30 more memorable moments
Baseball's list tends toward the recent and positive, so here are some alternatives, unvarnished.
By King Kaufman
July 31, 2002 | Baseball has an advertising campaign going with a credit card company that involves the game's 30 "Most Memorable Moments."
Because baseball is interested in selling baseball and the credit card company is interested in selling credit cards, the list skews toward the positive and the recent. Credit cards are sold in large numbers to people in their late teens and 20s, after all, and those people don't remember or care much about events prior to the mid-1980s. Or do you think that baseball executives really think 12 of the 30 most memorable moments in the game's history have happened since 1985?
Do they believe that three -- three! 10 percent! -- of the game's most memorable moments happened just last year? Get serious. Ichiro having a rookie year in which he proved himself to be roughly the equal of Willie McGee -- which is no small thing -- was memorable, mostly because Ichiro's a cultural phenomenon, but it's not in the top 30 of all time. Mark McGwire breaking Roger Maris' 37-year-old single-season home run record deserves to be on the list. Barry Bonds breaking McGwire's record three years later, amid a game-wide onslaught of offense, does not. And Luis Gonzalez's game-winning hit was arguably only the second most memorable moment of Game 7 last year, behind Randy Johnson coming in from the bullpen to pitch on no days' rest. Anyway, if Gonzalez's Series-winner from 2001 qualifies, why not Edgar Renteria's from 1997, which came in extra innings, and was at least a line drive?
Baseball has also gone to comical extremes to avoid negativity. The event cited for 1986 is the New York Mets' "comeback" against the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. Bill Buckner's famous error in Game 6, which cost the Sox the Series and is what made the comeback memorable, goes unmentioned. The only moment on the list that could be considered even slightly negative is Babe Ruth being sold by the Red Sox to the New York Yankees in 1920, which isn't fondly remembered by Red Sox fans. Today the sale would be seen as symptomatic of the Yankees' unfair competitive edge, but that's a different column.
I decided to come up with an alternate list of the game's 30 most memorable moments. I'm not saying my list should replace baseball's. Many of the moments are obvious choices -- Don Larsen's perfect game, Maris' 61 homers, Willie Mays' catch, that sort of thing. I'm just offering up 30 more moments, a list that includes some rough but inarguably memorable moments, like players' strikes, and acknowledges that the 20th century comprised 100 years. You can take my list and baseball's, mix and match, add a few moments of your own, and come up with your own 30.
It's hard to make this kind of list, by the way. I kept running up against the question of what makes a "moment." What is "the moment" involved in Ichiro's rookie year? And there's the obvious paving over of Buckner's "moment" in '86. I decided to go, where I could, for an actual moment, a play, something that could be shown in a single video clip, over something more broadly defined as a "moment." So Rogers Hornsby's .424 batting average in 1924 doesn't make the cut, even though it was a hell of a thing, even for that era. And Sandy Amoros' catch in the '55 Series is my moment, rather than the Dodgers winning their only championship in Brooklyn, which probably made that moment significant. Sometimes, though, as with a strike or a World Series upset, that isn't possible.
I made my list and found myself with more than 30 moments. I asked a couple of friends and my dad for help paring it down. I tried to err on the side of older moments rather than more recent ones, to make up for baseball's erring the other way. But I didn't try to skew toward the negative to make up for baseball's bias. I don't have anything to sell, but I don't have an ax to grind either.
A few moments that didn't quite make it: Dock Ellis throwing a no-hitter on acid, so he claimed; the cocaine scandals of the '80s; Bill Wambsganss' unassisted triple play in the 1920 Series; the Boston Braves ushering in an era of franchise movement by going to Milwaukee in 1953; Maury Wills' 104 steals in 1962, breaking Ty Cobb's record of 96 in 1912, which also didn't make the list; Gabby Hartnett's "Homer in the Gloaming" in 1938; the various other work stoppages since the early '70s; "Disco Demolition Night"; Don Denkinger's blown call in Game 6 of the 1985 World Series.
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