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Sam Miller, ESPN.com 4y

The Year That ... : Finding the single memory that defines each baseball season since 1903

MLB, Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies, Detroit Tigers, Houston Astros, Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Angels, Los Angeles Dodgers, Miami Marlins, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Oakland Athletics, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, Seattle Mariners, St. Louis Cardinals, Tampa Bay Rays, Texas Rangers, Toronto Blue Jays, Washington Nationals

Editor's Note: Originally published in 2017.

I couldn't tell you off the top of my head who won the 1945 World Series, but I could tell you that a goat got kicked out of it. I couldn't tell you who the best pitcher in baseball was in 1956, but I could tell you who threw a perfect game in that year's World Series. I don't remember who hit the most home runs in 1990, but I do remember that the Mariners' No. 2 and 3 hitters -- both of them named Griffey -- hit back-to-back dingers one day that year. Most of us remember these things like we remember our first phone number.

We would probably all be surprised to find out what history will remember about our era. Once the eyewitnesses die, a lot of weird stuff gets remembered, and a lot of stuff that seemed important at the time gets forgotten. I got to wondering what history will remember about 2017 -- what a late-21st century kid raised on baseball trivia books, This Date In History radio segments and her granddad's memories will know about this past season. To answer that requires first figuring out what gets remembered and why.

So, with the help of a few smart baseball friends, I charted 114 years of baseball by the single most memorable fact of each season -- the one thing a fairly serious baseball fan has probably heard of from that year.

What we learned: There are exactly seven ways to be remembered. Plus subcategories.

1. Incredible achievement, usually captured by a single number or concept
For example, 1905 was the year Christy Mathewson threw three shutouts in the World Series, and 1959 was the year Harvey Haddix took a perfect game into the 13th inning, and 1982 was the year Rickey Henderson stole 130 bases, and 1967 was the year Carl Yastrzemski won the last Triple Crown of the century. It sure does help when the number is a record, which necessitates us constantly bringing it up whenever somebody remotely challenges them. If somebody throws three no-hitters in a row next year, you'll subsequently hear Johnny Vander Meer's name about 95 percent less often than you do now. But some numbers persist despite not being records -- Roger Maris' 1961 chase and Hank Aaron's 1974 jog around the bases will be remembered for many decades after "61" and "755" quit being records -- and some performances are memorable without a specific number, such as Sandy Koufax's breakout in 1963.

1b. Incredible team (often captured by a nickname)
Because we like to argue about which team was the best team ever, and we like to show off by proving we can name decades-old lineups. So 1927 and 1928 were the years of Murderers' Row, 1975 was the year the Big Red Machine peaked, 1996 was the year the Core Four came together and launched a new Yankees dynasty, 1969 was the year of the Miracle Mets.

1c. Incredible single play, or sequence of plays, often aided by iconic photo or video images
These are the single moments when a player was so good, so impactful or so loud it overwhelms the rest of the season. Of course, 1954 was the year not of the 111-43 Cleveland Indians -- the best record in AL history -- but of The Catch. And 1951 was the year of Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round The World, not Willie Mays' debut. And 1988 was most memorably the year of Kirk Gibson's home run, not Orel Hershiser's 59-inning scoreless streak. Baseball is a game of slowly building records, of naps on the couch and dull Augusts, but the very, very biggest moments can stand out like an air horn in a library.

2. The moment the timeline begins
History is a long drive, and as with all long drives we remember the first and last miles more than the hours of unchanging landscapes in the middle. On the merits, the first World Series -- in 1903 -- wasn't that memorable, and in many ways, the play would have been unrecognizable to a modern fan: One team's ace was ineffective after injuring himself in a trap-shooting contest, another pitcher threw five complete games, and the best player on the field (Honus Wagner) made six errors. And yet nobody would dispute that the 2017 Series and the 1903 Series belong to the same lineage, which makes 1903 the infrastructure upon which our modern game is built.

And so 1922 is the year baseball got its antitrust exemption, and 1929 is the year Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig first got uniform numbers, and 1935 is when night baseball began, and 1946 is when Jackie Robinson desegregated the minors, and 1950 is when Vin Scully started broadcasting games -- unless that one belongs under category 2b ...

2b. The moment modern baseball begins
We can debate what's modern, but there are various points where the weird old-timey baseball they used to play became the cool and normal baseball we all love now. Which is why 1952 is the year Topps launched the modern baseball card, why 1965 is the year of the draft, and why 1976 is the year of free agency. This is probably the category for 2002's Moneyball A's -- a great team, but more historically memorable as the first modern team.

