12

The Postwar American Century (1945 to 1964)

americans in the postwar period encountered a great deal of pressure to conform to a preconceived set of ideals and values, in large part because of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. A second Red Scare emerged after World War II in an anticommunist witch hunt that made Americans wary of bucking capitalist principles and Christian virtues. The other factor that defined America after World War II was affluence. Between 1945 and 1960 the gross national product soared 250 percent and per capita income rose 35 percent. Much of this growth was fueled by pent-up consumer demand. After a decade and a half of austerity, Americans craved new automobiles and appliances. Returning veterans, with money to spend and access to low-interest mortgages through the GI Bill, formed a large market of ready homebuyers. By 1960, with the growth of suburbia, 60 percent of Americans owned their own home. As middle-class white Americans left the cities, people with lower incomes, often people of color, moved in to take their place. Not only were middle-class city dwellers relocating to the suburbs, but, following the introduction of home air conditioning in the thirties and forties, many Americans left the Northeast and Midwest for the warmer climate of the Sun Belt. California’s population nearly doubled between 1930 and 1950. With their newfound affluence and their homes in the suburbs, many Americans rediscovered their love affair with the automobile. By the 1960s, with the interstate highway system under construction, two-car families became the rule. As drive-in businesses, such as McDonald’s and Holiday Inn, appeared, an automobile-based culture emerged. Americans also fell under the influence of the new medium of television. Eighty percent of American homes had a television by 1960. Television reinforced the image of the American family, depicting it as white, middle-class, and Christian. Despite the strong pressure to conform to the perceived parameters of American society, challenges to the status quo emerged during the fifties and became full blown in the revolutionary sixties. Baseball in the postwar period reflected America’s obsession with conformity and affluence, while at the same time striving to adjust to America’s new reality.

In the spring of 1957, New York Yankees Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford planned a birthday party for their friend, second baseman Billy Martin. Mantle and Ford were the megastars on a team filled with superstars. Mantle, the Yankees’ center fielder, was probably the most popular baseball player of the fifties. The previous season he won the American League Triple Crown, the rare achievement of leading the league in three important categories: batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. When Mantle retired in 1968, his career 536 home runs trailed only Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. Ford was the ace of the New York pitching staff, the so-called Chairman of the Board. In 1956, Ford led the Yankees with nineteen wins and only six losses. When he retired after the 1967 season, the Yankee pitcher had compiled a career record of 236 wins and 106 losses. Mantle, Ford, and Martin socialized frequently, and they often drank to excess. Martin, who had gotten into a few well-publicized fights, also had a quick temper. To celebrate his birthday, on May 16, six Yankees—Mantle, Ford, and Martin, as well as pitcher Johnny Kucks, right fielder Hank Bauer, and catcher Yogi Berra—and their wives gathered at the Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan to eat, drink, and catch a performance by African American entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.

In 1961, the “M & M Boys,” Mickey Mantle (Ieft) and Roger Maris of the New York Yankees, challenged Babe Ruth’s 34-year-old record of 60 home runs in a single season. Mantle fell short of the record, finishing with only 54, but Maris broke Ruth’s mark with 61 homers, only to see his accomplishment diminished by Ford Frick, the commissioner of baseball, who put an asterisk next to Maris’s record because the 1961 season was eight games longer than Ruth’s 1927 season. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Cooperstown, N.Y.

During the performance, a group of intoxicated members of a bowling team celebrating at the next table began heckling Davis and shouting racial slurs at him. When someone from the Yankees table asked the bowlers to quiet down, they began to taunt the ballplayers. Martin asked the loudest bowler to step outside with him. A few minutes later Bauer, heading outside to see if Martin was okay, claimed to have discovered the drunken heckler unconscious on the floor near the cloakroom. The next day the media reported that six Yankees were involved in a brawl at the Copacabana. Although the players maintained that the man was beaten up by bouncers, the victim, a Bronx deli owner, accused Bauer of assault. A Manhattan grand jury was convened to investigate the matter, but the judge dismissed the case because of a lack of evidence. Yankees management, however, fined five of the ballplayers $1,000 each (one of them, Johnny Kucks, because he made less than the others, was fined only $500), and a month later, citing his bad influence on Ford and especially Mantle, the Yankees traded Martin to the Kansas City Athletics.

