The Senators send Clyde Vollmer to Boston for SS Merl Combs and OF Tommy O’Brien. The following day, the Sox will sell P Harry Dorish to the Browns.
1950 – New York Yankees pitcher Vic Raschi, troubled by the new rule that requires a one-second stop before delivery with men on base, balks four times in one game, a club record and two fewer than the single-season record. Nevertheless, Raschi wins, 4 – 3, over the Chicago White Sox. He will finish the season with six balks to tie the since-topped American League mark.
The first opening night game is held in St. Louis. The Cardinals, behind a complete game by Gerry Staley and home runs from Red Schoendienst and Stan Musial, beat the Pirates, 4 – 2, at Sportsman’s Park.
U.S. President Harry Truman throws out two balls at the Washington Senators opener – one left-handed and the other right-handed – then watches the Senators beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 8 – 7. When rain starts falling in the 6th inning, he puts on a raincoat and remains to the end.
1950 – The phrase “bullpen baron” — which will be applied much more famously to Pirates reliever ElRoy Face by beat writer Jack Hernon in 1959 — is coined by Joe Reichler of the Associated Press in his pre-season profile of the St. Louis Cardinals: “For relief they have Ted Wilks, the league’s bullpen baron with a 10-3 record for 59 assignments last year.”
Pacific Coast League Hollywood Stars wear shorts and rayon shirts as their Opening Day uniform. In 1976, the White Sox will also don shorts in the first game of a doubleheader against Kansas City.
1949 – Bill Veeck sells the Cleveland Indians for $2.2 million to a local syndicate headed by Ellis Ryan. Hank Greenberg will be general manager.
1949 – Gillette buys the World Series television rights for $1.37 million, the money to be dedicated to the players’ pension fund.
As part of the Browns’ five-year plan, team president William O. DeWitt announces that 14 players who are 28 years old or older will be put on the trading block. The youth movement is the result of St. Louis finishing in seventh-place with a record of 53 wins and 101 losses.
The San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, infused with some major league players, complete an 11-game trip to American-occupied Japan, a tour that drew more than half a million spectators to the games played at Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Lefty O’Doul, the team’s 52 year-old skipper, who had been personally asked by General Douglas McArthur to organize the first post-war peacetime cultural exchanges between the two nations due to his warm relationship with Asian nation, will be enthusiastically greeted by the Japanese fans, including Emperor Hirohito and Prince Akihito.
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