3. Bloopers and/or extraordinary failures
I don't know that most people know what Snodgrass' Muff (1912) and Merkle's Boner (1908) actually were, but they're probably the two most famous plays of the first quarter of the 20th century. Failure has a better set of vocabulary than success does, for one thing, but it's probably also the case that failure can fail a lot more dramatically than success can succeed. You actively hope for the walk-off homer, but you're not even considering the walk-off slow grounder through the first baseman's legs. So the 1986 season is the year of Bill Buckner, and the 2003 season is the year of Bartman and Grady Little, far more (in my opinion) than 2004 and 2016 will ultimately be remembered as the years of the Red Sox and Cubs winning.

4. Pathos
Sometimes overlapping with reason No. 3 -- Muffs and Boners are undeniably stories of pathos -- but mostly its own thing. The pathos events are the years when happy, playful baseball must grapple with the fact that it exists in a larger world of death, injury and human failing: 1939, the year Lou Gehrig retired; 1957, the year Herb Score got hit by the line drive; 1919, the year of the Black Sox.

5. Disruption of baseball's basic equilibrium
In 1944, Joe Nuxhall pitched in the majors when he was 15. Of course, he pitched in the majors not because he was the most incredible pitching prospect in history, but because all the good players had to go fight in the war, and so for two seasons baseball was basically profoundly weird. This happens sometimes, for reasons less dramatic than wars: The 1968 season was the year of the pitcher, the 1993 season was when the offensive environment of the steroids era really began (along with baseball in Colorado), and the 1987 season was a very brief juiced-ball moment. These are seasons we remember mostly as years when baseball broke, and when everything that happened has to be taken with a little bit of skepticism; you might even think of them as the year the stats don't count. You might actually put 1998 here, the year Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa homered so many danged times.

6. When the larger world intersects with baseball, or vice versa
For instance, 1942 was the year Franklin Roosevelt sent the "Green Light" letter to baseball, more or less giving the sport permission to keep playing baseball during the war for the good of the nation. The larger culture reached its big, heavy paw into baseball and reminded the sport it is a game in the world, not actually a world of its own. Same for 2005, the year Congress called Rafael Palmeiro, McGwire and others to testify awkwardly about performance-enhancing drugs.

Or, as the vice versa: The 1992 season is the year the "Homer At The Bat" episode of "The Simpsons" aired. It might have been the last time baseball players were celebrities enough to carry a pop-culture phenomenon, and it helped launch the show's practice of loading up on celebrity guest stars. Indeed, in retrospect that episode sort of looks like the final act of baseball's reign as the national pastime.

And, finally ...

7. By being weird, by being almost literally unbelievable or inexplicable
This is where we probably find the biggest disconnect between how historic something seemed in the moment and how long it survives in lore.

So, for instance, we have 1911, the year of Charlie "Victory" Faust. Faust was "virtually unmatched for sheer strangeness and improbability," according to the Society for American Baseball Research. Faust pitched two innings (allowing one run) and batted once (hit by pitch) for the New York Giants, but he wasn't really a player, as became clear almost immediately after he talked manager John McGraw into giving him a tryout. Rather, he became something between a mascot and a team joke and a good luck charm, and in the months he spent with the Giants they won a staggering 80 percent of their games. Then the Giants kicked him out, more or less, and immediately slumped; over the next three years he spent extended periods in mental institutions before dying in 1915.

Here's the thing about baseball: Even the most dramatic moments are extremely plausible. Just about every home run in history was hit by a player already known to be capable of hitting a home run, while even a perfect game is just the most likely thing happening 27 times in a row. The excitement comes from combining uncertainty and stakes -- rolling dice for money is exciting -- rather than any literal I Can't Believe What I Just Saw emotion.

But there are stories that just barely hold together, especially as decades pass. Faust's is one. What was this world, where a mentally ill man could walk up to the most famous manager in the world at a fair, tell him a fortune-teller had prophesied he would pitch the Giants to the pennant, and actually spend the next year with the team? What was this sport, where that same man could actually appear in games, despite being "arguably the least athletic person apart from Eddie Gaedel to play in the major leagues," according to SABR? Why did the Giants win so many games under the protection of Faust's and McGraw's superstitions, and what was the story -- one of fraternity or cruelty? What was it even like to be human in 1911? Faust's story wasn't that big a deal at the time, and he faded into obscurity in the years immediately afterward. But the decades that passed gave the absurdity and ambiguity of it time to ferment, and when the character of Charlie Faust reemerged in the 1960s (in Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory Of Their Times") he became the most famous part of an entire season of baseball.

