Not What it Used to Be

The steroids scandal has gotten people to talk about baseball again. We're not shocked. Baseball is now stuck in what we can only think of as its bronze age. The glory is gone.

We knew that baseball's golden era was marked by by the arrival of Babe Ruth in New York in 1920 and the departure of the Dodgers and Giants from Gotham.

But the game brought us so much joy as recently as the 1960s and ‘70s . We think of that time as baseball's silver age.

We still had the individualistic, old-boy managers - Earl Weaver, Sparky Anderson, and Billy Martin. Street smart and pugnacious winners.

We could count on certain teams to be perennial losers - the Phillies and Indians, for example. The owners were quirky and strange and sometimes even charming. They were as much a part of the city as the teams they owned - Joan Payson (New York), Bill Veeck (Chicago), the Tom Yawkey (Boston).

There were a few grandiose idiots - Chuck Finley comes to mind - who at least had the cojones to try some different things. And, of course, there was George Steinbrenner, a shipbuilder from Cleveland who snatched the Yankees away from CBS for a measly $10 million in 1973. He immediately declared he wouldn't get involved in day-to-day operations, and then did the exact opposite.

Old George is still around, but he's not the same as Young George.

Most ballplayers made the same as the average working stiff. Many struggled by on the measly major league minimum salary of about $6,000. A few, like Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, were over the $100,000 mark.

Yes, the ballplayers were still larger than life, but they lived like the rest of us, at street level, unprotected by gated communities, private jets, and posses that can be bought with today's average salary of about $3 million.

Strange and wondrous things happened. In their first season, the 1962 Mets won only 40 games, the most losses in Major League history. Then came 1969. Tom Terrific, Jerry Koosman, Ed Charles, Donn Clendenon, Art Shamsky, Tommie Agee, Ron Swoboda, Cleon Jones and good old Gil Hodges, aided by some shoe polish, won 100 games and beat the unbeatable Orioles in a World Series romp. The Miracle Mets, indeed.
 
We went to games back then. It was a father-son thing, a family outing. It was no less affordable than going to the movies, and a lot more exciting. Now, a trip to a big league ballpark requires serious advanced financial planning. More often than not, we choose to see our local minor league team. It's a lot more fun, a lot less expensive, and seems much more authentic. But it's not the bigs, and that we miss.
 
And, last but not least, will ever be another Oscar Gamble? His hair, a veritable eighth wonder of the world, practically required its own locker. But outsized hair didn't require steroids or HGH. Just good, steady grooming. Which is what great baseball's all about, isn't it?

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