Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 21, 1993 TAG: 9403100007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CURT SMITH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Back then, baseball's post-season epic was played solely in the daytime, and life used to stop for it every October. To follow the ``Fall Classic'' on school days, you smuggled a radio into class, ran an earplug up your sleeve and listened to the play-by-play while pretending to hear your teacher.
In those days, baseball was America's family affair, merging real life with youthful fantasies. As Gary David Goldberg, creator of TV's ``Brooklyn Bridge,'' remembers, ``The whole country came together that week - people on farms, factory workers, kids in school - everyone following every game.''
But now that the World Series is played wholly at night, with games sometimes stretching into early morning, how many baseball memories will today's children take into adulthood? To kids, baseball is becoming out of sight, out of mind.
Talk-show host Larry King recalls a different time. Raised near the Brooklyn Dodgers' Ebbets Field, he was 8 when the game began to rule his life. His passion for the Dodgers evolved from the sense of community that daytime baseball fostered. ``At the end of every game, we relived every play on our street corner.''
On the gray afternoon of October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a ninth-inning home run to beat the Dodgers, win the pennant and break a 17-year-old's heart. ``No day of my life since has brought me such pain,'' King says.
Author John Updike, then 14, sat in his Shillington, Pa., high-school parking lot and listened to the seventh game of the 1946 World Series. When the St. Louis Cardinals beat his beloved Boston Red Sox, Updike emerged ``dazed and with something lost forever.''
A few hundred miles away in upstate New York, I worshiped the Yankees. On October 13, 1960, Pittsburgh Pirate Bill Mazeroski stepped to the plate in the ninth inning of Game No. 7 against New York. I was at a Cub Scout meeting that afternoon. My Yanks had outscored and outhit the Pirates, and seemed destined to win the Series. Then, at 3:36 p.m., Maz homered to beat the Yankees and make Pittsburgh world champions. I sobbed.
At the same moment, 15-year-old Pirates fan Larry Lucchino was walking home from school in western Pennsylvania with a portable radio at his ear. The future president of the Baltimore Orioles jumped ecstatically in the air amid the blare of car horns. ``It was like Christmas in October,'' he recalls.
All this began to change in 1971 when, for the first time, a World Series game was played at night. By 1972, baseball scheduled all weekday Series games at night, and ratings doubled. Weekend games and many playoff contests were kept in the daytime.
The real vanishing act began in 1985 when baseball made the entire Series prime time, hoping to lure higher network ratings and rights fees.
In 1986, a near-record TV audience watched the New York Mets beat the Boston Red Sox in Game No. 7. Less noted was that millions on the East Coast were asleep the previous night during Game No. 6 when the Mets pulled off one of the most amazing comebacks in baseball history. In the 10th inning, well past midnight, Mookie Wilson's grounder slithered past Bill Buckner to cap a three-run rally. The Mets deprived Boston, yet again, of a world championship.
Even adults have caught baseball's sleeping sickness. Last year's final game of the World Series ended at 12:50 the next morning. A day later, a baseball executive told the New York Post's Phil Mushnick, ``I fell asleep well before the game ended. I feel embarrassed, but I shouldn't. Baseball should be embarrassed.''
Baseball has always been a trust parents passed on to their children. Now the moguls of baseball are breaking that trust by denying millions of youngsters the opportunity to savor the game.
Recently baseball signed a six year TV contract that precludes any daytime national network telecasts of regular season, playoff and World Series games.
A 1960s song asked, ``Where have all the flowers gone?'' Today nearly all of baseball's children have gone.
To retrieve them, let the owners and networks rise above petty interests and renegotiate calamitous TV contracts. Give us some day games. Restore the World Series to sunlight - and return the national pastime to our kids.
\ Curt Smith, a baseball historian, was a speech writer for George Bush. This is excerpted from an article in Reader's Digest.
\ Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service
by CNB