Similarly, 1910 is the year a manager ordered his team to let Nap Lajoie bunt for eight base hits, then tried to bribe the official scorekeeper to give Lajoie another, then got banned from baseball, just to spite Ty Cobb and tilt the batting crown. So it is that 1917 is the year starting pitcher Babe Ruth (Babe Ruth!!) walked the first batter of a game, punched the umpire, was ejected, and his relief pitcher got 27 consecutive outs (including a caught stealing on the inherited runner) for a "combined no-hitter." That game wasn't (as far as I can tell) mentioned in the New York Times sports section at the time, but is now the most famous event of that season, because it's almost too illogical to have happened. So it is that 1970 is the year Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter on LSD, and 1991 is the year Rodney McCray ran straight through an outfield wall.

So there we go, the seven-plus ways to be remembered.

It might also be worth noting that, while doing this, my collaborators and I were struck by how deep the options for 1988 and 1989 were. I picked Gibson's home run and Pete Rose getting banned for life, but that left an incredible collection of memories out: Jim Abbott pitching with one arm, Ken Griffey Jr.'s Upper Deck rookie card and the birth of the glossy baseball card era, Jose Canseco's 40/40 season, Hershiser's scoreless-innings streak, the Orioles starting a season 0-21, a massive earthquake interrupting the World Series, everything about Bo Jackson. Only a couple of seasons could compete with these two: Maybe 1951 (Mays and Mantle debuted and Gaedel batted, in addition to Thomson's home run) and 1908 ("Take Me Out To The Ballgame" was written, the Cubs won their last World Series of the century, a catcher caught a baseball tossed from the top of the Washington Monument, plus Fred Merkle). It struck me how blessed I was that, in probably my most formative seasons as a baseball fan, the game was so darned memorable.

Then I realized I probably got the relationship backward. Those years are probably memorable because I was 8. "History" might remember baseball one way, but baseball is not, and has never been, one way.

The list:

