How Baseball and America Have Changed

How baseball and America have changed since Opening Day, 1947 

Part I, 1947-1965

POSTED JULY 28, 2022

Seventy-five years ago, the Brooklyn Dodgers opened their season with Jackie Robinson playing first base.  Robinson was the first black player in Major League Baseball.  That year, he went on to bat . 297, score 125 runs, steal 29 bases and win Major League Baseball's inaugural Rookie of the Year award.  

Late as it was in coming, the breaking of baseball's color line was still seven years ahead of the Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education in 1954 and ten years before the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first piece of civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction.  Brown began the desegregation of America's schools, while the Civil Rights Act established the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department and empowered federal prosecutors to obtain court injunctions against interference with the right to vote.

The 1950's in New York were a heady time for the city's baseball fans.  The New York Yankees. the New York Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers gave us plenty to root for and the rivalries among the fans were intense.  New York teams won eight of the ten World Series in that decade, and a ninth was won by the transplanted Los Angeles Dodgers.  In the 1950's New York teams faced each other five times in the World Series.*

In 1951, the New York Giants had an end-of-season miracle run to tie the Brooklyn Dodgers on the last day of the season.  The Giants' incredible charge to the pennant began on August 12.  Trailing the Dodgers by 13-1/2 games on August 11, the Giants went on to win 16 straight games, going 37-7 down the stretch.   In the third and deciding game of the ensuing playoff, with the Giants trailing 4-2, Bobby Thomson hit "the shot heard round the world", capping one of the most incredible comebacks ever.  Even though the Giants would lose to their crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees, in the World Series, their 1951 season remains the stuff of legends. (Russ Hodges' memorable call of Bobby Thomson's home run is in the video below.)

In 1954, my favorite team, the New York Giants, won the World Series, and my childhood hero, Willie Mays, won the National League's MVP award.  It was also the year that I saw  Willie Mays make "The Catch" on TV.  It was the greatest play in World Series, and, quite possibly, baseball history. As ESPN explains, it was more than a "catch" or even a "catch and throw".  Calling it "The Catch" "makes an event sound simple that was borne of experience and thought and tremendous athleticism."

In 1955, the Dodgers, with six Black players now on their roster, won their first World Series ever, defeating the Yankees in seven games.  

In 1956, New York Yankees' pitcher Don Larsen tossed the only perfect game in World Series history against the Brooklyn Dodgers.  

Jackie Robinson retired after the 1956 season at the age of 37, finishing his Hall-of-Fame career in Brooklyn.  After retirement, he became heavily involved in the civil rights movement, crisscrossing the country and staging concerts at his six-acre home in Connecticut to raise money for the NAACP and the SCLC, writing in support of the movement in the pre-Rupert Murdoch New York Post, and participating in the marches and demonstrations of the era.  Like Dr. Martin Luther King, he was an advocate for non-violence and was front and center during the March on Washington in 1963.

Since their merger in 1903 to form Major League Baseball, the American League and the National League had each fielded eight teams, concentrated on the East Coast and in the Midwest.  That was soon about to change as faster commercial jet planes began to replace the older propeller planes in the 1950's and cross-continent travel became more practical.  

The 1958 season saw both the Giants and the Dodgers playing on the West Coast, and in the early 1960's both the American League and the National League expanded to ten teams..   

In 1961, prompted by the success of the Dodgers’ and Giants’ moves to the West Coast, the American League added a new franchise, the Angels, in Los Angeles. The league also awarded a franchise to Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Calvin Griffith, the owner of the Washington Senators, asked for and received approval to move the Senators there instead, giving the new expansion slot to Washington.

Not to be outdone, and facing the potential threat of a third league with a team in New York to replace the Giants and Dodgers, the National League added 2 expansion clubs for the 1962 season: the New York Mets, whose team colors were Dodger blue and Giants orange, and the Houston Colt .45s, who opened the Texas market to MLB for the first time.  In 1965, the Colt .45s were renamed as the Houston Astros when they moved into the Astrodome, the first domed sports stadium in the world.

As MLB was changing, so too was the nation.  The period from 1955-1965 was  the height of the civil rights movement and the struggle for social and racial justice for African Americans in the United States.  

