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Chad Osborne

Freelance baseball writer based in Southwest Virginia.

How Citizens Rescued the Welch Miners From Financial Ruin and Brought Baseball to Marion, Virginia – Society for American Baseball Research

Not fireworks. Not a chance to win a boat. Not even sunny evenings in the valley watching an improving ball team go on a hot streak. Not even a home-run basher nicknamed Muscles coming to town.1 None of those could bring folks out to Blakely Field to welcome and watch the Miners of Welch, West Virginia, play Appalachian League baseball in the middle of summer 1955.
“It looked like the handwriting on the wall,” an unnamed Welch baseball club official said of the town’s interest level in the Miner...
Cardinal News •

Summer baseball returns to Marion — and the field where the legendary Nolan Ryan got his professional start

Gary Price and Steven Seymour stood on the silver metal concourse, staring at the field through the drizzle, sipping steaming hot chocolate they had just purchased at the shaved ice truck.

Like everyone else at this high school stadium, the best friends since childhood were bundled in coats and caps. Some others wrapped themselves in blankets and ducked under umbrellas to hide from the threatening clouds.

“It’s great to have baseball back in Marion,” Price said.

Baseball? In these conditions?...
Rain Delay Theater •

Remember the rain delay at Marlins Park, you know, where there’s a retractable roof?

For years, I’ve been writing about baseball rain delays. Weird, huh?More specifically, I’ve written hundreds of stories and thousands of words about how weather events have plagued baseball games throughout the game’s history.One of the more unusual weather events I’ve researched happened a little more than a decade ago when the Miami Marlins experienced a rain delay on Opening Day of the 2015 Major League Baseball season.So, why was this rain delay unusual?Because Marlins Park, as it was called...
Marion Mets •

After leaving Marion's Mets, Carl Gentile made a name for himself in soccer

Marion Mets Newsletter – Issue 36Most players who buttoned up the pinstriped Marion Mets jersey in the 1960s and 70s did so with aspirations of someday making it to the big leagues. Marion, Virginia, was the first step along the journey to the top.A few made it. A small group had long, successful careers in The Show, as players like to call the major leagues, and several others had at least a cup of coffee there, playing a season or two while shuffling back and forth between the majors and minor...
Marion Mets •

‘I’ll never forget that first pitch. It knocked the catcher’s glove off’

Marion Mets Newsletter – Issue 28If you know a thing or two about the Marion Mets, you’ve likely heard this story.Team president Bob Garnett used to tell it all the time. It was one of the first stories he told me when we chatted for a newspaper story about the Mets way back in the summer of 1996.It’s even engraved on a sidewalk plaque downtown.It’s a short story, really, about Nolan Ryan’s very first pitch as a member of the Marion Mets.Ryan arrived in Marion in early July 1965 and spent severa...
Medium •

Mud slingers: How the Packers won a muddy ’65 NFL title game

Once again, December 31 came and left without me sitting down at my desk to write and publish, on its anniversary date, a story about the Ice Bowl, the 1967 NFL championship game played between the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers.The New Year’s Eve title tilt is famous for the frigid, bone-rattling conditions at Lambeau Field, a day in which temperatures dropped to, depending on who you ask, -15. Wind chills had combatants, and about 50,000 spectators alike, feeling like it was minus 48. It...
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee •

Al Williams: Pitcher, Fighter, Survivor

A few weeks ago, my daughter walked downstairs and handed me a handful of baseball cards I had given her years ago. She had been using them for bookmarks, she confessed, and was ready to get them off her desk.


As I sifted through about 30 cards, scanning them front and back, I remembered something that had escaped me as I have become a more casual collector: You can sometimes learn a lot about a baseball player from his card, and it isn’t always about baseball. 


A good example can be found...
Marion Mets •

This Marion Mets catcher became a world-famous elephant trainer

Marion Mets Newsletter – Issue 14Bruised shins. Broken digits. Busted knees.There’s a reason they call catcher’s equipment the tools of ignorance.Roman Schmitt likely wished he had some sort of tools – ignorant or otherwise – protecting his body the day an Asian bull elephant charged him, goring his leg, threatening not only his livelihood, but his life.Roman spent five months in the hospital. He had 19 operations – there were bone, artery and skin grafts – and doctors worried they’d have to amp...
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee •

Christie Brinkley’s 1996 Pinnacle set goes ‘beyond presumed sex appeal’

Christie Brinkley likely was taking selfies long before you. Way back in 1996.


Want proof? Take a look at the back of that year’s Pinnacle Series II baseball card set. In it are 16 limited, random insert cards – one per 23 packs – that feature playful pictures the supermodel-turned-photographer snapped of herself and select members of the Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians.


Serious and casual collectors alike may remember the initial popularity of the set and the news that Pinnacle had h...