Allen: When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Major League Baseball stood still
From Scott Allen at the Washington Post on July 17, 2019, with mention of SABR member J.G. Preston:
At 4:17 p.m. Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Mike Epstein stood 90 feet from home plate and some 238,000 miles from the moon.
With the Washington Senators and New York Yankees tied at 2 in the eighth inning of their series finale at Yankee Stadium, Epstein, a Bronx native, had one thing on his mind. It wasn’t Apollo 11′s lunar descent.
“I wasn’t concerned with it,” Epstein, now 76, said from his home outside of Denver last month. “I was concerned about scoring a run.”
An estimated 650 million watched Neil Armstrong take man’s first step on the moon more than six hours later, but during the lunar landing, 32,933 were in the stands at Yankee Stadium on the Sunday before the all-star break. Ken McMullen dug in against Jack Aker with Epstein on third, a man on first and no outs. Most scheduled sports programs were preempted by coverage of Apollo 11′s progress, but Washington’s WWDC Radio carried the Senators-Yankees game with short reports on the moon mission.
Read the full article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/07/17/when-apollo-landed-moon-major-league-baseball-stood-still/?utm_term=.e26cba8133a3
Originally published: July 17, 2019. Last Updated: July 17, 2019.