Two events in 1955 - the arrest of Rosa Parks and the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till - sparked outrage and gave a sense of urgency to the outrages and insults committed daily against people of color.

In August, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman.  His murderers were never convicted.  Till’s death ushered in a reckoning, shaping the course of the civil rights movement, in much the same way recent killings of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor,  Ahmaud Arbery, and many others, have renewed a deep sense of urgency for racial justice across the country.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, tired after a long workday as a seamstress, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery Alabama bus to a white male passenger.  She was arrested.  The next day, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proposed a citywide boycott against racial segregation on the public transportation system. African Americans stopped using the system and would walk or get rides instead. The boycott continued for 381 days. In June 1956, a federal court ruled that the laws in place to keep buses segregated were unconstitutional. 

De jure segregation and "Jim Crow" laws were coming to an end, but it would not be over until many protesters had marched and much blood had been shed.  As the Major Leagues moved west and expanded, African-Americans were slowly gaining rights that had been denied them for a century, but racist violence and white backlash against African-Americans achieving social and racial justice would continue for decades.  

In September 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, faced down the Arkansas National Guard and a screaming mob, and then, with the assistance of Federal troops sent by President Eisenhower, integrated Central High School.

In 1960, four Black college students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Their actions that day reverberated across college towns in the South, becoming the catalyst for six months of sit-ins and demonstrations.  After months of protests and public pressure, Woolworth's  formally desegregated on July 25, 1960.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Sept. 10, 1962 that James Meredith was to be admitted to the University of Mississippi.  Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett tried to prevent Meredith’s enrollment by assuming the position of registrar and blocking his admission. On Sept. 30, 1962, when a deal was reached between Barnett and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to allow Meredith to enroll, a riot broke out on campus. A mob of angry whites confronted U.S. marshals stationed on campus to protect Meredith

April-May 1963 - Birmingham Alabama sit-ins began on April 3 to protest the segregation of public facilities.   Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, and other leaders were arrested on April 12.  Local students organized and participated in mass marches on May 2, an action dubbed the “Children’s Crusade.” In response, the city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, ordered dogs and fire hoses to be used on the demonstrators.  Over a six-day period, there were 2,400 arrests.  The actions, filmed and broadcast by the increasingly popular medium of television, shocked the nation.  On May 10 the protest leaders announced an agreement with local authorities to desegregate public facilities within ninety days and to release the arrested protesters on bond or their own recognizance. 

In August 1963, some 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. It was also the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s now-iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.

In June 1964, Andrew Chaney, James Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who had been working to register African-Americans to vote in Mississippi, were abducted and murdered in the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964.  

On July 2 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.  Provisions in the Act prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin in hiring, promoting, and firing.

On March 7, 1965 ("Bloody Sunday"), a 25-year-old activist, John Lewis, led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and faced brutal attacks by oncoming state troopers.  Footage of the violence collectively shocked the nation and galvanized the fight against racial injustice.  

On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965**. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country." 

By the mid-1960's, baseball's undisputed dominance as the national pastime was coming to an end.  Football, a more violent and, if you will, more warlike sport, was gaining in popularity just as America was ramping up its involvement in the Vietnam War.  

In August 1964, I was attending a New York Mets game with my Dad.  Sometime in the middle of the game, an announcement was made that President Johnson had ordered retaliatory air strikes launched against North Vietnam as a result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident***.  The stadium erupted in cheering.  My stunned reaction ("What the heck are they cheering about?") would prove accurate in the ensuing years as the war escalated and the lies justifying it continued.  

Notes:

* This season the New York teams - the Mets, who have not won the NL pennant since 2015, and the Yankees, who have not won the AL pennant since 2009 - are currently on top of their respective leagues, and talk has begun about a Subway World Series.  If so, it would be the first such since 2000.

**In successive rulings by the conservatives on the John Roberts Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been effectively destroyed. Languishing in the Senate is a new voting rights bill named for John Lewis who went on to serve 33 years as the Representative for Georgia's 5th Congressional District.

***Misrepresented as an unprovoked attack on American naval ships, the "incident" prompted a joint session of Congress to pass overwhelmingly the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, an act that led to the Vietnam War’s escalation.