1903: The Year That ... they played the first World Series
1904: ... there was no World Series
1905: ... Christy Mathewson threw three shutouts in the World Series
1906: ... the Cubs won 116 games, the best record ever
1907: ... the Tigres del Licey were founded in the Dominican Republic
1908: ... Merkle's Boner happened
1909: ... the Honus Wagner T206 baseball card came out
1910: ... Nap Lajoie won the batting crown from Ty Cobb on the last day of the season
1911: ... Charlie Faust was John McGraw's good-luck charm
1912: ... Snodgrass' Muff happened
1913: ... the Federal League launched
1914: ... Wrigley Field opened
1915: ... the Federal League collapsed
1916: ... the Giants won (or, at least, didn't lose) 26 straight
1917: ... Babe Ruth and Ernie Shore combined on the weirdest no-hitter ever
1918: ... the Red Sox won their last World Series of the 20th century
1919: ... the Black Sox threw the World Series
1920: ... Babe Ruth debuted with the Yankees and hit 54 homers
1921: ... baseball debuted on the radio
1922: ... the Supreme Court gave MLB its antitrust exemption
1923: ... the House That Ruth Built opened
1924: ... Rogers Hornsby hit .424
1925: ... Babe Ruth missed two months with maybe syphilis
1926: ... Babe Ruth ended the World Series by getting caught stealing
1927: ... the Yankees were Murderers' Row
1928: ... the Yankees were Murderers' Row, again
1929: ... the Yankees put uniform numbers on their players -- Ruth No. 3, Gehrig No. 4
1930: ... Hack Wilson drove in 190/191
1931: ... Jackie Mitchell, a teenage girl, struck out Ruth and Gehrig in an exhibition
1932: ... Babe Ruth called his shot
1933: ... the first All-Star Game was played
1934: ... Carl Hubbell struck out five consecutive Hall of Famers in the ASG
1935: ... the first night game was played
1936: ... the first Hall of Fame class was announced
1937: ... Joe Medwick won the last (to date) NL Triple Crown
1938: ... Johnny Vander Meer threw consecutive no-hitters
1939: ... Lou Gehrig retired
1940: ... they timed Bob Feller's fastball with a motorcycle
1941: ... DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak and Ted Williams' .406 batting average coexisted
1942: ... Franklin Roosevelt sent baseball his "Green Light" letter
1943: ... the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League launched
1944: ... everybody went to war and a 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall pitched
1945: ... the Billy Goat Curse began
1946: ... Jackie Robinson played in the minors
1947: ... Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier
1948: ... Satchel Paige debuted in the majors
1949: ... Jackie Robinson won the MVP award
1950: ... Vin Scully began broadcasting Dodgers games
1951: ... Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard 'Round The World
1952: ... Topps essentially invented the modern baseball card set
1953: ... Mickey Mantle hit a home run "565" feet
1954: ... Willie Mays made The Catch
1955: ... Dodgers inspired Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer"
1956: ... Don Larsen throws a perfect game in the World Series
1957: ... Herb Score got hit by a line drive
1958: ... the Dodgers and Giants played baseball on the West Coast
1959: ... Harvey Haddix took a perfect game into the 13th inning
1960: ... Bill Mazeroski hit a walk-off home run to win the World Series
1961: ... Roger Maris hit 61 homers
1962: ... the expansion Mets lost 120 games
1963: ... Sandy Koufax broke out
1964: ... the Phillies had an all-time September collapse
1965: ... the draft started
1966: ... Sandy Koufax held out for more money at the start of the season, and retired at the end of it
1967: ... Yaz won the last Triple Crown of the 20th century
1968: ... was the Year of the Pitcher
1969: ... the Miracle Mets won
1970: ... Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter on LSD
1971: ... SABR was founded
1972: ... Curt Flood took on the reserve clause before the Supreme Court
1973: ... George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees
1974: ... Hank Aaron hit No. 715
1975: ... the Big Red Machine peaked
1976: ... free agency began
1977: ... Reggie Jackson became Mr. October
1978: ... Bucky Dent got his middle name
1979: ... saw the Disco Demolition
1980: ... Rotisserie Baseball was invented
1981: ... was split into two seasons
1982: ... Rickey Henderson stole 130 bases
1983: ... the pine-tar game happened
1984: ... the White Sox and Brewers played 25 innings
1985: ... Dwight Gooden, 20 years old, had a 1.53 ERA
1986: ... Bill Buckner let the ball get through his legs
1987: ... the ball was suspiciously lively
1988: ... Kirk Gibson hit his home run
1989: ... Pete Rose was banned
1990: ... Ken Griffey Jr. and his dad played together
1991: ... Rodney McCray ran through that wall
1992: ... "Homer At The Bat" aired
1993: ... the offensive era, and baseball at altitude, were born
1994: ... the strike ruined
1995: ... Cal Ripken broke Gehrig's streak
1996: ... the Core Four more or less debuted and the new Yankees dynasty began
1997: ... the Marlins won the World Series and were immediately stripped down for parts
1998: ... McGwire and Sosa chased the home run record
1999: ... Pedro Martinez had his best season and perhaps his best performance

Without the distance of history, everything after this is a bit more speculative- -- not just what we remember now, but what appears to be on a trajectory to be remembered.

2000: ... Alex Rodriguez signed with the Rangers for $252 million
2001: ... Barry Bonds hit 73 homers
2002: ... "Moneyball" novelized
2003: ... Bartman and Grady Little kept curses alive
2004: ... Curt Schilling pitched with a bloody sock and Theo Epstein beat his first curse
2005: ... star players were called to testify before Congress
2006: ... the Mitchell Report was commissioned
2007: ... Barry Bonds hit No. 756
2008: ... Barry Bonds got blackballed
2009: ... the Mets got swindled by Bernie Madoff
2010: ... Jim Joyce cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game
2011: ... the last day of the season became baseball's "best night ever"
2012: ... rookie Mike Trout and Triple Crown-winner Miguel Cabrera battled for the MVP award
2013: ... the rebuilding Astros hit their nadir
2014: ... Game 7 ended with Madison Bumgarner a hero ... and Alex Gordon stuck at third
2015: ... Jose Bautista flipped the bat
2016: ... the Cubs won an all-time great Game 7

Update!

2017: ... click here!
2018: ... click here!
2019: ... click here!

Thanks to Patrick Dubuque, Matt Trueblood and R.J. Anderson for consultation.

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