Reising: Michigan State baseball and College World Series memories
From SABR member Robert Reising at The Shanahan Report on February 27, 2020:
Happiness reigned all weekend. From Friday evening’s spirited greetings to Sunday’s fond farewells, eleven members of Michigan State University’s 1954 championship baseball team delighted in the team’s Sixty-Fifth-Year Campus Reunion in late April of 2019. The setting was perfect: ALMA MATER, their academic and athletic home more than half-a-century earlier. Camaraderie and gaiety so completely enveloped the eleven that fatigue was seldom visible during the three days. Time had not dulled their joy in and gratitude for a unique season. Nor would it ever, they all enthusiastically sensed. Long ago the phenomenon launched in 1954 had disappeared into their DNA.
Not a syllable of boasting was voiced. Yet each of the eleven possessed a silent awareness that he had contributed to a success that no other Spartan diamond squad could claim: a 25 win, 10 loss, 1 tie record; Championships of the Big Ten Conference and the District Tournament; and qualification for and a third-place, and 3-victory, performance in the College World Series. Each realized that he had aided in bringing the Michigan State baseball program its best team ever, in helping to set a standard by which all other Spartan teams have been or will be judged. Among the eleven, too, there was undoubtedly a growing awareness that the Spartans of ’54 were the longest regularly reuniting team in the history of American intercollegiate athletics.
Read the full article here: https://www.shanahan.report/a/michigan-state-baseball-and-cws-memories
Originally published: May 5, 2020. Last Updated: May 5, 2020.