaches in 57 years, “unmatched by any NFL franchise in the Super Bowl era.” Well, sports fans, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, in the early years, the opposite was …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

Maz, You’re Up

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

In 2010, The Heinz History Center published Maz, You’re Up, a children’s book written by Kelly Mazeroski, Bill Mazeroski’s daughter-in-law. When Kelly was writing the book, Sally O’Leary, a good friend and, at that time, the Alumni Liaison for the Pittsburgh Pirates Alumni Association, told me that Kelly had never done anything like this before …

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History Sports

Heavyweight Champion John L. Sullivan’s Wild Bouts in McKeesport and Allegheny City

by Clayton Trutor

“The air of Pittsburgh has been thicker today than at any time since the discovery and general use of natural gas,” intoned an unnamed editorialist for the Pittsburgh Post on September 19, 1886. “But not as in the old time with smoke however but with pugilism.” On the previous evening, heavyweight boxing champion John L. …

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Sports

I Almost Missed the Greatest Play in NFL History

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

Each Christmas reminds me of the near miss I had with the most dramatic moment in NFL history. In 1969, my wife Anita and I and our kids had moved to Carbondale, Illinois where I took a teaching position in the English Department at Southern Illinois University. With our families still living in the Pittsburgh …

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History Sports

Steelers Cheerleaders?

by Bob Fulton

Dedicated students of Steelers history are likely aware that Pittsburgh was the first NFL team to feature cheerleaders. The Steelerettes, composed of co-eds from what was then Robert Morris Junior College, were active from 1961 to 1969. But mention the Ingots — the Steelerettes’ male counterparts — to any Pittsburgh fan and the response is …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

Ralph Kiner and the FBI

by Bob Fulton

Though he was regarded as one of the most fearsome sluggers in Major League Baseball, Ralph Kiner did step aside once for a “pinch hitter.” An FBI agent. The Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder was the focus of an extortion plot in the summer of 1952. He was instructed in a letter to deliver $6,200 to an …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

There is Crying in Baseball

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

In A League of Their Own, the fictionalized story of the World War II All-American Girls Professional League, Tom Hanks delivers one of the most memorable lines in the history of baseball movies. Playing the foul-mouthed, alcoholic Jimmy Dugan, the manager of the Rockford Peaches, he, at one point, verbally abuses Evelyn, his right fielder, …

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Books Sports

Myron Cope: The Man Behind the Terrible Towel

by Fred Shaw

For a Steelers fan, watching 60 minutes of football at Acrisure Stadium without a sea of Terrible Towels is hard to imagine. In the mythology surrounding Pittsburgh’s most popular sports franchise, a playoff game against the Baltimore Colts at Three Rivers Stadium on December 27, 1975, marked the first appearance of the “gimmick” that would …

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Sports

Making It Happen

by Charlie Stewart

Mention the game of squash and it will likely conjure a traditional image of men in whites, whacking a hard, hollow ball off the walls of an enclosed court in the rarefied confines of a private club, prep school or eastern college. The indoor game with the long-necked racquet and dark rubber ball hasn’t always …

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Sports

How Baseball Brings Us Together

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

A. G. Spalding once claimed that baseball likely began with the simple act of a boy tossing a ball into the air. The poet Donald Hall, who wrote a book about Pirates maverick pitcher Dock Ellis saw this simple act evolving into “sons playing catch with fathers” and eventually into a game “on a diamond …

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Sports

Seeing Reds: The Pirates’ 1970s Rivals

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

Early in the 1974 season, with the Pirates struggling after finishing April at 6-12, Dock Ellis took the mound against the Cincinnati Reds. In spring training, Ellis vowed that he would hit the first five Reds batters because the Pirates had lost their aggressiveness and self-respect ever since their painful loss to the Reds in …

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Sports

Pittsburgh Hopes to Finally Get a Team Worthy of its Ballpark

by Brian O'Neill

Editor’s note: This piece was written and originally published prior to the Pirates getting off to the second-best start of the 30 Major League Baseball teams. Sixteen. That’s how many teams have won the World Series since PNC Park opened in 2001. Another five have gotten to the big autumn show and lost. That’s 21 …

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Sports

Baseball’s First Great Jewish Star

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

On April 15, 1947, Hank Greenberg played in his first game in a Pittsburgh Pirates uniform. He doubled in the only run of the game as the Pirates beat the Chicago Cubs 1-0 at Wrigley Field. A few hours earlier Jackie Robinson had trotted onto the infield at Ebbets Field and integrated baseball. Greenberg, baseball’s first …

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Sports

Baseball’s Best Book

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

When Ty Cobb died in 1961, Lawrence Ritter thought that “someone should do something, and do it quickly, to record for the future, the remembrances of a sport that has played such a significant role in American life.” He decided that he would take a tape recorder and, traveling around the country, talk to as …

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Sports

Paul Giamatti’s Father, Bart Giamatti

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

A few weeks ago, the CBS Sunday Morning program featured a lengthy story on actor Paul Giamatti. He had recently won a Golden Globe award for his role in The Holdovers. He was also one of the favorites to win an Academy Award, though he lost to Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer. Giamatti started his career …

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Sports Sports & Outdoors

Radio Rich

by Bill Christine

One night in Pittsburgh, in the middle of a Pirates game, Radio Rich, puffing on his pipe, came up to me in the press box and asked why the San Francisco Giants named their venue Candlestick Park. “Because,” I said, “they built it on Candlestick Point.” Radio looked askance. “Any other reasons?” he said. His real …

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Sports

The American League’s Jackie Robinson

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

Black History Month recognizes and honors the greatness of African-Americans who triumphed over prejudice and hatred and brought about major changes in American culture and society. In baseball, the player most honored during Black History Month is Jackie Robinson, who integrated the Major Leagues when he jogged onto the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on …

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Sports

Pie Traynor and Dale Dodrill: Lest We Forget

by Richard “Pete” Peterson

When Pittsburgh sportswriters go back into the past, they tend to focus on the glory years of Roberto Clemente and Willis Stargell and of the Super Bowl dynasty, but there are players from earlier eras that richly deserve our remembrance of the glory of their times. There are four statues at PNC Park honoring Pirate …

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Books Sports

From Basket Ball to the NBA

by Fred Shaw

While the debate over Pittsburgh’s status as a basketball town continues on barstools and radio waves across the region, what’s been settled by Claude Johnson, Carnegie Mellon University grad and author of The Black Fives: The Epic Story of Basketball’s Forgotten Era, is the important role that a black player from Homestead, once a “basket …

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Sports

A Victim of the Life He Led

by Clayton Trutor

Pittsburgh is unquestionably one of the great fighting cities in the United States. The city and its surrounding boroughs have produced world champions Billy Conn, Michael Moorer, Paul Spadafora, and a whole host of other world-class pugilists. Experts in the fight business place two-time world champion Harry Greb on top of Pittsburgh’s pugilistic slag pile. …

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