Interview #48: Mark Knudson
Major League pitcher, author and baseball coach
Intro
Mark Knudson is a former Major League pitcher, the first one I’ve gotten to interview in this project so far! He grew up in Denver during the 60’s and 70’s, attended college at Colorado State and was drafted by the Houston Astros in 1982. He made his debut in 1985 and his career ran until 1993 when he was part of his hometown Rockies’ inaugural season. His longest tenure was with the Milwaukee Brewers, from 1986 to 1991. When he retired, he went into sports media (and fatherhood with triplets), a career he’d started during his playing days and has since been in print, radio and TV in Colorado.
Mark cowrote a book with fellow Brewers teammate Don August titled Pitching to the Corners: My Post-MLB Career Abroad, which released on September 27th. You can find the book at any online book seller, but to make it easy for you here’s the Amazon link. I ordered mine, haven’t received it as of this article’s publishing but I’m anxiously awaiting it to show up. I also interviewed Don a few days after this, and the two of them gave me plenty of teasers to some of the stories that are inside.
We talked about his career, being a pitcher in Denver, his sportswriting and the backstory to the book.
A Pitcher From Colorado
What got you into baseball in Denver? Was there a lot of baseball in the area?
Well, we had the Denver Bears at the time, who were a very successful triple-A team. We always dreamed we'd get a big league team at some point. I worked at the stadium as a kid and we went to a lot of games. The Yankees team was there for a while with Graig Nettles and Billy Martin, and then the Expos came in with Andre Dawson and Tim Raines. And some of those guys I ended up getting to play against. But Denver had a rich history of triple-A baseball before they got the Rockies.
What stadium were they in?
Mile High Stadium. Mile High Stadium was a horseshoe football stadium, but the left field stands were built on a plane of water. It was the largest movable structure in North America. So you could turn a switch and gradually, kind of like the SkyDome closing, it would slide back into baseball configuration. That's where the Rockies played their first two years before they moved to Coors Field.
What was it like growing up a pitcher in mile high air?
We didn't know any different. This was normal. That's why guys like Kyle Freeland (a Denver native) and other guys from this area don't really care. They don't really have a problem with it cause you grow up and it’s your normal, you know? This is what you have to do to make the ball break this much and so on. So you don't have any preconceived notions about the altitude. In fact, the altitude didn't become an issue until the Rockies came into existence. In triple-A, no one really thought much about it.
What is the difference in pitching? It doesn’t spin as much?
Well, you have less air resistance. Fastballs don't have any problems spinning here, and curveballs actually don't have any problems spinning here, a good curveball will still break really well here. It's the sliders and the cutters and things like that that don't have quite the tightness and they have less break. But a good curveball is still a good curveball here.
Did you play any other sports growing up?
I wasn't fast enough to play football even though I love football. I wanted to be an option quarterback, but that wasn't going to work out too well. I played all the sports. We played on the high school football and basketball teams, too. I actually played on the high school golf team my senior year; wasn't very good at that either. It was always going to be baseball.
And that's the one thing I like about the school I'm coaching at right now is that we emphasize multiple sports. I think year-round baseball has harmed at the game, harmed the athletes, led to the plethora of elbow injuries. I think that hurts you as far as becoming an athlete. And when you're a better athlete you can be a better pitcher. So yeah, I played all the sports. I wasn't good enough to do any of the rest of them at another level. But we played them all.
Does it help being in an area with seasons where you can't be outdoors at times?
Yes. As a matter of fact, Joe Maddon and I would talk about this when he came into town. Joe played summer ball here in Boulder and was the first scout I ever talked to, he was a scout for the Angels. He said, I always liked to come and watch you guys work out because you didn't play year-round baseball; you had fresh arms, you were better athletes. You know, myself (Northglenn HS), Brian Fisher (Aurora HS), and Danny Jackson (Aurora HS), and obviously Goose Gossage (Roy J. Wasson HS in Colorado Springs) and Roy Halladay (Arvada HS), there's a long list of guys from here who went on to become successful Major League pitchers because we didn't play year-round baseball. I firmly believe that. I think year-round baseball is a cash grab for the guys who are running it, unfortunately. They're just trying to earn a living year-round and that I think has a detrimental effect on the players. They're better off if they're doing something else during the off season.
You got drafted by the Astros after going to Colorado State. What was it like leaving Colorado?
I went to A-ball in Florida first and that was a monumental change. I was not used to the humidity. I had a hard time adjusting. I had to back off my breaking balls at that point. I tried to learn how to control them better, but the ball still moved better. The fastball moved better. Florida is a great place to pitch, period, because of the air. You certainly had to make adjustments. I had to make adjustments in how I trained and everything else based on going from thin air, high altitude to sea level humidity.
And then you went to Columbus. Was that Columbus, Ohio?
