Some detail here.
- The series discusses the turmoil of the 60s, the league deciding to expand after seeing the profits of California teams in LA and SF and the increasing popularity of football after the first Super Bowl.
A) Expansion teams were given to Washington (and soon moved again to Minnesota), Houston and Anaheim. The book says this was done earlier than planned due to threats from the anti-trust act and a planned Continental League. The show does not discuss these at all. What were the threats?
B) The show does show a young George Carlin saying how football is like a war (the QB, a “field general” tried to dominate the air by throwing bombs and the ground by fighting for yards in enemy territory) and baseball is an out of date pastoral game (the objective is to go home, to go home and be safe). Baseball has a seventh inning stretch; football has a two minute warning… Were there ever any serious attempts to speed up baseball to compete with faster sports?
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They show almost all the old stadia being torn down - Ebbets Field, The Polo Ground, etc. Could probably guess - but what were they replaced with?
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Roger Maris broke beloved Babe’s record for 60 home runs in a season. This almost caused him to break down - Mantle was better liked and also came close; the press was harsh; people did not want to see the Babe lose his record - so it was forever pointed out Maris had an extra eight games. It seems Maris was treated unfairly, but they show enthusiastic crowds. Is this so? Is this why baseball increased the size of the strike zone?
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Sandy Koufax comes across as an amazing guy. Did he suffer from any significant discrimination?
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The series discusses the success of Frank Robinson for the Redlegs and Orioles, and Brooks Robinson for the Orioles. Just how many ball players have this surname? What are the criteria for winning a Golden Glove if several are awarded?
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Were the hapless Mets really so beloved despite five years in the cellar? How has history regarded Casey Stengel, or his opposite, Earl Weaver? How did Frank Robinson do as a manager?
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What were the bookies odds in the 1969 series where the Mets upset? As drastic as presented?
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Gibson seems like an amazing pitcher. Was he as intimidating a person as portrayed? Worse than Cobb (where only three contemporaries attended his funeral)?
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They show a young Pete Rose making some splendid steals and catches. Charley Hustle. Later, Rose gambled on games and lied about it. Was his character consistent throughout his life?
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Is it true Palmer might have been a mediocre pitcher but for Earl Weaver?
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They talk about the challenges to the Reserve Clause. Koufax couldn’t do it. Curt Flood challenges MLB because he did not want to be traded to the Phillies - was their bad reputation for treating players deserved? Marvin Miller, a labour lawyer, did. How is he regarded in legal circles? Was this good for baseball?
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How was AstroTurf received? Were the Houston Colt 45s the first sports team to use it? Did it make much difference?
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The series gets a lot of commentary from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Roger Angell, Billy Crystal, Gerald Early, Shelby Foote, Steven Jay Gould, Daniel Okrent, George Plimipton, Studs Terkel along with people more involved in the baseball world. Are these good choices?
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When did mascots become a thing?
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DiMaggio “list his lucky bat” near the end of his remarkable consecutive streak. He had modified the bat by reducing its weight. What modifications were allowed or not allowed? What about now?
You ask many questions, grasshopper. 
While both players had an intimidating presence on the field and were fiercely dedicated to winning, Gibson didn’t evoke the enmity among teammates and other players that Cobb did, and he avoided scandalous off-the-field behavior.
As for Cobb’s funeral, the Sporting News reported at the time that Cobb’s family wanted a small intimate service and asked people in baseball not to attend (several well-known players did offer to be his pallbearers).
Some of Cobb’s bad reputation stems from Al Stump’s poor biography. A more balanced and accurate picture appears in the recently published “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty”.
Not well at all. The manufacturing process during its early years made for some rather uneven surfaces.
They were the Astros by then but yes. The Astrodome originally had natural grass and semi-transparent roof panels but, between the fluorescent and natural light, players couldn’t keep track of the ball. So some of the semi-transparent panels were painted over and the grass subsequently died. AstroTurf, then called “ChemGrass”, was brought in but there initially was only enough to cover the infield.
When you asked about the old-time stadiums like Wrigley, I looked up where the Huntington Avenue Grounds – the first home of the Red Sox – had been. Northeastern University expanded into the site.
In decades past? Likely not. The pace of a baseball game has long been seen by baseball fans as being a feature, not a bug, as it were. And, historically, a baseball game was typically shorter in length than a football game – for example, from the '50s through the '80s, an average MLB game was about 2 1/2 hours in length, while an NFL game was about 3 hours.
