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The end of the golden years of baseball

During baseball’s golden years, the season ran from mid-April to late September, with each team playing twenty-two game symmetrical series against the other seven teams in their league, eleven at home field, eleven at home fields of the other equipment. . After one hundred and fifty-four games, the team with the higher win-loss percentage won the championship pennant and faced the other league’s pennant winner in a seven-game World Series that was the climax of the baseball season. and the sports year.

After the World Series, the sports world went into hibernation. Alumni of the university, of whom there were fewer then, attended the alma mater’s football and basketball games, but none of those sports aroused devotion today. There were ten National Football League teams, including the Giants, Bears, Packers, Steelers, Eagles, Redskins, and Lions. They played on Sundays, but most games drew fewer than 20,000 spectators. That was before television, but games were broadcast on radio, and in fact, I was listening to the Giant-Dodger football game on December 7, 1941, when, over the objections of a sportswriter, the broadcast was interrupted. party to announce the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no National Basketball Association and although people watched the four American teams in the six-team National Hockey League, ninety-nine percent of the players came from Canada and the games in the old Madison Square Garden were a way to pass the time while they waited. that the baseball teams go to Florida for spring training.

Fans of yesteryear call the half-century that passed in this way “The Golden Age of Baseball.” Sportswriters who remember it call it “the age of stability.” The first change came in 1953, when the last-place National League Braves moved from Boston, where attendance had fallen below 300,000 per year, to Milwaukee. There, under Charlie Grimm, with Hank Aaron and Eddie Matthews each hitting forty home runs a year and Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette each winning twenty games a year, attendance jumped to two million and the Braves began to finish first and second. That disrupted the old symmetry and tradition, but even purists had to admit that that first break with the Golden Years made baseball better.

In 1954, the last place the American League Browns moved from St. Louis, where they had drawn fewer than 300,000 fans, to Baltimore, hometown of the former Orioles, founded in 1882. It was there that John McGraw, Wilbert Robinson and “Hit-’em-where-the-in’t-is” Wee Willie Keeler invented “Small Ball” – bunting, base-stealing, hit and run – years before its inventors, the Gashouse Gang and Eddie Stanky were born. After the move, the Browns took the old Oriole name and began attracting over a million fans a year and building the team that featured Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Boog Powell and four twenty-game-winning pitchers in one single season. Again, if any change in an old institution so steeped in tradition can be called a positive, the revival of the Baltimore Orioles was a second positive. But how often the first small breaks in an old levee precipitate a series of worse breaks!

The following year, the A’s, the team of Connie Mack, Lefty Grove, Jimmy Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, Rube Waddell, Eddie Collins, Chief Bender, and Eddie Plank moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City, a much more significant break with the old tradition. . Before World War I, the Athletics had been the Athens of Major League Baseball for the Sparta of the New York Giants. During their 1927-1932 renaissance they finished first three times, second to the Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig Yankees, three times and won the World Series twice. However, after 1933, as the Great Depression deepened, the A’s had a series of seasons in which they lost two-thirds of their games. Attendances dwindled to less than four thousand a game, and Connie Mack had to sell Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, Max Bishop, and others to keep the franchise solvent.

With the migration of the Athletics, Kansas City became the westernmost city in the major leagues. Although the team continued to lose two games out of three, it drew over a million fans, but soon fell into the hands of an owner who found baseball slow and boring. To make it more interesting, he put up a zoo behind the outfield, moved the fences to favor his team’s hitters, sent fresh baseballs to the umpire via an electronic rabbit, and dressed his ground crew in space suits. In addition, he pioneered the use of designated hitters to hit for pitchers, attempted to introduce designated baserunners, and switch from four balls and three strikes to a shorter and less boring game of three balls and two strikes.

For baseball purists, the biggest and least forgivable blow to tradition came in 1958, the year the Giants left New York and followed the Brooklyn Dodgers west to California. True, the Dodgers’ attendance jumped to two and then three million in Los Angeles, double and triple what it had been at 35,000-capacity Ebbets Fields. Angelenos came to see Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Willie Davis and Tommy Davis (no relation) and Maury Wills. But it wasn’t the same; attention spans weren’t that long; the intensity was not that high. In Brooklyn, fans showed up early for batting practice, stayed the full nine innings, and met the players without a scorecard. The Angels came on fast during the top of the third and ducked after the last of the seventh to get a jump ball to get to the freeway.

The Giants’ new home in Candlestick Park outside San Francisco was as peculiar in its cold and windy weather as the Polo Grounds had been in its bathtub-shaped dimensions, but a steady stream of greats turned up at field. In addition to Willie Mays, they included Hall of Famers Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry, as well as the three Alouses, Félix, Matty and Jesús, Harvey Kuenn, Johnny Antonelli, Jack Sanford and Mike McCormick. . Hall of Famers Duke Snider and Warren Spahn and two-hundred-game winner Billy Pierce ended their careers there, and Giant’s attendance was double what it had been at the Polo Grounds.

The move to California strengthened the finances of both the Giants and the Dodgers, but in terms of baseball lore, moving the Dodgers from Ebbets Fields and the Giants from the Polo Grounds to California for financial reasons was tantamount to moving the Houses of Parliament from London. . to Liverpool as part of a real estate strategy. Surely, then, for baseball purists and Giants and Dodgers fans of yore, 1957 was the closing year of Baseball’s Golden Age and 1958 the first of the years that saw Baseball’s decline.