The Haunting of 1968

Abstract

The 1968 baseball season was considered the year of the pitcher. With his intense glare and fastballs under the chins of batters who crowded the plate, Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals permitted just over one run per ball game for the entire season, a modern day record. In the American league, Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers, who habitually swilled two dozen Coca-colas per day and would later be indicted as a gambling felon, won thirty-one games, the first pitcher to win more than thirty games since Dizzy Dean in 1934. No one has done it since. Carl Yastrzemski was the only American league player to hit above .300 and the National League collective batting average was a paltry .243, its lowest in sixty years. But with diminished offense fan interest gradually declined over the ensuing years. With the telecommunications revolution, the American public increasingly wanted its entertainment full of dazzle, speed, and neon. These were more readily experienced in a Magic Johnson-led fast break or a Michael Jordan acrobatic dunk than in the crafty expansion of the strike zone by a control artist who sent batter after batter trudging back to his dugout. Baseball did not feature the blockbuster pyrotechnics now necessary to sustain interest.