Sources: How They Play, AARP, ESPN, SPLC, Times-Union, ABC News. Library of America, History.com - 1, All That's Interesting, Wikipedia, UM History of Integration, Politico, MLB, Gilder Lehrman Institute

How baseball and America have changed since Opening Day, 1947 

Part II, 1965-1994

POSTED AUGUST 2, 2022

Part I of this series (1947-1965) can be found here: How baseball and Americas have changed since Opening Day, 1947 

The Demise of the Complete Game and the Nine-Inning Shutout

One of the most glaring changes in the game has been the role of the starting pitcher.  Today's pitchers seldom make it past the seventh inning even if they are winning.  While pitch count is the main driver, the roots of this change lie in the late 1960's and '70's, after "The Year of the Pitcher".

In 1968, the Cardinals' Bob Gibson, a starting pitcher, led the Major Leagues with a phenomenal 1.12 ERA, compiling 13 shutouts; the Giants' Juan Marichal pitched 30 complete games that year and the Tigers' Denny McClain pitched 28.  Pitching had become so dominant by the late 1960's that something had to be done.  

“Defense now dominates offense to the point of extinction,” wrote Rex Lardner in the New York Times, speculating that by 1971 no-hitters would be common and fans would celebrate the occasional foul ball. “With the batter being as helpless as he is,” Lardner wrote, “the game has become largely one of pitcher throwing to catcher and catcher throwing back.”

While 1-0 victories are exciting in soccer, the slower paced sport of baseball would not endure an infinite number of low run games.  A series of changes beginning in the late 1960's turned the tide - so much so that by 2021, the American and National League leaders in shutouts each had 2.  

After 1968's "Year of the Pitcher", MLB lowered the pitcher's mound by 1/3 - from 15" to 10".  

In 1969, "Saves" became a statistic that was established as an indicator of a relief pitcher's effectiveness.  Over time, a specialty developed - the "closer" who would enter the game to often pitch just the ninth inning when his team was in the lead.*  Since 1974, eight "closers" have been inducted into the Hall of Fame and nine have won the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in their league.**

 Beginning in 1969, the strike zone was shrunk several times to give the batter an advantage.  The last change was made in 1996 with the strike zone is now the space at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap.

In 1973, the American League adopted the Designated Hitter rule which allowed a field player to have no other duty other than to bat in the place of the pitcher.

Free Agency, Unions, and the Players' Strike of 1972

Prior to the 1970's, baseball players were "owned" by the team they played for.  They could not play for another team unless they were traded by the team's owners, and, if traded, they would not be able to object but would have to play for their new team.  On Christmas Eve, 1969, Curt Flood, a star centerfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals who had just been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, wrote to  baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.  Flood's two paragraph letter pretty much ended his career but united a union behind his cause.

After 12 years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several states. 

It is my desire to play baseball in 1970 and I am capable of playing. I have received a contract offer from the Philadelphia club, but I believe I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decisions. I, therefore, request that you make known to all the major league clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season.

Of course, the request was denied, and the battle for free agency went to the courts.  Supported by the Major League Baseball Player's Association, Flood v Kuhn eventually reached the Supreme Court which ruled on June 19, 1972 (yup- Juneteenth!***) that Major League Baseball’s reserve clause binding players to teams essentially for life was legal.  But...in its ruling, the Supreme Court pointed to baseball's anti-trust exemption as the reason the case was decided for MLB.  Baseball's antitrust exemption could only be removed by an act of Congress and that free agency for players should be attained through collective bargaining.  And that is precisely what happened. Because of the pressure that Flood's suit brought to the baseball owners, Miller and the union were able to bargain for binding arbitration on grievances. In 1976, when pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally agreed to play a season without a contract, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled them free agents. Overnight, the feudal system that had ruled baseball began to collapse.  

As Flood v Kuhn was making its way through the courts, the union representing the players, the Major League Baseball Player's Association, was gaining strength.  On March 31, 1972, after team owners had refused to increase the players meager pension payments, the players union representatives voted 47-0 for the first players’ strike in U.S. professional sports history.  Realizing how much money they were losing as the strike dragged on, the owners caved on April 13. 

