The state of Rhode Island has not had a major league baseball team of its own since the Providence Grays of the National League folded after the 1885 season, but other major league clubs have made brief visits to the state to play exhibition games. During World War II, from 1942 through 1945, 28 games were played in the state. These games fell into two categories: games against military teams, which were very common during the war, and contests held at the new Pawtucket Stadium against the minor league Pawtucket Slaters. The rosters of the major league teams would become diluted during the war due to 4,500 professional baseball players serving in the U.S. Military, but their visits still brought plenty of excitement.

Pawtucket Stadium, renamed as “McCoy Stadium” a few years later, officially opened on July 4, 1942. It became the home of several minor league teams, including the Pawtucket Red Sox, who hosted an (almost) annual game against the Boston Red Sox from 1973 through 1999. The Pawtucket Red Sox moved to Worcester, Massachusetts for the 2021 season, and in 2025 McCoy Stadium is being demolished to make way for a new high school for the city of Pawtucket.

The Ryder Cup matches between the United States and Great Britain were cancelled during World War II, but beginning in 1940, the American team played a series of “challenge matches” in the Detroit area to raise money for war-related charities. This is the story of those matches. 

The Ryder Cup Challenge Matches

The Ryder Cup Challenge Matches: Scorecards and Results, 1940-1943

Held in Worcester, Massachusetts, this event started a tradition that has lasted for 100 years. Click here to read this story of Hagen, Sarazen, and the early days of professional golf.

image source (CC 4.0): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fan_Village_Ryder_Cup_2023.jpeg

Written in Python and designed to work with data from Pro Football Reference box score pages. Available on GitHub.

After Tom Brady’s retirement, I used this tool to create a set of 12 drive charts that illustrate 12 of his greatest games. 

The 1967 Boston Red Sox were not supposed to compete for the American League pennant, but with a new, no-nonsense manager in the dugout and a rising star in left field, the team captured the pennant and the hearts of New England baseball fans. While already well-documented by baseball historians, this collection of notes is designed to supplement those earlier efforts. Box scores from all of the Red Sox spring training games are included, along with an analysis of Carl Yastrzemski’s Triple Crown-winning season. 

I contributed an article on the 1981 Major League Baseball All-Star Game to the SABR Games Project. You can read that article by clicking here.

The 1981 All-Star Game was unique in that it served as the beginning of the second half of the baseball season after the settlement of the longest in-season strike in Major League history. After completing the Games Project article, I had quite a bit of left-over research that did not make it into the article, so I created an appendix which is available by clicking here.

A brief history of a lost Rhode Island icon, which was a home-away-from-home for the Boston Celtics during the Bill Russell era. 

Also: The Rhode Island Auditorium’s 1947 Calendar of events, as found in the pages of the Providence Journal.