Life before videotape: How baseball teams celebrated in 1965 and 2013

In recent decades, major league baseball teams celebrate the last outs of playoff series with giant gangtackles of joy. For example, here are the Los Angeles Dodgers last week whooping up the final out of their quarter-final series. (They just got eliminated in the semifinal series, with presumptive Cy Young winner Clayton Kershaw, pitching on four days rest, getting beat 9-0.)

On Crossing Wall Street, Eddy Elfenbein points out that it wasn't always like that:

On Youtube, I recently stumbled across the complete Game 7 of the 1965 World Series. 

What I found fascinating was the restrained celebration after the final out. Perhaps it shows how much American culture has changed over the past 48 years. 

If you skip ahead to 2:20:16, you can see the final out. SPOILER ALERT – Sandy Koufax strikes him out. But notice how subdued the celebration is. Of course, the game is in Minnesota and not Los Angeles, so that certainly is a factor. Everyone is happy but it’s far from the over-the-top New Year’s-like manic celebrations we see nowadays. No man-pile. No confetti. Just hearty handshakes.

One possible reason for this change is that people tend to behave today in ways that will make the highlight reels. The arrival of videotape in the early 1960s (the first use of instant replay was the Army-Navy football game of 1963) is one reason why Baby Boomers tend to assume that history began around the time of the JFK assassination and the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show: they saw the same clips over and over.

Think of it as a sort of Darwinian selection for behavior that will make the replay. One thing that television likes is energy.

For example, Sandy Koufax's final strikeout in 1965 is not a video Iconic Moment, even though in text it's a quite well-known event, perhaps the most celebrated Jewish sports accomplishment of the 20th Century. Koufax, the best pitcher in baseball, had clinched the pennant in the next to last regular season game on October 2. So, he was scheduled to start the first game of the World Series on October 6 on his usual 3 days rest, which would allow him to start Games 4 and 7 as well with 3 days rest. But he refused to pitch Game 1 because it was Yom Kippur. Then he lost Game 2. But he threw a shutout in Game 5 and then came back on two days rest to win the final game 2-0.

We have excellent B&W video of catcher Johnny Roseboro trotting out to the mound to sincerely congratulate Koufax, followed by the other Dodgers on the field (but not in the dugout), but it's not a famous clip because everybody behaves in a dignified fashion. The Dodgers of 1965 probably felt that since the whole country was watching, they should be on their best behavior. And to whoop it up more would be showing up their opponents and their opponents' fans. And that would be unsporting.