Read Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever for Free Online

place to watch and play baseball. Back then the field was still natural grass. However, even here, in a longtime baseball town, football eventually gained the upper hand. In 1970, the outfield at Busch was ripped up for football as the stadium was also home to the St. Louis Cardinals of the National Football League. The infield was replaced by Astroturf seven years later and an unforeseen consequence was that the man-made stuff caused the temperature on the field to soar past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. (Lou Brock resorted to putting aluminum foil inside his cleats to beat the heat.) In addition, the change in turf at times made the game unrecognizable to the way the Cardinals played in the mid-1960s. Manager Whitey Herzog loaded up with speedsters (Vince Coleman, Willie McGee. and Ozzie Smith), who could turn bouncing hits to the outfield into doubles and triples. Such a brand of baseball took St. Louis to the World Series in 1982, 1985, and 1987.
    That last ballclub brought me to St. Louis for the first time. I was covering the San Francisco Giants, my first year of big-league ball, and that divisional series went seven games, with the Cardinals taking the last two to upend Roger Craig’s “Humm Babies.” It was my first experience in being drenched with cheap champagne. As I was covering the winner’s clubhouse, Tommy Herr, whom I’d pestered for quotes throughout the series, got me. I didn’t think about it until I returned later that evening to my hotel, changed into a new shirt, and wrote away as the sun came up over the Mississippi River. But when I went to run a hand through my hair, the fingertips became stuck. The bubbly had dried into a shellac-like dome-do.

    The same week Catfish Hunter pitched his perfect game, Jim Ryun ran the trails under a dormant volcano outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. The best miler in the world ran alone, gasping for breath.
    Two years before, at the age of nineteen, Ryun had set world records in the half-mile and mile. Sports Illustrated named him its “Sportsman of the Year” and he won the James E. Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete. But in the spring of 1968, everything went seriously off track. Three days after announcing his engagement to Anne Snider, it was confirmed that Ryun had mononucleosis. As a result, he missed the first round of the U.S. Olympic Trials.
    After three weeks of prescribed rest, he traveled to northern Arizona to train at seven thousand feet, the approximate height of the Mexico City Games. With the Olympics less than five months away, Ryun and the powers that be feared he wouldn’t be ready. One night Ryun made a single entry in his training journal. “Worried,” it read. In June, America’s top track star planned to run a 3:50 mile. Now he was pressed to break four minutes in his specialty. After years of training for the Olympic Games, he feared that he might “not even get a chance to try out.”
    Ryun’s struggles, however, went well beyond one man trying to make the Olympic team. ABC Sports’ Roone Arledge had paid $4.5 million, three times the amount NBC laid out for the Tokyo Games four years earlier, for the rights to broadcast the Mexico City Games. Using his popular ABC’s Wide World of Sports as a media springboard, Arledge planned to offer live coverage of the Olympics to the American audience. Four years earlier, in the Winter Games from Innsbruck, Austria, the action was taped and flown back to New York before being aired. Ultimately, Arledge’s goal was to one day have the Olympics become as popular as the World Series. But he realized that could happen only if the best-known athletes—and in the track world nobody was more famous than Ryun—found their way to the starting line.
    No sport cast a bigger shadow in 1968 than major league baseball. The’68 World Series was on NBC and ranked among the first major sports events to be rated. Nobody was surprised when it drew a 50-plus percent market share—an amazing