The incident at the Copacabana and Martin’s subsequent trade to the A’s seemed to capture the spirit of America in the fifties. Like America in the postwar era, the Yankees were powerful and confident. New York seemed to be at the center of the world, and it certainly served as America’s cultural heartbeat and economic engine. At the time of the brawl, the team had just won six World Series championships and seven American League pennants in eight years. The ball club responded to the incident at the Copacabana the same way American society responded to those who did not fit the preconceived set of Cold War ideals and values, discarding their second baseman because he did not conform to the club’s ideal image.

Other sports would eclipse baseball in popularity during the 1960s and beyond, but for much of the 1950s baseball had very little competition. The National Football League did not explode in popularity until after the 1958 NFL championship game at Yankee Stadium. That contest, between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, went into overtime, and the Colts’ sudden-death victory on national television gave the league immense publicity. A second professional football circuit, the American Football League, formed in 1960, and the champions of both leagues began playing a postseason Super Bowl in 1967. In 1970 the NFL absorbed the AFL, creating the modern National Football League. In the fifties and early sixties, professional basketball was still a minor sport, with the National Basketball Association maintaining franchises in smaller markets like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Syracuse and Rochester, New York. Baseball, however, was still enormously popular in the postwar era. If, as some historians have claimed, the 1920s represented baseball’s Golden Age, then the fifties represented baseball’s Silver Age. Just as the United States was at the peak of its power in the twenty years following World War II, baseball was at its peak as well.

In the fifties, baseball stars were national figures. Most Americans were familiar with Ted Williams, the left fielder of the Boston Red Sox, and Stan Musial, the first baseman of the St. Louis Cardinals, as well as Jackie Robinson. And most Americans agreed that the best center fielder in baseball played in New York City—they just could not agree on which team. Countless arguments debated the merits of Yankees center fielder Mickey Mantle, who replaced Joe DiMaggio in 1951, versus those of Willie Mays of the Giants and Duke Snider of the Dodgers.

The fifties were a good time for baseball in general, but they were an especially good time for baseball fans in New York City. Just as New York was the heart of American culture in the 1950s, it was also the center of the baseball universe. Not only did New York have three major league teams, it had three very good major league teams. In the American League, the Yankees, owned by Del Webb, a builder of suburbia in the West, were the most dominant team, winning the pennant every year between 1947 and 1964 except 1948, 1954, and 1959. The Yankees won five straight World Series from 1949 to 1953, and they also won the series in 1947, 1956, 1958, 1961, and 1962. As one wag said, rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for US Steel. Of course, in the 1950s America also led the world in manufacturing.

In the National League, the Giants and Dodgers often competed for the National League pennant. The crosstown competition was the fiercest rivalry in sports, as the fans and players of both teams hated each other. When the Dodgers traded Jackie Robinson to the Giants after the 1956 season, the aging Robinson chose to retire rather than play for Brooklyn’s archrival. Brooklyn won six pennants during the postwar period, capturing the National League flag in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956. In each of those seasons, the Dodgers faced the Yankees in the World Series. As the Yankees tended to win those contests, Dodgers fans consoled themselves with the defiant expression “Wait ’til next year.” In 1955, Brooklyn finally won its first and only World Series championship. The Giants won the National League pennant in 1951 and 1954, sweeping the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series.