But, what’s happened, particularly over the past 20 years, is that baseball games have gotten longer. There’s a bunch of reasons why – more time in commerical breaks, more pitching changes, batters stepping out of the box between pitches, pitchers walking around, etc., but the net is that the average time of a 9-inning baseball game has been at 3+ hours every season but one since 2014, and this past season, it was at 3:07. There’s no more action now than there was forty years ago, when a game lasted 2:33, but it’s over a half-hour longer. Go back earlier, and baseball games were even shorter – prior to the '50s, an average game was under 2 hours. (Source)
It’s a topic that baseball fans (including here on this board) have debated for some time, but MLB has seemed to be loath to take any real steps to cut the dead time.
Interstate 75 runs through where Crosley Field used to be.
Ebbets Field became an apartment complex.
Hm. That’s actually the wrong corner; I think this is a better example of what the location looks like now.
As noted, Astroturf, and similar first-generation artificial playing surfaces, were pretty terrible. They were hard (basically low-pile carpeting on top of concrete), and caused fatigue and injuries for the players (though football players likely had it worse than baseball players).
But, it was also a fast surface, both for batted balls and for players. Astroturf did, for a time, yield a “small ball” style of play for some teams, which focused on ground-ball base hits, fast baserunners and base stealers, and nimble infield play. Teams like the Royals and the Cardinals, in the '70s and '80s, were known for this sort of play, and were often pretty successful with it.
(1) The Sherman Antitrust Act prohibits anticompetitive agreements in interstate commerce. A lawsuit alleged that Major League Baseball constituted an illegal anticompetitive cartel.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1922 that the Sherman Antitrust Act didn’t apply to Major League Baseball because baseball wasn’t “interstate commerce.” It was a unanimous ruling authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of America’s most famous jurists. It was an extraordinarily stupid ruling, but the court couldn’t face the public outcry that would have resulted from breaking up the American and National Leagues.
Ever since then Congress has occasionally threatened to amend the Sherman Antitrust Act to specify that it does apply to Major League Baseball. And often they have used those threats to get major league clubs for their home towns. For example, after the Kansas City Athletics moved to Oakland, Senator Stuart Symington threatened baseball and got the Kansas City Royals added in 1969.
(2) After the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California, New York struggled to get a National League team back in the city. It tried to swipe several clubs, including the Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds.
Finally, there was a plan to start a new major league, the Continental League, with clubs in New York, Houston, Denver, Minneapolis, and Toronto. They were supposed to begin play in 1961.
The Continental League was thwarted when the American League announced they would the Los Angeles Angels and Washington Senators in 1961 (they allowed the old Washington Senators to move to Minneapolis), and the National League would add the New York Mets and Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros) in 1962.
Having swiped New York, Minneapolis, and Houston from the Continental League, the whole plan dissolved.
Old Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox, was a block north of the new Comiskey Park (now called Guaranteed Rate Field); when New Comiskey opened in '91, the old park was torn down, and the area became a parking lot for the new park. The location of the old home plate has been memorialized.
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Both Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds were replaced with apartment complexes. Sportsmen’s Park in St. Louis is now the site of a Boy’s Club facility. The old Busch Stadium in St. Louis is now a mixed-use development next to the new Busch Stadium. Municipal Stadium in Kansas City was replaced with single-family housing. Comiskey Park in Chicago is now the parking lot for the new stadium for the White Sox.
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Baseball purists (which included a lot of sportswriters) scoffed at the extra eight games, but fans were overwhelmingly excited by the chase.
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Gibson was liked by his teammates, but was very intense and preferred to be left alone on game days. He had a far better sense of humor than Cobb. It’s known that Gibson and Bob Uecker held hands in a team photo as a prank. When Cardinals management discovered it, they reshot the photo (with Gibson and Uecker separated from each other.
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Goodwin, Angell et al love baseball. More importantly, they were all extremely articulate in their love of the game and their teams. The kind of people who fit perfectly in a Ken Burns documentary.
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The Chicago Cubs used a live bear cub as a mascot in 1916. It didn’t work out that well. The modern mascot began in 1974, when a college student named Ted Giannoulas convinced the San Diego Padres to allow the chicken character he had played for a local radio station attend Padres games to entertain the fans.