Columbus, GA. The home of Aflac.
Was there a culture shock going to the south?
Absolutely, absolutely. I'm from a blue state, I’ll put it that way. And it's very different, culture-wise, especially in central Florida and rural Georgia. Extremely different. I thought those were all stereotypes until I lived through it.
When I went to Louisiana the first time I was like, I didn't know it was actually like this.
It is actually like that. You don't think so, but it is.
And then Tucson.
Yep. Tucson was more like home. That was easy.
Dry air and elevation?
Yeah, that wasn't hard. Columbus was an interesting place. It was hot and humid, but you never saw the sun. It was always hazy.
You progressed through the minors pretty steadily. Then you got traded in ’86, and you got traded with the guy you just wrote a book with.
I did. Don was drafted a couple years after I was and was making the same progression up through the minors that I was. So we were teammates in Spring Training and then we were teammates in Tucson. That's after I'd been in the Big Leagues and come back down to Tucson. That was a strange occurrence, because I think most players feel this way, you feel like the team that drafts you has so much invested in you that they care deeply about you. And they don't; you’re a business asset, you're going to move around. Sixty-some percent of the guys who make the major leagues make them with the team other than the one that drafted them. So it's not unusual, but it took some getting used to.
It was quite a change. I was on a first place team when I got traded, getting ready to go into the playoffs. The ‘86 playoffs between the Mets and the Astros was an epic series with Dwight Gooden and Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott. The guy I was traded for, Danny Darwin, he won five games in August and September, but he didn't set foot on the field in the playoffs. And I always tell people, I could have done that. I easily could have sat in the bullpen the whole time during that series. It was a tremendous series. That year I was the only guy in baseball… I played for one playoff team and I started games against the other three, because I started a game against the Red Sox in Fenway, started against the Mets and the Angels.
I just interviewed a Mets fan who fell in love with baseball with the ’86 Mets. He was convinced Mike Scott did something to those baseballs because he was lights out that year.
Well, the thing about Scotty is that he had a very, very straight, over-the-top delivery. So his fastball was really straight. So yeah, he monkeyed with the baseball a little bit and got his fastball to move. But everybody thought his split finger fastball was a product of tampering, it wasn't. He just had a great delivery, and he had the right mechanics for it. He showed me how to throw it and I couldn't do it because I was not straight over-the-top like he was. His split finger fastball was 100% legitimate. And every time someone checked the ball to see what he was doing, they’d find that the ball wasn't touched. But what they missed were the fastballs that he threw that would jump a little bit were the ones that he was messing with, and people never bother checking those. So Scotty was a great pitcher, his split finger was legit and he was a Cy Young winner for good reason.
that interview is here:
He must’ve been a good guy to try to learn from.
Well, you try to learn from Nolan Ryan, obviously. That's the guy everybody on the staff was looking up to in those days, but he was from Krypton, so it didn't really count. We couldn't do what he could do.
Were you a hard thrower? You’re 6’5”.
I know you've probably heard this from a lot of different people, the guns they're using today are kind of skewed. They're four to five, maybe six miles-an-hour faster because they measure the ball when it leaves the pitcher's hand, as opposed to when it reaches home plate. So Nolan Ryan throwing 98 miles-an-hour then is 104 now.
These guys aren't all throwing 100 miles-an-hour. They're not throwing harder than Nolan did. But I was a 95 guy most of the time with that gun, pitched in the lower 90s most of the time. What held me back was really a dominant second pitch. I had decent breaking stuff, but it was never good enough to take me to the next level.
Do you think if you'd been pitching in today's era you would have tried to reach 100, or you would have been trained to do that?
Yeah, that's scary, because I'm a high school coach now and I'm pretty careful about that. I don't want my players, especially in the offseason, trying to muscle up and throw 100 miles-an-hour because their bodies aren't ready for it at that age. I'm fearful that if I had grown up in the era with year-round baseball, indoor facilities like they have now, that I probably would have blown my arm out. But as it is, I've never had an arm surgery.
You didn't have any?
I went my entire career without surgery because I didn’t try to throw 100 miles-an-hour. I threw as hard as I could throw, but I knew I had to do other things to make the ball move. Especially to keep the ball off the barrel of the bat. That's how we all pitched back then.
Yeah, your strike out totals are pretty low.
I got two strikes on a lot of guys. The whole thing was if you get two strikes on them and you get them out, they're still out. Back then, hitters didn't want to strike out either. Hitters weren’t swinging for the fences with two strikes like they are now. Today you don't even have to try to strike out 8 or 10 guys in the game because they're all swinging from their heels. Back then, hitters took pride in not striking out. They were going to put the ball in play with two strikes.
Did that change your approach? So instead of the two-strike strikeout pitch, you're going for weaker contact.