The gains by the baseball players union were a reflection of the times.  Nationwide union membership would peak at 21 million in 1979.  But those times were about to end.  

On August 5, 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air traffic controllers whose union had declared a strike two days earlier.  The union was demanding a pay raise, a shorter workweek, and better working conditions.  Not only did Reagan fire them; he permanently replaced them. And with that action, he sent a powerful message that many employers even in the private sector acted upon after that.  It was an important turning point.  Reagan's firing of the air controllers laid the groundwork for the assault on labor that continues to this day.  

Long before Curt Flood sacrificed his career to challenge baseball’s reserve clause and pave the way for free agency, he followed his conscience to advocate for social change. As a young ballplayer in the 1960s, Flood spoke out against segregated spring training camps in Florida and traveled to Mississippi with Jackie Robinson to support non-violent protests organized by the NAACP.  [link below]

How baseball and America have changed since Opening Day, 1947

Part III, 1994 - 2022

POSTED AUGUST 9, 2022

Part I of this series (1947-1965) can be found here: How baseball and Americas have changed since Opening Day, 1947 

Part II (1965-1994) can be found here: How baseball and America have changed since Opening Day, 1947

The Major Leagues continued their southward and westward expansion in the late 1990's.  After a yearlong process, on March 9, 1995, the league awarded a National League franchise to Phoenix and an American League franchise to Tampa Bay. The Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (currently the Tampa Bay Rays), would subsequently begin play for the 1998 season.  

Baseball on Steroids, America on Opioids

The 1998 season is also widely considered the start of the steroid era and a pivotal year when the popularity of MLB began to decline. Of the 13 players who hit 40 or more home runs in 1998, eight have now been linked, through Major League Baseball testing, the Mitchell report or other sources, to use of such drugs.  In 2003 the last steroid-related event took place on the field as Barry Bonds broke McGwire's single season home run record of 70 by hitting 73 for the San Francisco Giants.  Pitchers too were not immune to the allure of steroid use.  Although he denied it, pitching great Roger Clemens was implicated in the steroid scandal.  Numerous ballplayers may be denied entrance to baseball's Hall of Fame because of their alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs.  What is perhaps saddest about this episode in MLB history is that many or most of the players implicated would have been great even without steroids.

As baseball was dealing with steroids, opioids were becoming an epidemic.  The first wave of America's opioid epidemic began with increased prescribing of opioids in the 1990s.  In every year since the CDC began tracking (1999), overdose deaths involving prescription opioids (natural and semi-synthetic opioids and methadone) have been increasing.  While baseball has stopped its steroid use, the tragedy of opioid-related deaths continues.

Personal Computers, Data Analytics and Sabermetrics

 The personal home computer was well on its way to changing our way of life by the 1990's.  A fledgling industry that sold 48,000 computers in 1977 had placed 54 million units in American homes by 1990.  In 1991, the World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989, was opened to the public.  This valuable, easy-to-use source of information increased the market far beyond video gamers, and the users of spreadsheets and word processors.  By 2000, there were more than 160 million computers in US households, nearly every business in the nation had implemented computer systems to handle many of its daily operations, and data analytics had become a necessity for firms looking to improve their profitability.

Among those businesses making use of computers and data analytics was Major League Baseball.  Baseball has always been a sport with a fondness for statistics.  Generations of boys perused the dozens of statistics on the back of their baseball cards, which became the source of endless wrangling over who, for example, was the best centerfielder in New York City.  But those statistics on the back of those baseball cards were just the beginning.  

In 1971 the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) was founded, and the science of sabermetrics, the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity, began. The term "sabermetrics" was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate.  In 1982, sabermetrics was  introduced to the wider public with the first mass-market publication of the Bill James Baseball Abstract. 

Statistics took a big step toward revolutionizing baseball when the science of sabermetrics met the personal computer.  Sabermetrics has affected everything from how the game is played and managed to how a player's value to his team is measured.  

