Miller: Finding the single memory that defines each baseball season since 1903
From Sam Miller at ESPN.com on December 28, 2017:
I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head who won the 1945 World Series, but I could tell you that a goat got kicked out of it. I couldn’t tell you who the best pitcher in baseball was in 1956, but I could tell you who threw a perfect game in that year’s World Series. I don’t remember who hit the most home runs in 1990, but I do remember that the Mariners’ No. 2 and 3 hitters — both of them named Griffey — hit back-to-back dingers one day that year. Most of us remember these things like we remember our first phone number.
We would probably all be surprised to find out what history will remember about our era. Once the eyewitnesses die, a lot of weird stuff gets remembered, and a lot of stuff that seemed important at the time gets forgotten. I got to wondering what history will remember about 2017 — what a late-21st century kid raised on baseball trivia books, This Date In History radio segments and her granddad’s memories will know about this past season. To answer that requires first figuring out what gets remembered and why.
So, with the help of a few smart baseball friends, I charted 114 years of baseball by the single most memorable fact of each season — the one thing a fairly serious baseball fan has probably heard of from that year.
Read the full article here: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/21837836/the-year-finding-single-memory-defines-baseball-season-1903
Originally published: December 29, 2017. Last Updated: December 29, 2017.