RP33: 4:00 – 4:25pm, Georgia 7,8,9

The 1960s were a decade of turmoil, tragedy, violence, and unrest. Baseball’s status quo was shattered by expansion, stadium construction, and labor issues just as surely as the national status quo was jolted by assassinations, war, civil rights, and the counterculture. Immense cultural and social change became the decade’s norm. Yet, as the decade’s changes spun ever faster, the on-field pace of baseball ground to a near halt in the Year of the Pitcher. Baseball seemed to be losing its place in America’s heart to pro football, a sport that seemed much more reflective of the raucous decade. Marshaling a wide range of sources, images, and observations, Treder explores such themes in this presentation, contextualizing baseball’s role in the 1960s, and the 1960s’s role in baseball.

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Steve Treder (SteveT@wmgnet.com) has written a weekly column on baseball history for The Hardball Times since 2004, and is a co-author of many Hardball Times books. He has presented papers to the Nine Spring Training Conference on the Historical and Sociological Impact of Baseball, to the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, and to the SABR Annual Convention. His articles have been published in Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, as well as in The National Pastime. A lifelong San Francisco Giants’ fan, he is Vice President for Strategic Development for Western Management Group, a compensation consulting firm headquartered in Los Gatos CA.