The pioneers in this revolution were the 2002 Oakland Athletics and their general manager Billy Beane.  Faced with a limited budget and the loss of three key players in the off-season, Beane and his assistant Paul DePodesta used a roster selection system based on sabermetrics.  That season the Oakland Athletics went on a 20 game winning streak. In Major League Baseball, this is unheard of - in the 122 years of modern baseball, only 3 teams have had longer winning streaks.  And on the Athletics'  limited budget (just 30 % of that of the New York Yankees), it was something of a miracle.  By the mid 2010's, every major league team had an analytics department conducting proprietary sabermetric studies.

Here are a few of the most widely used sabermetrics:

WAR (Wins Against Replacement) - a metric that attempts to distill a player’s contributions into a single number. This number compares a player’s actions to the expected contributions of an easily available replacement-level player.  Its calculation centers around the number of runs a player adds offensively and the number of runs he saves his team either defensively or on the mound.  This year's leader in the season so far is Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees with a WAR of 6.7.  The highest pitcher is Sandy Alcantara, in second place with a 6.0 WAR.

BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play) - BABIP measures how often a ball put in play falls for a hit (excluding strikeouts, walks and homers because they are not technically hit into play and affected by the defense). This season's leader is Xander Bogaerts of the Boston Red Sox at .382.

FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) - While Earned Run Average (ERA) has long been the mainstream king of pitching metrics, FIP was created to capture what ERA largely ignores. FIP looks just at a pitcher’s strikeout, walk and allowed home run rates, three main areas that the pitcher has the most control over. Kevin Gausman of the Toronto Blue Jays currently leads the majors with an FIP of 1.98.

Have the advances made by  sabermetrics been all positive? The Beyond the Box Score article linked below argues that while sabermetrics have given mangers, coaches, ballplayers and fans a deeper understanding of the game, baseball's popularity and fan base have been declining.

Can anything reverse baseball's declining popularity?

Since the 2010's MLB has introduced a number of technological innovations to improve fan experience.  They had to.  Ballpark attendance dropped from 78 million in 2008 to 68 million in the pre-covid season of 2019.  World Series viewership has declined steadily since the late 1970's with the three last World Series (2019, 2020, 2021) ranked among the lowest five ever.  

Many factors played into the declining popularity of what was once America's undisputed national past-time.  A graying fan base, increasing competition from other sports, and a seemingly endless season have all helped to shrink the sport’s following.  I am one of that graying fan base, but I haven't attended a ballgame in more than 10 years.  I seldom watch games on TV until the postseason - and then only if a player or a team I root for is playing.  My loss of interest in the sport is driven by what the game has become in recent decades. 

A couple of weeks ago, I turned off a game between the Yankees and the Mets before the end of the second inning as batter after batter fouled balls off and worked deep into the count.  Those at bats used to be considered epic.  Once in a game with the game on the line is exciting; many times in the first inning of one of 162 regular season games is boring. 

Changes to any sport are inevitable, but whether the changes actually make it better is debatable. Over the past 20 years, Major League Baseball has moved from "a game of movement and strategy to a static contest of boredom only interrupted by the occasional home run and even rarer base hit."  Or as former Yankee great and current Marlins' manager put it: baseball is "unwatchable sometimes...because nothing goes on." 

No statistic bears this out more than "balls in play" - the at-bats that do not result in a walk, a strikeout or a home run.    The number of balls put into play has been declining rapidly - in the decade of the 2010's there was a 7.5% drop.  Two of the key reasons for this trend are the reliance on sabermetric data and the fact that pitching has once again become dominant.

• The reliance on sabermetric data has led teams to value certain skills more than others; analytics encourages power pitching and power hitting. Skills, like hitting the opposite way, drag bunts and stealing bases, are no longer valued.  

• With the advent of today's pitching strategy of starter/set-up man/ closer, the improved conditioning and training regime, and the technology to capture information on every pitch, pitching has once again become dominant.  The average fast ball speed, about 93 mph, is now 10 mph faster than in the mid-twentieth century.  Pitchers are so dominant that there are more foul balls in a game than balls put into play.  The ability to capture information on every pitch has ignited an explosion of “designer” breaking pitches that has made for the toughest era in history for a hitter to put a ball in play. In the cold truth of its diagnostics, technology is telling pitchers what to throw and what not to throw. [link below]