The world series, then and now
The World Series isn’t what it used to be. It used to be, to mix a sports metaphor, the Super Bowl.
A number of decades ago, it drew the nation’s focus, as few other regularly scheduled events could. That was true particularly for those of us who were young at the time.
And yet, when I was a kid, the World Series, which started Friday, wasn’t even really a world series.
Major League Baseball, at that time, didn’t have many players from the rest of the world, from Japan or Korea or Cuba—except for Orestes “Minnie” Minoso—or from Panama, Venezuela or even the Dominican Republic. For that matter, baseball didn’t even have many native-born Black players since this was just a few years after Jackie Robinson.
What it did have was a kind of mysterious, alluring uniqueness.
For the first time—at least the first time since the last World Series or since meaningless grapefruit league exhibitions—a team from one self-contained insular league would play a team from another wholly insular league. We had no idea what would happen because, of course, there was no interleague play then. If you were, say a Yankee fan, you had little idea who played third for the Milwaukee Braves or who batted cleanup for the Pirates and who was good.
And it wasn’t just any teams from each league. It was, in fact, the best team from the National League playing the best team from the American League, best having been determined over a long, draining season. Best truly meant something back then.
There were no division series nor championship series nor wild cards; no drawn-out previous rounds of playoffs to dilute the excitement. There was no group of eight teams, in each league, trying to get hot at just the right time, even if they had only been marginally good for six months.
Maybe most important, at least to a kid, the World Series games weren’t all played at night, and didn’t all end later than bedtime. (As a sports reporter, I was at the ballpark to cover the first World Series game played at night, Oct. 13, 1971, the visiting Baltimore Orioles at the Pittsburgh Pirates. My memory is, by 10 p.m. or so, we froze our asses off in the unheated press box. By 1987, just 16 years later, there were no day games left in the World Series.)
Until the late 1950s, World Series games weren’t even played on the west coast, three hours later than east coast time, because the great national pastime stretched only as far west in the nation as St. Louis.
Growing up in the Bronx, we took it as our birthright that our home-borough Yankees would be the American League representative in the series every year. We were so used to it, the first few innings of the radio broadcast of the day games were frequently transmitted over my elementary school’s PA system.
I have a clear memory of running home, at the end of the school day and the end of the PA broadcast, to see if Don Larsen would be able to finish his perfect game. (He did, striking out Dodger pinch hitter Dale Mitchell for the 27th consecutive out, whereupon Yogi ran to the mound, jumped into Larsen’s arms and gave him a bear hug.)
It’s quite a different World Series now. To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll be watching. Once again, the games may end after my bedtime.