MLB is exempt from the Sherman Anti-Trust act due to a Supreme Court decision in 1922. Most people believe this was a bad decision, but the court has declined to reconsider it. It would take an act of Congress to remove the exemption. MLB was afraid that Congress was about to do this, which would have made it much easier for a new league like the proposed Continental League to compete with MLB. The big issue at the time was team movement, which left fans in places like Brooklyn and D.C. feeling abandoned, and lack of expansion, which left people in places like Houston feeling ignored.
Yes, but they’ve been mostly ineffective. They’ve limited the amount of time for pitching changes, allowed for intentional walks with no pitches thrown, and starting in the 2020 season, required incoming relief pitchers to stay in the game until the end of the inning or three batters have been faced.
To really speed up the game, they’d have to cut down on the amount of time between pitches. They’ve tried to make batters stay in the batter’s box, but it hasn’t helped. These days, batters spend a lot of time fidgeting before getting set for the next pitch. If you look at video of old games (from, say, the 70s), you’ll see that batters spent a lot less time getting ready. I think a big part of the problem is how umpires interpret the rule against quick pitches. The pitcher isn’t supposed to throw a pitch until the batter is ready, but I think this used to mean the batter had to be given time to get ready. Now it means the batter gets to say when he’s ready no matter how long it takes.
In a lot of cases they were replaced with housing.
The attendance at the game where Maris broke the record was only 23,154. This was at Yankee Stadium, which was huge. The place should have been sold out.
Robinson is a common name. baseball-reference.com lists 33 players with that name.
A nit: the MLB fielding award is called the “Gold Glove.” Golden Gloves are awards given to amateur boxers.
The selection process for Gold Gloves has changed over the years, What’s remained constant is that the voting is done by the managers and coaches. One Gold Glove is awarded each season for each defensive position in each league, for a total of 18 awards.
Stengel had already established his reputation as manager of the Yankees during that team’s greatest period of success. As manager of the Mets he was considered sort of a clown. There’s no way a manager could have made the early Mets into a winning team, but Stengel’s humor helped people see the team as lovable losers.
Earl Weaver is widely regarded as a genius, especially by SABRmetricians.
Frank Robinson’s record as manager was mediocre. Some of it was the teams themselves. No matter how good a manager is, he can’t turn a bad team into a good one. But Robinson also had trouble managing players who weren’t as dedicated and aggressive as he was as a player.
Bob Gibson was a very tough competitor, and he would sometimes throw at opposing batters to back them off the plate, but he wasn’t violent. Off the field, he was a normal person. Cobb was short-tempered and violent both on and off the field. I would happily be friends with Bob Gibson. I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of Ty Cobb.
I don’t think so. Palmer had a high level of talent and dedication. I believe he’d have been a great pitcher for any manager.
Philadelphia was a bad place for black players. Jackie Robinson got a truly hostile reception in Philly when he played there for the Dodgers.
Artificial turf had a big effect on the game. It rewarded speed both on offense and defense. Ground balls were more likely to get through the infield, or to bounce so high that a speedy batter could make it to first base even if a grounder was caught by an infielder. A ball that reached the outfield could make it all the way to the wall if the outfielders weren’t fast enough to prevent it. During the turf era there were teams that won with more speed and less power than you see in today’s game.
Most of them were good, but I don’t know why he included Shelby Foote. He used Foote in his Civil War documentary, and he was quite good there. He didn’t contribute much to the baseball documentary.
The first of the modern mascots was the San Diego Chicken, played by Ted Giannoulas. He first appeared at Padres games in 1974.
The rules haven’t changed much. A bat must be made of a single, solid, round piece of wood. You can’t add anything to it to make the ball go farther, or to make it react in any odd way. You’re allowed to have pine tar on the bat handle up to 18 inches from the end. The bat can be painted or flame-treated (which supposedly makes it harder). Some players rub the bat with a hard object to compress the wood fibers, which is supposed to make it harder, but there’s little evidence this has any effect.
Palmer’s Fielding-Independent ERA (normalizes both hits on balls in play and home runs) is a whopping 64 points higher than his actual ERA, which is a direct consequence of the stellar O’s defenders behind him for almost his entire career. His K-W ratio is a mediocre 1.6, which even for his time wasn’t all that great. BBRef’s WAR relies mostly on his actual ERA; Fangraphs mostly on his F-I ERA. As a consequence his BBRef WAR is 67; at Fangraphs it is 56.
If he had played most of his career with say the Indians he wouldn’t be any more regarded than say Milt Pappas (they were teammates during Palmer’s rookie year, note)-almost exact same F-I ERA.
