WORLD SERIES
SERIES TO REMEMBER.
As Major League Baseball kicks off its Fall Classic, memories of past World Series seem to sharpen the anticipation of fans across America for the upcoming games. Here are examples from 90, 40, 30, and 25 years ago this month.
1927 — Murderers’ Row vs. the Pirates
The 1927 New York Yankees, considered by many as the best ever baseball team, earned much of that accolade by pummeling their American League opponents during the regular season. Led by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the rest of Murderers’ Row, the Yankees won a then-record 110 games, and finished the season 19 games ahead of the second-place Philadelphia Athletics. Ruth and Gehrig, “The Buster,” engaged in a home run derby during the season, with The Babe breaking his own 1921 record of 59 by hitting his 60th on the season’s penultimate day.
“Sixty!” he yelled at the press after circling the bases. “Count ’em, 60! Let’s see some other son of a bitch match that!”
New York’s achievements before the start of the World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates prompted Ruth biographer Leigh Montville to call the fall classic “nothing more than a curtain call.”
At a batting practice in Forbes Field on Oct. 4, the Yankees showed the Pirates their power at the plate. During the session, Ruth hit five balls out of the park. The New York Times’ Richard Vidmer wrote afterward, “The Babe went on a batting spree, which left the interested onlookers, including the Pirates, open-mouthed in wonder.”
Ruth continued his show the next day in Game 1, which New York won, 5-4. Babe had three of the team’s six hits and yelled at reporters afterward in the locker-room, “Well, it won’t be long now, boys, it won’t be long now.”
In Game 2, Yankees manager Miller Huggins started a young right-handed pitcher, George Pipgras, to the surprise of the skeptical press contingent. Yet Pipgras pitched a complete game and won 6-2. Pirates’ Joe Harris grounded to Pipgras for the final out, but young Pipgras ran to first rather than throw to Gehrig. After touching the bag, he gleefully stuffed the ball in his pocket as a souvenir.
After an overnight train trip to New York, the Yankees thumped the Pirates at The Stadium, 8-1, in Game 3. That prompted Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror to write, “Pittsburgh is a crushed, spiritless club.” Ruth delighted the home crowd of 64,000 with his first home run of the series.
It was a different story in Game 4 on Oct. 8. With the score tied at 3 in the bottom of the ninth, no outs and two men on base, Ruth came to the plate. He had produced all of the Yankee runs with a single and a two — run homer, so Pirates manager Donie Bush ordered Ruth intentionally walked.
“Give me a chance!” yelled Ruth, according to the New York Times. “The Buster will do it if I don’t!”
But Gehrig didn’t, striking out, along with the next batter, Bob Meusel. Two outs. But with Tony Lazzeri at the plate, pitcher John Miljus unleased a wild pitch. Earl Combs dashed home, the Yankees won 4-3 and swept the World Series, 4-0.
1977 — “Mr. October” meets a female pioneer
The Yankees welcomed the Los Angeles Dodgers to Yankee Stadium on Oct. 11, 1977, for the first game of the World Series. Nearly 57,000 fans, as well as some of the 60 million TV viewers, cheered when the Yankees won in the 12th inning, 4-3. Paul Blair, a late-inning defensive replacement for Reggie Jackson, drove in Willie Randolph, for the walk-off winning run.
In Game 2, the Dodgers won handily, 6-1, largely by pummeling the sore-armed starter Catfish Hunter in the first three innings. Hunter had not pitched in a month, and many believed at the time that Yankees manager Billy Martin had sacrificed him to set up his other starters for the rest of the Series.
Afterward, Jackson, who had gone hitless in the game, complained to the press about Martin’s unfair use of Hunter, his former Oakland teammate. That led to a public Jackson-Martin spat in which the skipper told the press that Jackson could “kiss my dago ass.”
Yankees captain and catcher Thurman Munson spoke to reporters to calm the waters, according to Jackson biographer Dayn Perry. “Reggie’s been struggling ... Billy probably just doesn’t realize that Reggie is Mr. October.”
Perry and others have written that Munson used the nickname in a derisive sense — Jackson had batted only .167 so far in the Series and .136 in the 1977 postseason.
The Yankees won Game 3 in Los Angeles, 5-3, and Jackson was 1-3 with an RBI and scored two runs. He and Martin made up in front of the news media after a scolding from Yankees general manager Gabe Paul. In the next game, which New York won 4-2, Jackson picked up his pace at the plate by hitting a home run and a double.
