Feeling Nostalgic about the 70's

[Frobby]

This is not quite 1970’s nostalgia, but 1969 welcomed the publication of the 1st edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia.   I got a copy as a present and it’s certainly the best present I’d ever gotten to that point in my 11-year old life.  The full career season-by-season stats of every player who had ever played the game!   A couple of pages on the stats for every season ever played, team-by-team, with the final standings for each season!  Lists of the top career hitters and pitchers in all major categories!

I don’t think younger fans can really appreciate how big a development this was.   The information in that book was not available in readily usable form anywhere else on earth.  My brother and I took turns studying every page of that book, learning about past great players and sometimes just very good players who had one amazing season.  We used to have drafts where we’d alternate picks, add up the stats of the players we selected, and see who won.  Sometimes we’d do the draft based on the player’s best season, or it might be best three seasons, or best five seasons, or best three consecutive seasons, or whatever.  Sometimes we’d do it by decade.  The variations were almost limitless.  Sometimes we’d do it “open book,” other times from memory, but either way, we’d use the Encyclopedia to tell us who had the better three seasons, Addie Joss or Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown.   It was awesome.  

[Frobby]

There was also an annual publication called Who’s Who in Baseball that would have the career season-by-season stats for every active player.  So, while the Baseball Encyclopedia wasn’t republished in updated form every year, if you bought a Who’s Who  each season you could augment the information in the Encyclopedia with subsequent seasons.  The Who’s Who looked like this.

[Chelsea_Phil]

9 hours ago, Roy Firestone said:

I was batboy for the 70-71-Oriole teams...thats pretty awesome to remember...I actually owned ONE of Brooks Robinson's sawed off batting helmets(the bill was cut down so Brooks could see better)...the other helmet is in the HOF...but my nephew actually left the helmet I owned in the rain...and his mother threw it out in 1975....I  still cant forgive her for that...

I don’t get it.  She threw it out because it got wet?  Huh?

As the Robot said in Lost in Space, ‘Thst does not compute’.

[Jagwar]

2 hours ago, Chelsea_Phil said:

I don’t get it.  She threw it out because it got wet?  Huh?

As the Robot said in Lost in Space, ‘Thst does not compute’.

I suppose the first question is... why was the nephew playing outside with Brooks Robinson's helmet?  

[spleen1015]

20 minutes ago, Jagwar said:

I suppose the first question is... why was the nephew playing outside with Brooks Robinson's helmet?  

This is what I was thinking. Roy, this is on you for letting your nepheew get a hold of it.

[btownoriole]

17 hours ago, InsideCoroner said:

Before my teenage years when I started buying all the baseball publications I could get my hands on, I religiously watched This Week In Baseball. I was legitimately disappointed if the family had plans and I missed it.

Like Frobby, I also sat for hours reading the list of qualified hitters and pitchers in the Sunday sports section. “Wow, look at that average on Madlock!” 

Planned my Saturday around This Week In Baseball.  When I got my Apple TV+ trial (to watch the O’s of course) I found they have a library of old episodes.  It was fun watching the one from Opening Week in ‘82 with a feature on rookies Cal Ripken, Jr. and Terry Francona, both of whom with full heads of hair!  

[osfan83]

- This Week in Baseball, always excited when they featured the O's. 

- Baseball cards. The thrill of getting Orioles in a pack. 

[SouthRider]

5 hours ago, btownoriole said:

Planned my Saturday around This Week In Baseball.  When I got my Apple TV+ trial (to watch the O’s of course) I found they have a library of old episodes.  It was fun watching the one from Opening Week in ‘82 with a feature on rookies Cal Ripken, Jr. and Terry Francona, both of whom with full heads of hair!  

Apple TV also has a 'great games' library which is both very sparse and very random.  One game they have is the 1991 opening of New Comiskey Park - a game between the White Sox and Orioles.  It is the full game with O's announcers Jon Miller and Jim Palmer.   My son thought it was funny I was getting excited for an O's rally in a game from 32 years ago. 

[SemperFi]

On 9/24/2023 at 12:10 PM, Frobby said:

I can’t speak about the Sun, but in those days the Post would print a full list of all the stats of the qualified batters and pitchers every Sunday, and I’d spend at least an hour looking at them every week.  The batter list was in BA order (OBP? SLG? What’s that?), while the pitcher list was in ERA order.  As a 4th grader, our teacher actually taught us how to divide a larger number into a smaller number by giving us a copy the final 1967 list from the paper and having us calculate the batting averages by dividing the at bats into the hits for every player.  My lifetime fascination with baseball stats stems from that exercise, and to this day I remember a lot of stats from that particular season.  

Alan Greenspan credits baseball stats for his love of math and then economics.  I can still do most math in my head and am baffled by newer generations that need to use the calculator on their phone, it was of great use in my professional life.  I too remember going to the news stand the day The Sporting News came out to read about the minors.

[Osornot]

17 hours ago, Snutchy said:

There are LOTS of O’s fans still around Rochester. My wife is from there and we visit 3-4 times a year. I always wear my O’s gear and ALWAYS have older folks tell me they’re O’s fans and want to talk baseball. 

Yes... I try to get home as much as possible (not often any longer) but I am seeing a lot of Yankees (ughhhh) there now... Probably a combination of O's ditching and bandwagon maybe.

[Osornot]

21 hours ago, Il BuonO said:

My dad is from Rochester and that’s how me and my brothers started following the Orioles. The ‘70 series against the Reds is etched in my memory. In those days there World Series was played at day time and pops let me miss school to watch a game. He wrote a note for me to take to the nuns the next day explaining I needed to experience the great American cultural pastime of baseball. Needless to say, they weren’t having any.

My first was the 1969 series and watching on the auditorium stage.  I loved the day games

[NCRaven]

More football related.  Couldn’t wait for Monday Night Football halftime when Howard Cosell would give 30 second highlights of Sunday’s games.  Had to see my Colts.

[Otter]

8 hours ago, btownoriole said:

Planned my Saturday around This Week In Baseball.  When I got my Apple TV+ trial (to watch the O’s of course) I found they have a library of old episodes.  It was fun watching the one from Opening Week in ‘82 with a feature on rookies Cal Ripken, Jr. and Terry Francona, both of whom with full heads of hair!  

I also planned my Saturday around watching TWIB.  Just hearing the TWIB theme music brings me back to my childhood and gives me goosebumps.  

[Sanity Check]

I wish there was a way to be able to watch the 1970, 1971 and 1972 AL Playoff series that the O's played in.  I was 8-10 years old in those years, and didn't get to really see the games, much less appreciate them the way I might if I watched them today.....

---

[harp6]

13 hours ago, Frobby said:

There was also an annual publication called Who’s Who in Baseball that would have the career season-by-season stats for every active player.  So, while the Baseball Encyclopedia wasn’t republished in updated form every year, if you bought a Who’s Who  each season you could augment the information in the Encyclopedia with subsequent seasons.  The Who’s Who looked like this.

I used to get these every year.  I also remember the anticipation of when the spring edition of Baseball Digest or Street and Smith's yearbook would hit the stands so that I could see all the predictions and who were the rising starts to watch.

I also remember trying to get the radio station as clear as possible, but  I could still only hear 3 out of 4 words because of the static. 

There was also trying to get the TV antenna at the right spot so the picture was somewhat clear.  Now, as I sit in my living room watching HD quality games on a big screen TV, I think, "how did we ever watch the games back then?"