ONE IS ENOUGH : Ernie Banks Might Have Felt Like Playing Two, but Scheduled Doubleheaders Soon Will Be as Rare as a Star’s Free Autograph

In September of 1987, Pope John Paul II said Mass before 63,000 of the faithful at Dodger Stadium. The next day, the Dodgers played a regularly scheduled doubleheader against the Cincinnati Reds, attracting 23,829 believers.

It’s not known whether the Pope will make a return engagement, but the Dodgers don’t figure to schedule another doubleheader.

That twin bill on Sept. 17, 1987, could wind up as a historical footnote in the club’s record books--the last scheduled doubleheader played by the club. But it’s not just the Dodgers.

Once an American tradition, regularly scheduled doubleheaders have been virtually phased out of existence.

Whereas 148 of them were on the major league schedule 25 years ago, there are only three this season.

And next year, for the first time in this century, the National League has not scheduled any. The American League plans one.

There are no doubleheaders scheduled Tuesday, the Fourth of July, which used to be a big day for them. But then, there hasn’t been a doubleheader scheduled on any major national holiday since the St. Louis Cardinals played the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park on July 4, 1984.

The Dodgers haven’t played a holiday doubleheader at home for nine years. The Angels, who haven’t played a scheduled doubleheader at Anaheim Stadium this decade, played their last holiday twin bill on Labor Day, 1977.

Baseball has gone from being crazy about doubleheaders to being crazy about avoiding them. It took that papal visit to force the Dodgers to double up in 1987. The Pope booked the stadium for Sept. 16, in the midst of a Dodger home stand, leaving the club no alternative but to play the Reds twice the next day.

How did all this happen?

It should come as no surprise that it can be traced to the bottom line.

In the mid-’70s, when baseball’s attendance boom began--boosting attendance by 22 million to a high of 53 million last season--the owners realized an economic truth: A team could draw many more fans to two single games than to one doubleheader.

There were other factors, too, that led to the doubleheader’s demise, but there is no doubt that it is now as rare as that other great American bargain, the double feature at the movies.

“When I draft the schedule, one of the standards it has to have is no doubleheaders whenever possible,” says Henry Stephenson, baseball’s official schedule maker. “Holiday dates themselves aren’t a big attraction anymore. More teams are saying they want to be on the road then because their fans are out of town, too.”

Stephenson, who runs his company with his wife in Staten Island, N.Y., has to double up games if there are conflicts with stadium use--as there was in San Diego with the Padres and Chargers this year--or if a club requests a doubleheader, which nobody does anymore.

“It doesn’t make any sense from a marketing standpoint,” Stephenson said.

Once in a while, Stephenson also has to schedule a doubleheader to satisfy rules of the Major League Baseball Players Assn., which has to approve all schedules. Rules require that a team not play more than 20 games in a row and also get a day off after flying west to east.

This year, the Tigers played a doubleheader in Detroit to avoid a string of 39 games on 39 dates, and the Giants had to double up at home against the Braves on a Sunday because the Braves opened in Atlanta the following Tuesday.

“We don’t play doubleheaders because we want to,” a Giant spokesman said.

In the old days, clubs played doubleheaders because they needed to. Aside from Ladies’ Day--which has been eliminated because of women’s lib, insiders say--doubleheaders were a club’s biggest promotion, a way to lure fans to the park on a Sunday afternoon, especially against inferior teams that were poor draws. It’s no coincidence that the 1962 New York Mets, in their first year of existence, were scheduled for 11 doubleheaders on the road.

An average gate in 1957 was slightly under 10,000. Big doubleheaders could draw three times that number.

Last season, major league teams averaged about 25,000 for single games, 36,500 for the four scheduled doubleheaders. With the average fan spending $6 for a ticket and $5 for concessions, a club’s revenue for a single game last season was about $300,000, not including parking. The doubleheaders took in nearly $200,000 less than two single games would have.

In 1957, their last season in Brooklyn, the Dodgers averaged fewer than 13,000 fans a game at Ebbets Field and the average for their eight doubleheaders was 20,000. But last season, the Dodgers averaged more than 38,200 a game and drew fewer fans to each of their three rain-caused doubleheaders.

If baseball needs to lure fans to the park these days, it gives away pins, balls, bats, cushions and sports socks, not games. There’s even some doubt whether the public--especially youngsters weaned on MTV--could sit through a doubleheader. Years ago, the slower pace of life was better suited to the five or six hours required to watch a doubleheader. Today, games are longer, and an average doubleheader can last seven hours.