But the Dodgers cut the Yankees’ Series lead to 3-2 by winning Game 5, 10-4. Jackson hit a home run off Don Sutton on the first pitch in the eighth, hoisting his Series batting average to .353 with a huge slugging percentage of 1.215.
Back in New York and leading the Series 3-2, the Yankees surged ahead 5-3 in the fourth. Jackson hit a homer that inning over the rightfield fence on the first pitch from Burt Hooton. He homered to right again in the fifth off Elias Sosa, also on the first pitch. “Reggie, Reggie,” the fans yelled.
In the eighth, Jackson faced knuckle-baller Charlie Hough and homered to deep centre on the first pitch. The Yankees won the game, 8-4, and the Series, 4-2. Jackson had hit four straight, first-pitch homers starting with his last at-bat in Game 5. He flipped the meaning of “Mr. October” and earned the nickname.
While Jackson’s home runs were certainly spectacular, another drama, one largely unknown during the 1977 Series. A 26-year-old female researcher/reporter for Sports Illustrated fought to gain access to the teams’ locker rooms.
Melissa Ludtke had reported on Yankees games during the regular season and had gained the trust of the team manager.
“Billy Martin, in fact, had given me complete access to his office,” she said in a 1993 interview with the Washington Press Club foundation. “Kind of through the back door, which was attached to the locker-room.”
The Yankees extended her access to the entire clubhouse, including the locker-room, for the last two games of the regular season. So at a practice the day before the Series’ first game she sought and gained similar admission to the Dodgers’ locker-room.
During Game 1, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s spokesman, Bob Wirz, confronted Ludtke in the press box.
“This is not going to happen,” Ludtke recalled Wirz saying. “You will not be getting access to the Dodgers’ locker-room this evening or any other evening.” Wirz said the ban applied to the Yankees as well.
SI’s baseball editor reached a compromise with Kuhn’s office while the Series shifted to Los Angeles. When the teams returned to New York for Game 6, officials offered a plan in which Ludtke could wait outside a team’s locker-room, and a designated PR man would bring out players that she requested to interview.
“It wasn’t the best arrangement,” Ludtke said in a recent interview. “It’s what you see and hear in the locker-room that gives you the tenor of the team.”
But after the Yankees won the Series that first night back at Yankee Stadium, a riotous celebration engulfed the space near the lockerroom. Ludtke interviewed a few players, but had to wait 90 minutes before Jackson came out of the locker-room. Once there, he told her he’d said all he had to say that night to reporters in the locker-room, and then he left.
On Dec. 29, 1977, Ludtke and SI’s parent company Time Inc. sued Bowie Kuhn, American League president, the New York Yankees, New York mayor Abraham Beame and others. She claimed she had been denied the same access granted to men. On Sept. 25, 1978, U.S. District Court Judge Constance Motley sided with Ludtke and Time.
During the 1978 World Series, a rematch of the same teams, MLB initiated a complex arrangement of bringing reporters in and out of locker rooms. “The men protested,” Ludtke said recently, “and the scheme lasted only one game.”
But it was a start of a long process of female reporters gaining equal access.
Ludtke assessed her impact on that progress in a 2012 interview during a Journalism & Women Symposium.
“It increased enormously the number of young women who came into sports media — as reporters, as employees of sports teams and league offices, in agencies representing athletes and in other aspects of sports work that earlier generations of women had not been involved with, such as working as team trainers or as umpires.”
The 1987 World Series was the first to be played indoors when the Minnesota Twins hosted the St. Louis Cardinals in the Minneapolis Metrodome. The Twins won all four of their games at home to win the series, partly by exploiting their park’s eccentricities.
“It was loud, the sightlines were difficult, the roof made it easy to lose fly balls,” said Jim Kaat, a former MLB pitcher and broadcaster, in a USA Today interview. “In short, the Twins usually had the advantage there.”
Also according to USA Today, Cardinals pitcher Joe Magrane wore earplugs during the Series, and players on both teams used hand signals to beat the noise.
1992 — The first international World Series
Beginning with the birth of the modern World Series in 1903, the games always were held in only one of the world’s countries — the United States. Not until 1992 did the championship play out on a foreign field of dreams — Toronto’s Skydome.
The Blue Jays, who made their MLB debut in 1977, won the Fall Classic over the Atlanta Braves, 4-2. Blue Jay catcher Pat Borders won the Series MVP award, batting .381, with two homers and six RBIs.
Toronto earned a second straight Series title the following year against the Phillies.