One of the greatest pennant races of all time took place in 1951. The Dodgers held a large lead for most of the season—by August 11, they were 13½ games ahead of the Giants. But in the second half of the season the Giants started to creep up, at one point winning 15 games in a row. The two teams finished the season with identical 96-and-58 records. To determine the pennant winner, the National League staged a three-game tie-breaking series. The Giants won Game 1 at Ebbets Field by a score of 3–1. The Dodgers evened the series the next day, winning 10–0 at the Polo Grounds. The final game of the series, also at the Polo Grounds, was played on October 3. Going into the bottom of the ninth inning, the Dodgers held a 4–2 lead. With one out, third baseman Bobby Thomson came to bat with Whitey Lockman at second and Clint Hartung at third. Thomson had been hot, knocking in a run in the seventh inning and homering in Game 1. Willie Mays, who would end his career twenty-two years later with a total of 660 home runs but at the time was still an unproven rookie, stood on deck. Given that first base was empty, the conventional wisdom held that the Dodgers should have given Thomson an intentional walk and pitched to the rookie, hoping he would hit into a game-ending double play. Instead Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen called for relief pitcher Ralph Branca to replace starter Don Newcombe on the mound. Branca pitched to the Giants third baseman, and Thomson knocked a three-run home run over the wall in left field. Perhaps the most famous home run in baseball history, the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” gave the Giants the National League pennant. A week later the Giants would lose the World Series to the Yankees in six games.

Despite the popularity of baseball in the postwar period, the forces shaping American society presented new challenges to the game. For instance, the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” was literally heard around the world, as Armed Forces Radio broadcasted the game to bases on every continent. In May 1951, one month after being removed from command in the Korean War by President Harry Truman, General Douglas MacArthur threw out the first pitch at a game between the Phillies and the Giants at the Polo Grounds, where the general was enthusiastically cheered while the president was booed in absentia.

Baseball was even dragged into the postwar ideological fray. In an April 1949 speech at an international peace conference in Paris that was sponsored by the Soviet Union, African American folk singer and actor Paul Robeson announced that black Americans would not fight for the United States in a war against the Soviet Union. With his speech, Robeson, a former NFL football player and a star of segregated movies who had already made the transition to mainstream films, attracted the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In response, the committee summoned Jackie Robinson, perhaps the most famous African American in the country, to Washington, DC, to answer if black Americans would support the United States in a war against the Soviet Union. Robinson was hesitant about testifying before the committee, but on the advice of Branch Rickey, he agreed to appear. In his statement, Robinson testified that he could not speak for the singer but he believed that most African Americans would “do their best to help their country win the war.” Robinson added that African Americans were not going to stop fighting racial discrimination, but he believed that black Americans could “win our fight without the Communists.” Thus, the Cold War influenced baseball. McCarthyism, the tactic of advancing politically by making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper evidence, named after Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who built a political career in the early 1950s on the practice, also cast its shadow on the sport. In 1954, fearing that the name of his ball club invoked images of Communist revolutionaries, Cincinnati Reds owner Powel Crosley changed the name of his team to the Cincinnati Redlegs. In 1961, with McCarthyism a distant memory, new owner Bill DeWitt restored the name Cincinnati Reds.

Other forces prevalent in postwar America affected baseball. Suburbanization, for instance, endangered baseball’s stability. Ballparks were neighborhood institutions, often squeezed between existing streets and buildings. For instance, the outfield fence of Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators, followed strange angles that cut around a tree and an apartment building. Parking was scarce at most urban ballparks, which were built when neighborhood fans walked or took the bus, streetcar, or subway to the game, and the lack of parking threatened to keep suburbanites away. Fearing crime or succumbing to racism, many suburban fans became reluctant to travel to the city to attend a game, especially at night. And with the introduction of television, suburban fans found it easier to catch the game on TV—or forgo the game altogether for another program.