There was also a fad of teams using humans as good-luck charm mascots in the far less politically correct days of the early 20th century, like Charlie Faust, hunchbacks Eddie Bennett and Louis Van Zelst, as well as Li’l Rastus, a homeless black youth “adopted” by Ty Cobb.
That would of course break the record, but what I find odd is that you seem to imply this would somehow be easier to do than breaking the record within a single year. It is of course equally unlikely.
The difficult in breaking DiMaggio’s record is that you need a player who not only has a very high batting average but who doesn’t draw too many walks. Even then, DiMaggio’s record was preposterously unlikely.
The extent to which Maris was treated unfairly has been insanely exaggerated. He found the media attention very difficult to handle, but that was just his nature.
As to the strike zone, they were futzing around with it a lot back then. The 1963 change was a response to two general perceptions; one was that games were getting too long and another was that there was too much scoring in general.
Incidentally, the reason only three contemporaries attended Cobb’s funeral is that it was a private family service and his teammates and competitors hadn’t been invited.
If you hear horrible stories about Ty Cobb, they are about 97% likely to be bullshit. Most of the “Ty Cobb was a psycho racist maniac” story is the product of Al Stump’s accounts of Cobb, almost all of which are apparently fiction. Literally story after story has been proven to be completely false, and many of them were debunked at the time Stump wrote them, but that image of Cobb has persisted. The fact Burns repeated some of the stories as fact is not a credit to Burns as a historian. The story about Cobb killing a guy just before a game? Totally made up. You’ve heard Ty Cobb sharpened his spikes? Literally zero reason to believe that was true. Ty Cobb spontaneously pistol-whipped a Black man on the street? As authentic as as episode of “Star Trek.”
This is not to say Ty Cobb was the friendliest guy on earth, because he WAS intense, and to be honest Bob Gibson is actually a pretty good comparison in terms of his intensity, competitiveness, intelligence, and unwillingness to get along by getting along. A present day similar player was Jose Bautista, not that I am suggesting Bautista was great for long enough to be in the Hall of Fame like those guys. Cobb did get into fights (which was a more common thing back then in general) and he had a huge chip on his shoulder. He was not the easiest guy to get along with, and he was poorly treated by his teammates when he first broke in. I would not have liked Ty Cobb, I’m quite certain of that. He did have friends, though, and he wasn’t a psycho, and his views on race were typical for a man of this time and matured as he aged; he was a big fan of Willie Mays.
Prior to relatively recently, there was no real effort to accurately depict the history of baseball. It wasn’t considered important, and so real history and big fish stories floated around and were treated with equal seriousness. Stump’s ridiculous fictions entered baseball lore late in the period of “none of this matters in terms of being true or false” era. Had you tried the same hatchet job on Bob Gibson 35 years after he retired you would have been laughed out of the publishing industry, because that would have been in about 2010, when everything you said could have been disproven in three minutes. That wasn’t the case in 1960, so all these lies have been remembered as truth.
That’s a pattern for Burns.
League Park in Cleveland (1891) still stands, partially, and has been restored back into being a baseball field.
It certainly is in “Baseball.” (Bob Gibson is also maligned in the documentary, albeit not the way Cobb is.) I’m not sure about The Civil War or Jazz, I am not as knowledgeable in those subjects.
Ken Burns gets a lot of little things wrong in “Baseball,” but many don’t amount to much, like saying Jackie Robinson started out as a second baseman; he had to play first base in his rookie year, because the Dodgers had Eddie Stanky at second and didn’t have a first baseman. That’s an understandable error because Robinson played second most of his career. There’s little errors in the film clips too, like they’ll be talking about one game and show a clip from a different game.
Individually these don’t mean a lot, but collectively they start to add up to two problems:
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They begin to slander people. I’ve spoke of Cobb at length, but the Gibson characterization was mean, too, and vaguely racist. Why was Gibson characterized as a mean, unfriendly asshole who wanted to hit everyone, but not Don Drysdale?
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Taken as a whole, they are reflective of the general disdain for bothering to get the history of baseball correct.
Today there is way less reason to get this shit wrong, because the study of baseball history is 100 times better and online resources make it easier to look up the facts and find out that the story about how Bob Gibson hit Bill White the first time he faced him as an opponent is false.
Years ago Bill James wrote a bit about David Halberstam’s book “Summer of '49” in which he observed that Halberstam got so many facts oddly wrong that the only reasonable conclusion was that he had made no effort to get them right. Same thing. It’s baseball so who cares, right? It’s not important.