The High Ground

As the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals prepared to meet in the 1968 World Series -- the anticipated duels between Denny McLain and Bob Gibson underscoring a historic “Year of the Pitcher” -- baseball’s owners were planning equally historic changes that would help regenerate offense and restructure the game on and off the field.

Now, in fact, preparing for a rematch 38 years later, the Tigers and Cardinals will have survived a far different route than in ’68 and will be playing a different game, even if pitching is still the name of it.

“Those were radical changes, no question about it,” Commissioner Bud Selig recalled by phone. “There was a feeling that the sport was experiencing stagnancy. The owners were looking for ways to rev it up.”

Responding to a season of record dominance by pitchers and a decade basically dominated from the hill -- “You only had to look at what [Sandy] Koufax and [Don] Drysdale did with a Maury Wills bunt and steal in Los Angeles,” Selig said -- the owners lowered the mound from 15 inches to 10 (there were suspicions that it had been as high as 20 inches in some ballparks, including Dodger Stadium), altering the slope and angles from which pitches were delivered.

In addition, umpires were quietly instructed to narrow the strike zone, basically depriving pitchers of the high or rule-book strike that has only recently been reestablished by commissioner’s office edict.

If those developments represented a welfare check for the beleaguered hitters in the aftermath of the ’68 season and Series, in which the Tigers rallied from a three-games-to-one deficit to defeat Gibson in Game 7, overall pitching was additionally weakened that winter when baseball expanded for a second time, going from 10 teams in each league to 12. Kansas City and Seattle joined the American League, San Diego and Montreal the National, necessitating a significant restructuring.

For the first time, both leagues were divided into two divisions of six teams each, and a five-game pennant playoff was instituted as a qualifying round for the World Series, the route that the New York Mets would have to travel while winning the 1969 Series.

Selig was not the commissioner in 1968 (Gen. William Eckert, the unknown soldier, was fired that December and replaced by Bowie Kuhn), but he is a baseball historian and was active in the owners’ circle trying to obtain a team, which he did in 1970 when the Seattle Pilots went bankrupt after one season and moved to Milwaukee as the Brewers.

“Pitching had been so dominant in the ‘60s, and especially in ‘68, that the owners, quite properly, felt it was hurting the game,” Selig said, speaking specifically of the decision to lower the mound.

“It was also a period in which pro football was beginning to gain in popularity, looking at new cities. It was fast-paced and violent compared to the tone of baseball, and the owners were deeply concerned about” the competition.

There are differing opinions as to whether ’68 was part of a pitching-oriented pattern that needed to be addressed or an anomaly that found the owners overreacting.

The certainty is that there has never been a comparable season in the context of overall pitching domination.

The tone was set in April, when Houston and the Mets were unable to score a run for six long hours before the Astros prevailed, 1-0, on an error in the 24th inning.

In midsummer, the National League won the All-Star game, 1-0, with the only run scoring on a double play.

For an appropriate finishing touch there was Drysdale’s then-record 58 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings or those consecutive days in September when Gaylord Perry of San Francisco and Ray Washburn of St. Louis pitched a no-hitter against each other’s team.

It was a season in which Carl Yastrzemski (.301) was the AL’s only .300 hitter, and Willie McCovey won the NL’s runs-batted-in title with the lowest total (105) since 1920.

Major league hitters batted a cumulative .237, still the record low, and the per-game runs average of 6.8 for two teams was the lowest since the dead-ball era of 1908.

In addition, both of the leagues had earned-run averages under 3.00 for the last time, and two pitchers, McLain of Detroit and Gibson of St. Louis, won their circuit’s most-valuable-player awards, in addition to the Cy Young Award.

McLain was 31-6, the last 30-game winner in the majors. Gibson was 22-9, with a phenomenal ERA of 1.12. The Cardinals right-hander pitched 28 complete games and 13 of the numbing 339 major league shutouts. He also won his last 15 regular-season decisions.

“I don’t know of any pitcher to have a more dominant season,” Selig said.

