When I was a twelve-year- old in the summer of 1974, the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates were battling it out for the lead in the National League East, but this year both the Cardinals and the Pirates got off to a very sluggish start.
I was recently reminded of the 1974 season as I looked over an old issue of Sports Illustrated.
It was from July 22, 1974, and featured Cardinal outfielder Lou Brock, originally from El Dorado, Ark., on the cover.
He was running towards second base while glancing back towards home plate, likely on the way to a stolen base that was one of 118 he would get in his record-setting year.
Brock was 35 years old at the time and he was still fast enough to be the game's very best base-stealer.
I was finishing Little League and on my way to junior high school, and I had a year's subscription to Sports Illustrated that had cost me $12. But the magazine came out every week, so that wasn't a bad price. Brock had become my favorite baseball player and I'm glad that I ended up keeping that particular issue. The cover price was 60 cents.
On the front, just under the the cover price that said 60 cents, was a caption that simply read, "Thief at Work. Base Stealer Lou Brock."
In 1974 Brock was second in the voting for the National League's Most Valuable Player and the Cardinals finished second to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the National League East.
Later on Brock would end up in the National Baseball Hall of Fame after a 19-year major league career.
And my magazine became a nice piece of sports memorabilia.
May is a fun time for baseball fans because that's when both the weather and the competition start to heat up.
For the most part, as the nation and the world struggle through difficulties, baseball games can continue--not merely as a pleasant diversion--but as a prominent part of what makes up American nostalgia.
The summer of 1974 was particularly interesting.
The American involvement in Vietnam had ended but the controversy continued. On the radio, one could often hear songs like Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings; or Rikki Don't Lose that Number by Steely Dan.
Millions of people laughed each week at Archie Bunker in All in the Family on TV, and a book called Jaws, about a great white shark, stayed on the best-seller list for 44 weeks.
President Richard Nixon was under great pressure about the Watergate cover-up and would resign from office on Aug. 9.
But the baseball heroics continued.
Hank Aaron had broken Babe Ruth's career home run record in April and continued to knock baseballs out of the park as the season went on.
Cardinal pitcher Bob Gibson kept striking out batters and winning games. He wasn't quite as overpowering as he had been in younger years, but he got his 3,000th strikeout in July and would go 18-15 on the season.
And Brock kept swiping bases.
But he wasn't only a good baserunner; his skills made him a great player all around.
Columnist George Will, in his 1990 book about baseball entitled Men at Work, wrote that Brock was hurting during the 1974 season because he braced his slide with his hand. It got painful enough that he couldn't even hold a glass of water. "But," Will wrote, "he could hold a bat well enough to hit .306."
When Brock stole a base, however, it wasn't simply because he was fast, but also because he was smart.
In the 1980s Cardinal outfielder Vince Coleman was regularly compared to Brock because of his blazing speed as a base-stealer. He stole more than a hundred bases a year for three straight years; something even Brock never did.
But I think Brock was smarter than Coleman.
The article in my 43-year-old Sports Illustrated told how Brock studied opposing pitchers during batting practice before games, and it enabled him to steal on them later, even if it was a pitcher he had never played against before.
Today baseball is still a game that requires players to do their mental homework and it is still exciting. It has, however, evolved a bit over the years. Players don't steal quite as much as they did in the 70s and 80s.
But it was sure fun to watch while it lasted.
-- David Wilson, EdD, of Springdale, is a writer, consultant and presenter, who grew up in Arkansas but worked 27 years in education in Missouri. You may e-mail him at [email protected]. The opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 05/17/2017