During baseball’s golden years, the season ran from mid-April to late September and each team played twenty-two-game symmetrical series against the other seven teams in its league, eleven on the home field, eleven on the 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 pennant winner from the other league 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. College alumni, of whom there were fewer then, attended the alma mater’s football and basketball games, but neither sport commanded today’s devotion. 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 the games were broadcast on the 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 show 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 games at the old Madison Square Garden were a way to pass the time while they waited. that baseball teams go to Florida for spring training.
Fans of yesteryear call the half century that passed that way “The Golden Age of Baseball.” Sports writers 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 foremost. second. That disrupted the old symmetry and tradition, but even the purists had to admit that that first break from 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” – bunts, stolen bases, the hit and the run – years before its inventors, the Gashouse Gang and Eddie Stanky were born. After the move, the Browns took on the old Oriole name and began attracting more than a million fans a year and building the team that featured Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Boog Powell and four 20-game winning pitchers in a row. single season. Again, if any change in an old institution so steeped in tradition can be called positive, the resurgence of the Baltimore Orioles was a second positive change. But how often the first small breaks in an old dam 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 A’s had been the Athens of Major League Baseball for the Sparta of the New York Giants. During their 1927-1932 revival they finished first three times, second only to the Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig Yankees three times and won the World Series twice. However, after 1933, when the Great Depression deepened, the A’s had a series of seasons in which they lost two-thirds of their games. Attendance dipped below 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 A’s, Kansas City became the westernmost city in the major leagues. Although the team continued to lose two games out of three, it attracted more than 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 a zoo behind the outfield, moved fences to favor his team’s hitters, sent fresh baseballs to the umpire via electronic rabbit, and outfitted his ground crew in space suits. In addition, he pioneered the use of designated hitters to bat for pitchers, attempted to introduce designated baserunners, and switch from four balls and three strikes to a shorter, 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 Ebbets Fields, which seats 35,000. 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 as long; the intensity was not that high. In Brooklyn, fans arrived early for batting practice, stayed the full nine innings, and knew the players without a scorecard. The Angels came in quickly during the top of the third and ducked after the bottom of the seventh to get a jumper to hit the freeway.
The Giants’ new home at Candlestick Park, outside San Francisco, was as peculiar in its cold, windy weather as the Polo Grounds had been in its bathtub-like dimensions, but a steady stream of great players showed 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 Alous, Felix, Matty and Jesus, Harvey Kuenn, Johnny Antonelli, Jack Sanford and Mike McCormick. . Hall of Famers Duke Snider and Warren Spahn and 200-game winner Billy Pierce finished 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 out of Ebbets Fields and the Giants out of the Polo Grounds to California for financial reasons was equivalent to moving the Houses of Parliament out of London. . to Liverpool as part of a real estate strategy. Surely, then, for baseball purists and Giants and Dodgers fans of yesteryear, 1957 was the closing year of Baseball’s Golden Age and 1958 the first of the years that saw Baseball’s decline.