Baseball had not been keeping up with the demographic changes that were taking place in America, and by the end of World War II the major leagues and the US population had become seriously misaligned. For fifty years no changes had been made in the major league map—the same sixteen major league teams, representing the same ten cities, played baseball between 1903 and 1952. The major leagues were confined to the northeastern quadrant of the United States, with no team south of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and with the two westernmost teams, both in St. Louis, on the banks of the Mississippi River. During the same period, however, American demographics changed. The population doubled between 1900 and 1950, jumping from 76 million to 151 million. And the population shifted, with western and southern states gaining residents. California, which still did not have a major league baseball team when the war ended, jumped from the fifth most populous state in 1940 to second place in 1950. Technology also changed America, as commercial air travel made the West Coast seem less remote.

Table 12.1. High-Level Minor League Teams, 1949

Class AAA
American Association	International League	Pacific Coast League
Columbus Red Birds	Baltimore Orioles	Hollywood Stars
Indianapolis Indians	Buffalo Bisons	Los Angeles Angels
Kansas City Blues	Jersey City Giants	Oakland Oaks
Louisville Colonels	Montreal Royals	Portland Beavers
Milwaukee Brewers	Newark Bears	Sacramento Solons
Minneapolis Millers	Rochester Red Wings	San Diego Padres
St. Paul Saints	Syracuse Chiefs	San Francisco Seals
Toledo Mud Hens	Toronto Maple Leafs	Seattle Rainiers

Class AA
Southern Association	Texas League
Atlantic Crackers	Beaumont Exporters
Birmingham Barons	Dallas Eagles
Chattanooga Lookouts	Fort Worth Cats
Little Rock Travelers	Houston Buffaloes
Memphis Chickasaws	Oklahoma City Indians
Mobile Bears	San Antonio Missions
Nashville Volunteers	Shreveport Sports
New Orleans Pelicans	Tulsa Oilers

Minor league teams felt pressure from the changes taking place in America. In the first half of the twentieth century, large cities in the North that lacked a major league team, as well as cities along the West Coast, were content to support high-level minor league clubs. Starting in 1946, these leagues were classified as Triple-A. Cities in the South settled for teams in second-tier minor leagues, Class Double-A. With the advent of television, however, rather than going to a minor league game, some fans preferred to stay home and watch broadcasts of major league teams. Fans and civic leaders in large cities without big-league teams began to demand major league clubs. At the same time, others questioned whether Boston, Philadelphia, and St. Louis could still support two teams and whether New York City could support three.

The fifty-year logjam finally gave way in Boston. By the fifties, the Braves were struggling at the box office. The Braves were not a terrible team. Led by starting pitchers Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain, Boston won the 1948 National League pennant. (The other two Braves starters, Bill Voiselle and Vern Bickford, were less memorable that year, inspiring the Boston faithful to lament, “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.”) But the Braves were losing out in popularity to the Red Sox. In 1952 they drew only 281,278 fans. Not happy with the low attendance and tired of playing second fiddle to the Red Sox, Braves owner Lou Perini announced in March 1953, one month before the start of the season, that the club was moving to Milwaukee. Milwaukee had once had an American League club, in 1901, but the AL Milwaukee Brewers had become the St. Louis Browns after only one season. In 1953 the Wisconsin city had just built a new ballpark, Milwaukee County Stadium, ostensibly for the minor league Brewers, but in reality the city hoped the new stadium would lure a major league tenant. The Milwaukee Braves thrived in their new location; in just their first eight games in Milwaukee, attendance at Braves games surpassed that of their entire 1952 season in Boston. When the season ended, Milwaukee had set a new National League attendance record, drawing 1,826,397 fans. And the Braves were successful in Milwaukee. Led by right fielder Hank Aaron and third baseman Eddie Mathews, Milwaukee won the National League pennant in 1957 and 1958, and the team beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series.

