During the golden years of baseball, the season ran from mid-April to late September and each team played symmetrical series of twenty-two games against the other seven teams in their league, eleven at home field, eleven at home field. other equipment. . After one hundred and fifty-four games, the team with the highest 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. College alumni, of whom there were fewer back then, attended the alma mater basketball and soccer games, but none of those sports sparked devotion today. There were ten teams in the National Football League, 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, despite the objections of a sportswriter, the game was interrupted 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 at the old Madison Square Garden were a way to pass the time while waiting. for baseball teams to go to Florida for spring training.

Old-time fans 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 of the National League Braves moved from Boston, where attendance had fallen below 300,000 a year, to Milwaukee. There, with manager Charlie Grimm, with Hank Aaron and Eddie Matthews hitting forty home runs each a year and Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette winning twenty games a year, the attendance jumped to two million and the Braves began to finish first and second. That broke 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 attracted fewer than 300,000 fans, to Baltimore, the hometown of the old Orioles, founded in 1882. It was there that John McGraw, Wilbert Robinson and “Hit” they-where-they-are-not “Wee Willie Keeler invented the” little ball, “hitting, stealing bases, the game of hitting and hitting, years before his reinventors, Gashouse Gang and Eddie Stanky, were born. After the move, the Browns took the old Oriole name and began attracting more than a million fans a year and building a team that featured Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Boog Powell and four twenty-game winning pitchers in one season. Once again, if any change to an old institution so steeped in tradition can be considered positive, the resurrection of the Baltimore Orioles was a second positive change. But how often the first small breaks in an old levee! or precipitate a series of worse breaks!

The following year, the Athletics, 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 revival they finished first three times, second behind Babe Ruth / Lou Gehrig’s Yankees three times and won the World Series twice. However, after 1933, when the Great Depression deepened, the Athletics had a series of seasons in which they lost two-thirds of their games. Attendance dropped to less than 4,000 per game and Connie Mack had to sell out 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 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 the fences to favor his team’s hitters, had fresh baseballs delivered to the umpire via an electronic rabbit, and dressed his ground team in suits. space. Additionally, he pioneered the use of designated hitters to hit pitchers, attempted to introduce designated base runners and switch from four balls and three strikes to a game that shortens and less boring three balls and two strikes.

For baseball purists, the biggest and least forgivable shake-up to tradition came in 1958, the year the Giants left New York and followed the Brooklyn Dodgers west to California. True, the Dodgers’ attendance rose to two and then three million in Los Angeles, two and three times what it had been at 35,000-seat Ebbets Fields. Angelenos turned out to see Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Willie Davis and Tommy Davis (no relation) and Maury Wills. But it was not the same; the attention span was not that long; the intensity was not that high. In Brooklyn, fans came early for batting practice, stayed the full nine innings, met the players without a score card. The Angelenos rushed in during the top of the third and ducked after the last of the seventh to jump onto the freeway.

The Giants’ new home in Candlestick Park outside San Francisco was as peculiar in its cold and windy climate as the Polo Grounds had been in its bathtub-shaped dimensions, but a steady stream of great players appeared in 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 two-hundred-game winner Billy Pierce finished their careers there, and Giant’s attendance doubled from 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 tradition, removing the Dodgers from Ebbets Fields and the Giants from Polo Grounds to California for financial reasons was tantamount to removing 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 yesteryear, 1957 was the final year of the Golden Age of Baseball and 1958 the first of the years that saw the decline of Baseball.