A fella named Max Patkin, The Clown Prince of Baseball, walked into my office today. I remember when Max was a major draw back in the ’40s and ’50s. We would love to see him. You’d go to the park knowing that he’d be there imitating the coach at first base and doing contortions with his body you can’t believe. We’ve gotten too serious, the Yankees included, with labor negotiations, the struggles to meet salaries, all that business stuff. We need to find a little of the fun we used to have, a little of the Max Patkin I saw when I was a kid growing up in Cleveland in the ’40s. Max said to me, “The players don’t like me anymore, they think I make fun of them.” We should go back to the days of guys like Max. I’ll bring him back.
AstroTurf is disgusting. It dramatically changed the game, especially in the National League because so many of the parks have it. Gloves are bigger now, and the wrong people are using the wrong glove, like second basemen. I should know, I was one. If the glove is too big, the ball sinks in there.
Pitchers have become sort of sectionalized. There are starters, set-up men, middle relievers, long relievers, closers. When I was playing [with the Yankees in the ’40s and ’50s], we’d say, “Let’s take this guy apart in the sixth, in the third at-bat.” Now you never get the chance, because he’s gone by your third at-bat. The bullpen has become so important. A team almost has to have a closer. That’s what’s the matter with the Dodgers right now. The art of pitching has extended the game. I think basically pitching is not as good as it was; it’s not that the hitting has gotten so much better. I think there are a lot of inexperienced, not very cagey pitchers out there, and the balls are flying out all over the place.
Then there’s trains and planes: travel has changed the game. And look at double-headers. There used to be double-headers every Sunday. Sure, the players got Monday off. But the owners finally figured out that people were paying for one game and they could get them to pay for two.
Catchers used to wear their shin guards in the on-deck circle. The idea was to save time if they didn’t get to hit.
We didn’t have helmets. We used to wear liners under our caps, and the front was virtually open. If you got hit in the forehead, you could really get hurt.
Television has made the game slower. I used to like to work really fast, and I didn’t like to throw eight or nine pitches between innings. [When a game was televised] I’d sit in the dugout for 40 seconds, then walk out and hope that by the time I got to the mound the commercial would be over. After 1968 [when Gibson compiled a staggering 1.12 earned-run average, the Tigers’ Denny McLain won 31 games and Carl Yastrzemski won the AL batting title with a mere .301 average] they lowered the mound from 15 inches to 10 inches. That had a big effect, especially on breaking balls. It took away some of the effectiveness and it had a devastating effect on pitchers. You won’t see pitchers pitch 300 innings anymore, or 20 complete games in a season. Everyone criticizes the pitchers for that, but it’s not their fault. They don’t have to complete games because the role of the reliever has changed.
When I first came up [in 1954], after you made the last out you just left your glove in the outfield. I don’t know why it stopped. I guess a ball must have hit a glove. When you think about it, it’s silly. I don’t think we’ll ever see players getting meal money anymore and [being told] where to eat. It used to be that if a player was staying at a hotel, he had to eat at that hotel. You’re never going to see that again.
I can think of two things right off the top of my head. A batter will never again come to the plate without a helmet, and black players will never again have to sit in the back of the bus. When I was in the minor leagues in Jacksonville in the early ’60s, the bus would stop and the black players would have to get out in the black part of town. They stayed with black families; they couldn’t stay in the hotel with the white players.
The big change in baseball since my boyhood is not so much in the game – although the players are bigger, richer, faster, stronger and represent a more diverse America than when I was a boy – the big change is in me. When I was a boy I brought a complete innocence to the game. These were the first heroic figures of my life, the first men whom I had read about and heard about over the radio and then beheld with my own eyes. Not surprisingly I saw them and their deeds in mythic terms, particularly in an age when the journalism was significantly more reverential, and when the use of radio allowed listeners to imagine the players as we wanted, not necessarily as they were. Now I am older and more skeptical and, because I have written two books on baseball, I have a far better sense of the players themselves, that their skills, supreme in this one small area of human endeavor, are often accompanied by fears and anxieties in other aspects of life, which frequently makes them surprisingly vulnerable. It does not so much shrink them as make them more mortal, which is probably a healthier thing. It is not so much that Joe DiMaggio has gone away, and that America is thereby diminished; it is more that in the end he was a great centerfielder and a great hitter, which is at once far more than enough, and yet a great deal less than the myth.
I don’t know baseball. I’m just a woman who owns a team.
