The 1971 World Series was played in a different world
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The Orioles' Frank Robinson scores the winning run of the sixth game of the 1971 World Series as he comes home on Brooks Robinson's 10th inning hit. -
Press photo by Anthony Kaminski of the World Series at Three Rivers Stadium in 1971.
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Charles Manson got the death penalty that spring, though it was later deemed unconstitutional.
The Pirates and the Baltimore Orioles played six World Series games in broad daylight that fall, though daylight in the World Series was later deemed unconstitutional, at least effectively.
Seven thousand people were arrested in one day in one city protesting the Vietnam War that summer, just as the Constitution's 26th amendment was ready to give 18-year-olds the vote.
Forty years may have cobwebbed all of it amid drifts of mental dust, but a lot went down in 1971.
"It did; oh, it did," Al Oliver was saying the other day. "I didn't think much about it at the time, but I do now. I feel fortunate to have been part of history."
PG VIDEO: 1971 PLAYERS RECALL SERIESThe Pirates first baseman/centerfielder, who was delivering line drives the whole summer, was talking specifically about the first day of September 1971, when manager Danny Murtaugh wrote the first all-minority lineup in Major League Baseball history. But he could have been appreciating the entirety of a season when cultural turbulence was little else but America's day-to-day backlighting, and when America's baseball was little short of divine.
The three-game series that starts here Monday night not only brings the Baltimore Orioles back to Pittsburgh for the dubious modern curiosity known as interleague play, it provides a homecoming for some 20 staff and players from that championship Pirates season.
Looking back through the prism of 40 years, the boys of lumber only grow fonder of its memories.
"When I think about it now, it's like I didn't realize how good we were," said Richie Hebner, the third baseman, now 63. "We had good pitching, but people looking back at the Lumber Company don't think about pitchers. Without pitching, it's a long, hot summer. You have to win a lot of games 2-1 and 3-2 to get to October, and we did, even if people came out to see us score 10 runs."
That was probably because Willie Stargell hit 48 home runs, because Roberto Clemente hit .341, and because those Bucs were offensively dangerous from one end of the dugout to the other. But Hebner is right. The pitchers were nearly as frightening. Dock Ellis was 14-3 at the All-Star break, and he started for the National League that July in Detroit. Steve Blass was on his way to 15 wins with a luminous 2.85 earned run average. Dave Giusti would be Fireman of the Year, with 30 saves.
And still with lumber and lightning and enviable depth, those Pirates were considerably overshadowed in that era by those Orioles, who were not only the defending world champions, who had not only followed that up with 105 wins in 1971, who not only had Boog Powell, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson and Paul Blair, but had four 20-game winners.
First Published June 19, 2011 12:00 am