Other teams followed the Braves’ lead. In St. Louis, the Browns had trouble competing with the Cardinals. Bill Veeck, who had sold the Indians and then bought the Browns, tried to lure fans with promotions. Veeck once said, “You can draw more people with a losing team by giving them bread and circuses than with a losing team and a long, still silence.” He made good on that principle. In 1951 Veeck signed a player with dwarfism to a contract with the Browns, and on August 19, the Browns sent the three-foot-seven Eddie Gaedel to pinch-hit against the Tigers. Gaedel, whose strike zone was only one and one-half inches high, walked on four pitches and was promptly replaced by a pinch runner. But even gimmicks did not help draw fans. Veeck tried to move the team to Los Angeles, but the American League, citing the distance from the other clubs, rejected his request. He also tried to move the team to Milwaukee, where he had once owned a minor league team, but Braves owner Lou Perini, who owned the minor league Brewers and was planning his own team move to Milwaukee, objected. Veeck then looked at Baltimore. Other American League owners, tired of his publicity stunts, refused to let the Browns move unless Veeck sold the team. At the end of the 1953 season, Veeck sold the Browns to a Maryland attorney named Clarence Miles, who moved the club to Baltimore and changed the name of the team to the Orioles.

In Philadelphia, the Athletics could no longer compete with the Phillies. The Phils, who had earned the nickname the “Whiz Kids” because of young stars like pitcher Robin Roberts and right fielder Richie Ashburn, won the 1950 National League pennant, while the A’s had not finished in first place since 1931. The Athletics’ aging owner, Connie Mack (who turned ninety-one in December 1953), had become too frail to operate the team. After fifty years at the helm, he had already stepped down from his managerial duties following the 1950 season. In November 1954 Mack sold the Athletics to Chicago stockbroker Arnold Johnson, who moved the club to Kansas City for the 1955 season.

The moves, or franchise shifts, of the Braves, Browns, and Athletics made sense. In each case, the club left a two-team city, and baseball’s geography remained confined to the northeastern quadrant of the United States. But what happened in the late fifties radically redrew the baseball map and made Major League Baseball a truly national organization. Both the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants needed new stadiums. Their existing facilities were old—Ebbets Field was built in 1913, while the Polo Grounds was built in 1911. Both were located in residential neighborhoods—the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and Harlem in Manhattan—and neither offered much parking. City officials in New York, however, were unwilling to help the Giants get a new stadium. The team’s owner, Horace Stoneham, began to negotiate with officials in Minneapolis. Had the Giants moved to Minnesota, however, they would have remained in the northeastern quadrant of the country.

Across the East River in Brooklyn, the Dodgers were planning on building a new stadium. Walter O’Malley, a lawyer with the Brooklyn Trust Company, had taken over the ownership of the club after forcing Branch Rickey out in 1950. O’Malley planned to construct a domed stadium in downtown Brooklyn at the terminal for the Long Island Railroad, the same location where the Barclays Center—home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets—would eventually be built in the twenty-first century. O’Malley was willing to bear the construction costs if the city of New York condemned the land.

But city planner Robert Moses had a different idea. Moses, who was attempting to rebuild New York City, wanted to create a modern infrastructure. No tunnel or bridge was built in New York without his approval, and he was responsible for bringing the United Nations, the World Trade Center, and the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs to the city. Moses wanted to build the new stadium for the Dodgers in the Flushing Meadows neighborhood of Queens, near the grounds of the 1939 World’s Fair. O’Malley hated the location. The Dodgers owner still thought in terms of neighborhood fans, and with the proposed stadium site surrounded by water on three sides and a cemetery on the fourth, he feared the team would not attract walk-up customers. More troubling to O’Malley was the question of whether the team still could be called the Brooklyn Dodgers if they played in Queens.

While O’Malley was mulling his options, officials from Los Angeles approached him. They did not attempt to convince him to move the Dodgers to California. As Brooklyn was the most prominent team in the National League, Los Angeles officials did not believe they could do that. Instead they sought advice from O’Malley on how to buy the Washington Senators and move that team to Los Angeles. But O’Malley saw opportunity in the conversation. He knew that because of travel costs, the National League would not approve the move of only one team to California. O’Malley contacted Stoneham and convinced him to move the Giants to San Francisco rather than Minneapolis, and both clubs headed west following the 1957 season.