Gibson and McLain met twice in the Series, with Gibson striking out a Series-record 17 while winning Game 1, 4-0, before enjoying a rare, Game 4 laugher at McLain’s expense, 10-1. McLain rebounded to go the route in his own Game 6 laugher, 13-1, and the Tigers completed their comeback by taking advantage of a misjudged fly ball by Curt Flood to score the pivotal runs in a 4-1 victory over Gibson in Game 7 -- the third victory in the Series for Mickey Lolich, who was named the Series MVP.

McLain would experience legal problems in future years, but he won 24 games on the lower mound of 1969 and Gibson won 20, and the post-’68 changes certainly didn’t represent the total end of quality pitching. Among starters, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson, to cite a few, have produced potential Hall of Fame careers since then, and Nolan Ryan, among others, already has been inducted.

Yet, the league ERAs soared as offensive statistics in virtually every category increased by about 20% in 1969, and the beat has continued amid adoption of the designated hitter by the AL in 1973, additional expansion, a wave of smaller, fan-friendly ballparks, the floating strike zone, force-fed pitching, tighter and harder baseballs, a swing-from-the-heels emphasis on home runs with reduced concern for strikeouts, technologically improved bats and, yes, bigger and stronger players, some chemically improved.

Said Steve Hirdt, executive vice president of the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball’s official statistician:

“The 1969 changes definitely had the desired effect ... but the increase in offense that we’re seeing today is at another level, born of changes that came into the game in the early and mid-1990s.

“Since 1993, the average of runs per game has been higher than nine every year -- and has been above 10 in three of those years. And since 1994, there has been an average of more than two home runs per game every year; such an average had been achieved only once in all of baseball history prior to 1994.

“I’d hate to say that something will never happen, but I don’t expect to see a return to 1968 [pitching] levels in my lifetime.”

It won’t happen because owners won’t let it happen. The revved-up game -- with work stoppages and setbacks along the way -- has produced revved-up attendance: record totals closing in on 80 million a year and a team average of 2.5 million in 2006 compared with 1.1 million in 1968.

“No one would have ever predicted we’d be talking about these numbers,” Selig said.

He referred to the gate, but he could have meant the offense as well.

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Then and now

Comparing baseball’s leaders from 1968 and 2006:

*--* BATTING AVERAGE 1968 AL Carl Yastrzemski .301 2006 AL Joe Mauer .347 Total AL .300 hitters: 1968--1, 2006--20 1968 NL Pete Rose .335 2006 NL Freddy Sanchez .344 Total NL .300 hitters: 1968 --5, 2006--17

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*--* HOME RUNS 1968 AL Frank Howard 44 2006 AL David Ortiz 54 Total AL 30 HR: 1968--3, 2006--19 1968 NL Willie McCovey 36 2006 NL Ryan Howard 58 Total NL 30 HR: 1968--4, 2006--14

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*--* RUNS BATTED IN 1968 AL Ken Harrelson 109 2006 AL David Ortiz 137 Total AL 100 RBIs: 1968--2, 2006--20 1968 NL Willie McCovey 105 2006 NL Ryan Howard 149 Total NL 100 RBIs: 1968--2, 2006--16

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*--* EARNED-RUN AVERAGE 1968 AL Luis Tiant 1.60 2006 AL Johan Santana 2.77 Total AL sub-3.00 ERA: 1968--22, 2006--1 1968 NL Bob Gibson 1.12 2006 NL Roy Oswalt 2.98 Total NL sub-3.00 ERA: 1968--27, 2006--1

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*--* INNINGS PITCHED 1968 AL Denny McLain 336.0 2006 AL Johan Santana 233.2 Total AL 250+ innings: 1968--7, 2006--0 1968 NL Juan Marichal 326.0 2006 NL Bronson Arroyo 240.2 Total NL 250+ innings: 1968--13, 2006--0

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Sources: MLB.com, baseball-reference.com, baseball-almanac.com