Pittsburgh (Remnants of Forbes Field, and the most lopsided World Series ever*

 

The last two days have were the first baseball games I’ve gone to in Pittsburgh, but it isn’t the first baseball stadium in Pittsburgh I’ve been at.

Sort of.

From 1909 until 1970, the Pirates played at Forbes Field, one of the first metal and concrete baseball stadiums. The earliest years of major league baseball were played in stadiums made of wood, which weren’t that sturdy, and had a habit of burning down. Forbes Field wasn’t the first metal and concrete stadium, but it was the first in the National League. In the next two decades, every major league city built one. Two of those, Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston, are still in use.

By 1958, the nearby University of Pittsburgh was growing enough that the university purchased Forbes Field for the land, with the understanding that the Pirates would play there until a new stadium was built. That new stadium was Three Rivers Stadium, which, like most stadiums being built then, was a multi-purpose (the Pittsburgh Steelers NFL team also played there) concrete oval. However, its setting, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio River (hence, “Three Rivers”), made it spectacular to view from above, if not from inside the stadium. In 1970, Three Rivers opened, and Forbes Field was torn down, mostly, to accommodate University of Pittsburgh buildings. PNC Park opened in 2001.

A few years ago, I attended a meeting at Carnegie-Mellon University, an institution renowned for its skill in robotics, about how to build autonomy into spacecraft. It was a fascinating meeting, bringing together people like me, who think about spacecraft missions, people who build spacecraft, and people who design things like self-driving cars and (still-to-become-common) delivery drones. The hotel accommodations were such that walking through the University of Pittsburgh campus was one of the ways I could get to the meeting. One day, I noticed a wall that seemed out of place, but I could see that it had a marker on it, so I walked over to see it. It was part of the original outfield wall of Forbes Field. By far the most famous baseball play in Forbes Field history was when the Pirates’ Bill Mazeroski hit a home run in the bottom of the 9^th inning of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series to defeat the Yankees, and I knew I wasn’t far from the spot where Yankee outfielder Yogi Berra watched helplessly as the ball cleared the fence. What I didn’t know until I was writing this up was that at the time of that play, Forbes Field had already been sold, and its fate was sealed.

Kerry and I have run across remnants of old baseball stadiums a couple of other places, and I'm sure there are others. In Omaha last year, we found the old home plate for Rosenblatt Stadium, long the home of the College World Series, now on a pedestrian path inside the Omaha Zoo. And Kerry ran across the old home plate for the Twins' old home, the Metrodome, in the Mall of the Americas next to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Incidentally, there's apparently a marker for the old home plate of Forbes Field in the hallway of a building on the Pitt campus, but it's not in the exact location -- that would be inside a women's restroom.

The most lopsided World Series ever (*)

Back to that 1960 World Series. I saw lots of reminders of it this week, including a photo collage about Mazeroski’s home run in our hotel lobby. The Pirates won a few World Series before, and a couple since, but 1960 was a memorable, and bizarre, one.

The World Series is “best-of-seven,” which means the teams play until one of them has won four games, which can take a total of up to seven games. The Yankees scored a total of 55 runs in the 1960 Series, 10 more than any other team in any other of the 119 World Series played. Second place is 45, not even close. The Yankees outscored the Pirates by 28 runs over the seven games combined, also the World Series record.

The asterisk (*) is because the Yankees lost the Series! They won three games by 10 or more runs each, and lost four games by one or two runs, Game Seven on the Mazeroski home run.

Ironically, in the second-most lopsided World Series ever (23 run differential), the team that was badly outscored almost won, as well. That’s 2001, when the Diamondbacks had beaten the Yankees by scores of 9-1, 4-0, and 15-2, and lost three one-run games, two in extra innings, going into Game Seven. The Yankees had a one-run lead in Game Seven in the 9^th inning with future Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera pitching. Arizona rallied for two runs, and won the Series in one of the highlights of my life. There would have been a certain karmic justice if the Yankees had won one they should have lost after losing one they should have won 41 years earlier. But let's face it, the Yankees have won plenty of World Series.