At the gate, the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants were an immediate success. The Giants, playing in the minor league–caliber Seals Stadium, drew 1,272,625 fans in their first season on the West Coast, double their attendance in New York in 1957. The team’s new major league stadium, the windy Candlestick Park, which was built at the edge of the city in an area slated for industrial development, opened in 1960. For four years, the Dodgers played in the massive Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which had a capacity of 92,500 for baseball. As the Coliseum was designed for football, the Dodgers made temporary modifications to the structure, erecting a fence across the football field to create a right field wall 300 feet down the line from home plate. Because the grandstand at the left field foul pole was only 251 feet from home plate, the club also installed a forty-two-foot-high screen along the left field wall. The Dodgers drew 78,672 fans in their first home game in Los Angeles and 1,845,556 for the year, 800,000 more than the team attracted in Brooklyn the previous season. In 1962 the team moved into Dodger Stadium, which was built on the site of what had been a formerly vibrant Mexican American neighborhood called Chavez Ravine. Because it destroyed a neighborhood, the location caused controversy—both at the ballot box and in the minority community—but in the end, voters approved the stadium. Both stadiums were designed with acres of parking. The two teams were also successful on the field. Los Angeles won the 1959 and 1963 World Series, while the Giants won the 1962 National League pennant, only to lose the series to the Yankees in seven games.

While West Coast fans celebrated the arrival of major league baseball, fans back in New York struggled with the hole left by the loss of the city’s two National League teams. Former Giants and Dodgers fans could not bring themselves to root for the Yankees. Unexplainably, without the competition from two other major league teams, the Yankees actually drew sixty-five thousand fewer fans in 1958 than they had the year before. The city immediately attempted to attract another National League team, only to be rebuffed by the Reds, Phillies, and Pirates. The National League rejected city leaders’ request for the creation of a new National League team in New York. Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. assigned the task of luring another team to the city to attorney William A. Shea, who adopted a different strategy. In 1959 Shea announced the formation of a third major league called the Continental League, which he said would begin play in 1961. The league would feature franchises in New York as well as seven other large cities that lacked a major league team—Atlanta, Buffalo, Dallas–Fort Worth, Denver, Houston, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Toronto. To give the league credibility, former Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey was named president of the Continental League.

The threat posed by the Continental League forced Major League Baseball to act. In July 1960 the National League unanimously agreed to expand to ten clubs. Two weeks later, confident that New York would receive one of the new franchises, the Continental League dissolved without ever playing a game. In October the National League announced that it would add teams from two Continental League cities, New York and Houston, both of which would start playing in the 1962 season. By the end of the twentieth century, every Continental League city except Buffalo would have a major league team.

At its October meeting a week later, the American League gave Washington Senators owner Calvin Griffith permission to move his team to Minneapolis–St. Paul before the start of the 1961 season. At the meeting, the American League also added two new clubs, although neither was placed in a Continental League city. To replace the team leaving Washington, the league added a new franchise, which would also be called the Washington Senators. And with the National League competing with the Yankees in New York, the American League decided to return the favor by placing an expansion team in Los Angeles. To get a jump on the National League, the American League announced that its two new teams would begin playing in 1961.

The teams in baseball’s four new cities represented the triumph of the suburbs. Because the Minneapolis–St. Paul franchise represented two cities, Griffith originally wanted to name the club the Twin Cities Twins (the team’s cap still bears a “TC” logo), but before they ever played a game he instead christened them the Minnesota Twins. Rather than play in one city or the other, the Twins would play their home games at Metropolitan Stadium in suburban Bloomington, on the site of the future Mall of America. The new National League team in Texas, called the Houston Colt .45s because of the state’s Old West heritage, would play at Colt Stadium, a temporary facility quickly erected in Houston’s suburban Medical Center District, until the club’s permanent stadium, being built on adjacent land, was ready. The other new National League team, called the New York Mets after the nineteenth-century New York Metropolitans of the old American Association, would play at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan until 1964, when a new stadium, named after William A. Shea, was ready in Flushing Meadows, Queens—the same site Robert Moses had wanted for the Dodgers. Not only was Shea Stadium accessible from two interstate highways, but because it was not built in the crowded boroughs of Manhattan or Brooklyn, it had enough room to provide parking for thousands of cars.

