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1980s: The Decade Baseball's Innocence Ended
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The 1980s
By Peter Gammons
The decade of the 1980s was baseball’s end of the innocence. Oh, there were two labor stoppages, the Pittsburgh drug scandal, the Shakespearean peaks and caves of Pete Rose, an ill-conceived collusion aimed at freezing bidding for free agents, and the procession of four commissioners, but the game still had a traditional feel while adjusting to the free-agent system that went in place in 1976.
No one hit 50 homers, and when Andre Dawson hit 49 in 1987 and a kid named Mark McGwire hit 49 in 1987, it all seemed innocently heroic. There were five World Series that would be replayed for decades to come, because of a missed call in 1985, a missed ball in 1986, the indoors of 1987, Kirk Gibson’s 1988 blast, and the tragedy and heroism of players such as Dave Stewart in the aftermath of the earthquake of 1989.
It was a decade that unveiled arguably the two greatest leadoff hitters of all time in Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines. It debuted pitchers we thought would be historic, and some were—Fernando Valenzuela, Dwight Gooden, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Tom Glavine. It was the dusk of 300 game winners – Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Don Sutton, Phil Niekro.
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And it was played in traditional, functional stadiums whose entertainment was limited to the game, and the game only. The most memorable scoreboard moments came in the 1983 World Series when Eddie Murray’s home run off Charles Hudson hit Murray’s name on the board at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium and in the sixth game of the 1986 series when the Shea Stadium board congratulated “the 1986 Champion Red Sox.” Of the 28 parks in use when the decade ended in 1989, only six are still in use, and two of them, Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field, are tourist landmarks that have stood at their street corners since before World War I.
Because free agency was so new, owners were convinced only the big markets would win. Hence they tried rigging the marketplace, yet from 1980 through 1989, the only team to win two world championships was the Dodgers. The winningest single season team was the ’84 Tigers. Mike Schmidt hit the most homers (313), Eddie Murray drove in the most runs (996), Jack Morris won the most games (162), and the lovable Cubs (’85 NLCS) and the Red Sox (’86 World Series) pulled the curses out of their historic closets.
And, in the end, because of what we later learned of Pete Rose, his breaking of Ty Cobb’s hit record in 1984 and the way he couldn’t just let it be a single – he had to hustle to second base – his isn’t the lasting memory of the decade. That would be three particularly memorable home runs by Kirk Gibson.
The first came on June 14, 1983 at Tiger Stadium, off Boston pitcher Mike Brown, a titanic blast that cleared the transformer atop the right field roof—the transformer Reggie Jackson hit in the ’71 All-Star Game—by nearly 20 feet and landed in a lumberyard across Woodward Avenue. The second also came at Tiger Stadium, in Game Five of the World Series, a shot off Padres Hall of Fame reliever Rich Gossage, which for all intents and purposes closed out the series and completed the Tigers’ 111 – 59 season. The third, of course, came at Dodger Stadium off Dennis Eckersley, which Jack Buck described with, “I don’t believe what I just saw,” and Vin Scully called as, “In the season of the improbable, the impossible has happened.”
