wezen-ball: Yaz and the Triple Crown

I’m reminded of a friend of mine that passed on seeing Cream at MSG back in ‘68…“I’ll catch them next year, man.”

Yaz also provided a little bit of context surrounding his quest for the Crown:

  “‘The big thing was just being involved in the pennant race that year,’ Yaz says. ‘When I was going for my 3,000th hit (in 1979), we weren’t involved in the race and I went 10 or 11 at-bats trying to get that hit.

  ‘But being in the pennant race, I was so focused that I didn’t know I had won it until the next day. There wasn’t any media attention on the Triple Crown. None whatsoever. It was the first time Boston had been in a pennant race in a long time, and everything and everyone was focused on it.’

  Yaz hit .523 with five homers and 16 RBIs during the final two weeks. Over the last two days in a critical series against Minnesota, he went 7-for-8, including a three-run homer that won the game on the second-to-last day.”

No media attention? To someone born of today’s era like me, this just seems impossible to believe. Maybe the Triple Crown just wasn’t as exciting at the time. Frank Robinson had won it the year before, and Mantle won it ten years before that (and Williams 9 years before that). That’s not really all that rare. At the time, it was happening about as frequently as an NL All-Star victory today: rare, but inevitable.