Baseball: national pastime or a sport gone bad?
As for saving the national pastime from tedium, here’s the bottom line: It’s going to be tough.
Tough because there are considerable differences between baseball today and when it rode atop American sports. As for some of those differences, we might consider the performance of Yankee great Mickey Mantle in the final game of the 1960 World Series – yes, that game, game 7 against the Pirates, the Bill Mazeroski home run game 7.
Mantle drove in two New York runs on that remarkable October afternoon at Forbes Field. He came to bat five times and collected three hits.
Here’s the thing, though: He saw a total of 10 – I repeat 10 – pitches. Twice he put the ball in play on the first pitch.
The Yankees scored nine runs on 13 hits on Oct. 13, 1960. The Pirates scored 10 runs on 11 hits. Not a Pirate, not a Yankee struck out.
They played the game in two hours and 36 minutes.
In contrast, the April 14 in Pittsburgh against the Washington National resulted in a 9-4 Bucs’ victory. The Nats had eight hits. The Pirates 14. Twenty-three batters fanned.
The time of game was three hours and 37 minutes.
I’m wondering how Mantle, who died in 1995, might react to today’s pace-of-play. Like many of us, he would be appalled. (Then, again, I’m only guessing.)
Recently, I’ve watched the final nine innings of the 1960 World Series twice. (It’s a minor miracle that the full game is preserved for watching. Part-owner of the Bucs, crooner Bing Crosby, out of the country for the Series, had it filmed off his TV.)
Here are some lessons to glean from that best of all games.
One. Pitchers worked at a brisk pace. Vernon Law, the Pirates’ starter, took at most 12 seconds between pitches. Bobby Shantz of the Yankees worked even faster. The lefty reliever delivered the ball to home plate between eight and 10 seconds after getting it back from the catcher. Pirates reliever Roy Face kept up the same pace as Shantz.
Two. Batters, once in the box and ready to hit, stayed in the box ready to hit. Oh, they occasionally stepped out. But they never stepped as far away from the plate as today’s hitters do. They didn’t waste our time for no good reason.
Batters didn’t feel the need to adjust their batting gloves after every pitch. (Heck, in those days they didn’t wear batting gloves.) They didn’t require time out of the box to inhale and exhale, to fix a shin guard or an elbow guard (these accoutrements were not yet strapped to hitters’ bodies), or to do any one of the other things which today’s batters do that causes the game to slow down.
Three. Batters swung early in the count. Mantle saw 10 pitches. On one pitch in the seventh inning, Bill Mazeroski hit into a double play. He hit the second pitch he saw in the ninth out of the park. Maz had two hits in four at bats. All afternoon he saw eight pitches.
The whole Yankee team saw 139 pitches on October 13, 1960. The Pirates saw far fewer: 107.
The game in 1960 was simply faster than it is today. This includes mound visits. Yankee manager Casey Stengel marched from the dugout to the pitcher’s mound three times in game 7. The Pirates’ Danny Murtaugh was there twice.
Neither manager lingered. Casey, 70 years old in 1960, made sure to hustle back to the dugout.
At no time did a catcher from either team feel the need to confer, mid-inning, with a pitcher. There were no visits to the mound by pitching coaches. The first and third basemen held their positions.
Hustle. Hitters hustled down the line to first base on ground balls. The TV camera showed them racing across the bag, even on easy outs. Today, hitters simply don’t do that.
We’ve all seen Mazeroski battle interference as he raced around the bases after he hit the winning home run. Two other Pirates belted four baggers. The Yankees hit two, including one by Yogi Berra.
Like Mazeroski, the other long-ball hitters on Oct. 13 sped from home plate to home plate. Even Yogi.
The game has devolved gradually. As a consequence, the actions of today’s players are baked into the game’s DNA. And there are additional hurdles to overcoming inertia, including time-consuming video replays and front office analytics. Those pesky numbers people have done far more harm than good.
While the NFL and the NBA have made their games more compelling, more entertaining, Major League Baseball has done the opposite.
The 2023 baseball season is supposed to bring changes on several fronts. A pitch clock promises the end of pitcher-batter dawdling. For this fan, next year can’t get here soon enough.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.