Born Ten Years Too Late

Perhaps the 1970's and 1980's were the decades when major league baseball was played at its most balanced level in history. I've never done a statistical analysis of the era (the balanced theory is not an original idea by the way) but what other period in baseball history offers us a richer and more varied combination of baseball skills and performance manifesting themselves on the field of play. Power hitters, speed merchants, high octane hurlers, innovative managers and entertaining personalities (think Rose, Reggie and Earl) dotted the major league landscape. With the exception of Nolan Ryan's ridiculous strikeout totals and Rickey Henderson's unparalleled stolen base numbers the period appears to have been marked by statistical modesty. Rare were the forty home run seasons of this past decade but neither were the leagues dominated by punch and judy hitters plying their offensive wares between home plate and the region just beyond the infield dirt.

It was over this era that the relief pitcher transformed himself from the back of the rotation castoff to the 7th, 8th and 9th inning monster who shutdown games with a vengeance to its current resting place as the ninth inning specialist.

There was also the fact that as the 70's moved into the 80's the mini-dynasties that ruled the former decade gave way to baseball's greatest era of playoff and World Series participatory diversity ever.

All aspects of baseball strategy had to be respected by the managers and players. The multitude of skills developed over the hundred year history of the game were finally all being used together to make the game as close to perfect as possible.

It was as if the game reached it's pinnacle in the years when I was four, seven, twelve years old. Too young to appreciate the completeness of the game on the field but old enough to fall in love with it.

This video, found at Church of Baseball, is narrated by a gentleman who tells the story of a day at Shea in 1977 with his father and brother. The story is ultimately a touching one without being sappy. I won't tell it because the narrator delivers it perfectly. Instead, it's the skilled production of the video and feelings it conjures up in me that deserve the written word. The players that appear throughout the video I know only through pictures, videos, books, essays and second hand accounts. Born ten years too late I missed their baseball primes.

Set to the back-drop of some damn good funk music, you see Joe Morgan stroking gappers and hustling his way to first base. One of those hits drives in Pete Rose, helmetless, chugging around the basepaths. Morgan, one of the glues that held together the great Red dynasty of the 1970's, is the last Red you see during the opening montage when the narrator gives his respect to this great team. A well deserved homage to the two time MVP.

Later there's Johnny Bench taking a pitch the opposite way into the corner at Fenway. Perhaps a single, maybe a double. We don't know but I've only ever seen vids of Bench pulling towering fly balls into the left field seats at Riverfront, the ugly astro turf speeding underneath the white baseball as it moves towards the stands.

More history and context peppers the video. There's footage of Joe Torre waving a white towel in the dugout as he presides over the dreadful Met teams of the late 1970's, a full two decades before extended success came his way on the other side of the New York baseball world.

The producer/narrator of the video goes by the You Tube screen name of theokappel. He's put together the best baseball vid I've ever come across on the internet. It's greatly appreciated.