The American League’s new West Coast team, called the Los Angeles Angels after that city’s former minor league club, perhaps best represented suburbanization. In the club’s first season, the Angels played in a ballpark called Wrigley Field, which had served as the home to the city’s minor league Angels. In 1962 the team temporarily moved into the newly constructed Dodger Stadium, although the American League club referred to the facility as Chavez Ravine rather than by its official name. In 1966 the Angels’ permanent home was ready. The new stadium was not built in Los Angeles, but in suburban Anaheim, near Disneyland in Orange County. On September 2, 1965, in preparation for the club’s 1966 move to Anaheim Stadium, the team officially changed its name to the California Angels, becoming the only twentieth-century baseball team to change its name in midseason. The owner of the Angels, singing cowboy movie star Gene Autry, did not believe the team could be known as “Los Angeles” if it played in a suburb thirty miles away.

Expansion created new challenges for baseball. With the addition of two new clubs in each league, the major leagues had to change their schedule. Under the old 154-game schedule, every team played 22 games against each of its opponents. With ten clubs in 1961, the American League expanded its schedule to 162 games, with every team playing 18 games against league teams. Expansion also diluted major league talent, especially pitching. Pitchers who would not have made a major league roster when there were only sixteen teams now found themselves on big-league staffs.

Still, the level of play remained exciting. In 1961 two Yankees—center fielder Mickey Mantle and right fielder Roger Maris, called the “M & M Boys” by the press—challenged Babe Ruth’s thirty-four-year-old record of sixty home runs in a season. Both players—but especially Maris—received a great deal of hate mail for threatening a record many people held as sacred. On the last day of the season, Maris hit his sixty-first home run. While the hit should have broken the record, Commissioner Ford Frick announced that because Maris took eight more games than Ruth to set the record, his record would not replace Ruth’s. Instead, Maris would hold the record for a 162-game season while Ruth would continue to hold the record for a 154-game season. Many saw Frick’s decision as a slap in Maris’s face, as he essentially placed an asterisk next to the new record.

The following year, with the addition of the Mets and the Colt .45s, the National League adopted the 162-game schedule. While the Colts were creating new traditions in Houston, the Mets drew on nostalgia, adopting Dodgers blue and Giants orange for team colors. The club brought in former Yankees manager Casey Stengel to skipper the team. Stengel had led the Yankees to seven World Series titles from 1949 to 1958, but the Yankees fired him after he lost the 1960 World Series. Many people, including Stengel himself, believed the Yankees had fired the seventy-year-old manager because of his age.

In their first season, the Mets were one of the worst teams in baseball history. Even Stengel’s skill could not overcome the club’s lack of talent. The first run the Mets surrendered scored on a balk, and the club lost its first nine games. The Mets finished the 1962 season in last place, losing 120 games and winning only 40. But even as a terrible team, the Mets immediately became very popular in New York, as former Dodgers and Giants fans embraced the young team. The Mets drew almost a million fans in 1962 and surpassed a million the following year, and in 1964, in their new home at Shea Stadium, the Mets outdrew the Yankees, even though the Yanks would win their fifth straight pennant that year. The Mets were not as successful on the field, remaining in the cellar for most of the decade. The club finished in last place from 1962 to 1965, and again in 1967. In 1966 and 1968 the team managed to climb to ninth place. Then something miraculous happened—in 1969 the “Amazin’ Mets” won the World Series in five games! America had changed, and, miraculously, so had the Mets.