But the fans were not really asked their feelings on the doubleheader. For that reason, major league baseball and the players’ association try to deflect responsibility for the doubleheader’s decline, each pointing a finger at the other.

“There are 81 (home) games (for each team) and the owners would love to play them on 81 dates,” said a union spokesman who declined to be identified.

But major league baseball contends that union rules and player salaries have forced the owners to squeeze every available dollar out of the game. One rule--no doubleheader after a night game--makes Sunday doubleheaders fiscal suicide because a club’s best box office is done on a Saturday night.

And salaries have gone up from an average of $99,876 in 1978 to $438,729 last year.

“The economics of the game are such that clubs really need revenue to pay the bills,” said Dick Wagner, special assistant to the commissioner and former general manager of the Reds.

But Wagner feels no sadness about the disappearance of the doubleheader.

“In some cities, the doubleheader seemed to create problems with some of the fans,” he said, pointing out that guzzling beer for 18 innings proved too much even for the most stout-hearted drinkers.

“Their decorum was not too good,” Wagner said. “There were fights and problems. Baseball has been on a real program to improve fan behavior.”

Although Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs’ immortal, used to step outside the dugout on a warm afternoon and say, “It’s a great day--let’s play two,” players generally don’t mourn the passing of the doubleheader.

“I hate them--they’re bad for baseball,” said Joe Morgan, former second baseman for the Reds. “You can’t give that pure performance for 16 innings or more. After five swings of the bat, that’s enough.”

And as Frank Quilici, former manager of the Minnesota Twins, once said, “Doubleheaders can kill you.”

Quilici no doubt shudders when reminded of the doubleheader between the Giants and Mets in New York in 1964. It lasted 9 hours 52 minutes, a baseball record.

But Quilici probably would not have minded doubleheaders, which can wreck a pitching staff, if he’d had a pitcher like Dutch Levsen. On Aug. 28, 1926, Levsen pitched two complete-game victories for the Cleveland Indians over the Boston Red Sox, 6-1 and 5-1, and went into the record books as the last pitcher to accomplish that iron-man feat.

Doubleheaders were a test of endurance for sportswriters as well.

“There’s never been a good story written yet on a doubleheader, especially a split,” said Bob Wolf, a retired baseball writer who covered the Milwaukee Braves for the Milwaukee Journal from 1953 through 1965.

Aside from dealing with the physical demands, a writer needed to have the mental dexterity to fuse two games into one story and resist the temptation to emphasize the second game.

“AP (Associated Press) did that and it was my pet peeve,” Wolf said.

Another peeve was the twi-night doubleheader, “the dreaded one,” Wolf said, because it almost always lasted beyond midnight into the next day, creating havoc with deadlines and biorhythms.

Wolf remembers a Sunday doubleheader in Milwaukee that dragged on for hours because of rain delays.

“The club didn’t furnish food in those days, so the writers sent out for prime rib,” he said.

Bob Broeg, sports editor emeritus of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a member of the board of directors of the Hall of Fame, covered the Cardinals from 1946 through 1958. He theorizes that the increase of night baseball in the late ‘40s spelled doom for Sunday doubleheaders.

Sam Breadon, owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, once told him, “Night ball makes every day Sunday.”

The average working man no longer had to wait until the weekend to see a game.

Broeg did not have much affection for what he called the double dip. Because of so-called Sunday “blue laws” in some cities, games couldn’t start until 2 p.m. and had to end by 6. To avoid having to reschedule the second game, especially if their team was way behind, players sometimes accelerated the action by deliberately striking out.

“It made a mockery of the game,” Broeg said.

In the 1950s, it wasn’t unusual for every major league club to play a doubleheader on Sunday--the Pittsburgh Pirates played a home-and-away total of 22 doubleheaders that year. The regularity of Sunday doubleheaders might have put pressure and stress on a player, but it did provide him with more than an occasional day off on Monday.

“Those were nice,” said Joe Amalfitano, former player and now a coach with the Dodgers.

Players today can go nearly three weeks without a break.

“When you get a day off now, it’s very, very welcome,” Amalfitano said.

There is one Dodger, though, who relished every single second of every doubleheader.

“I like to play all day long,” said Manager Tom Lasorda. “They could play tripleheaders, for all I care.”