You do the same thing, honestly. You're always pitching to contact, back then at least. You’re always trying to make them make weak contact, get the ball in on their fists, off the end of the bat, you know, change speeds to get them out in front. Whatever you could do, you were trying to pitch to get soft contact. If a guy took a big swing and made solid contact, it could be one foot from the third baseman and it's going to go by him. But if you made soft contact, the defense’s range obviously improved greatly and they’re going to make a play for you. So I was greatly relying on my defense as a pitcher. Most of us were back then. All the good games I ever pitched in my life featured a number of highlight reel defensive plays.
I bet players loved playing behind you then.
Well, you hope they did. You wanted them to. You wanted them to be excited and on their toes every pitch. I tried not to walk a lot of guys. I tried to do a lot of first pitch strikes. I had a game against Roger Clemens in Fenway where I went 8 1/3 or something and threw 87 pitches and won the game 3-1. Roger struck out a dozen, I struck out one, and we won. So that was what mattered. (note: here’s the box score for that game. Roger Clemens threw 140 pitches!)
You were mostly in the American League. Did you ever get to hit?
I think I batted 18 times in the major leagues. We had the DH in the American League. Lots of bunts. Tim Raines took a hit away from me once in the Astrodome. I hit a line drive over the shortstop and Raines caught it. He was playing me like you would play a girl in softball, right behind the short stop. No respect.
So you hit that thing and you're like, alright, I got my first hit!
Yep. I hit off a friend of mine too, Dan Schatzeder. He grooved one for me and I hit it right over the shortstop and Raines was standing right there. You gotta be kidding me.
Sounds like you made a lot of friends playing baseball. Was that camaraderie your favorite part of the sport?
I'd be surprised if most everybody who you talk to doesn't say that. The connections, the camaraderie, the friends, the connections. I'm not going to tell you Nolan Ryan is my friend, but the chance to be his teammate and follow him around like a puppy and try to do what he did and learn from him. I played with Robin (Yount) and Paul (Molitor). You learn life lessons from watching how those guys handle themselves as professionals. It's just something sticks with you forever. It's invaluable.
How valuable was that veteran presence as a young pitcher coming up?
Of course, Nolan and Bob Knepper, who I still see on occasions, those kind of guys, they didn't have to tell you something, you just watched how they handle themselves and how they went about their craft. Everything was about being ready to do your best when you got your opportunity. Phil Garner was another one, with the Astros. And then you get you traded to the Brewers and Robin and Paul are Robin and Paul, right? I mean they were exemplary professionals. Teddy Higuera was another one who was just a bulldog. Teddy would go and give you 15 innings if you needed to. He was amazing. I played with a lot of guys like that. Jim Gantner. Who were just total pros and you saw how that translated how they handle themselves away from the ballpark and in their everyday lives. You're blessed to have been around those guys.
You never got hurt, but you were sick?
Yeah, I caught a virus after Opening Day, we got a win over Nolan Ryan on Opening Day in 1991 and the next day, we had a workout at the stadium and I passed out on the trainer’s table. I ended up on the disabled list for quite a while. I lost 18 pounds or something like that. It was a virus. It's called CMB (Cytomegalovirus), and it was similar to mononucleosis; had that same kind of effect on you. I don't know how I contracted it, but it wiped me out, sent me back to the minor leagues after a while to try to rehab.
I spent the rest of the ‘91 season, well, second-half, I should say, in Denver, trying to get my strength back. Didn't throw a complete game until the playoffs in Denver. And complete games were actually a thing back then. We actually tried to finish what we started, unlike today where you go 5 innings and you hit the shower. We tried to finish the games we started. That was the objective when you took the mound.
So that wiped the rest of your year out. And then you wound up with the Padres?
So I signed with the Padres. Greg Riddoch was a friend of mine, the manager of the Padres, he's a Colorado guy. I had a really good year in Las Vegas, but spent the year in triple-A.
And then in ’93 you went to the Rockies. Was it a big deal for you to come and pitch for Colorado in their inaugural season?
Absolutely. I told the Padres when the season was over, they wanted to resign me, and I told Randy Smith, the general manager, who was friends with our manager Jim Riggleman, and was the manager in Vegas. Randy Smith had been with the Padres but was going to work for the Rockies. And Riggs called Randy and said this guy really wants to sign with his hometown team and the Rockies signed me before the expansion draft. I was thrilled with it, the chance to become the first Colorado native to play for the Rockies.
It was a big deal here. I actually flew home during the All Star break in ‘90 and spent three days campaigning for the vote to build Coors Field, went up and down the Front Range with some people from the mayor's office and we went to all these different places and try to tell people how great it would be to have a Major League team here. And then I got on an airplane and flew to Oakland and threw a shutout against the A’s on Friday.
You got to pitch in Oakland before Mount Davis went up, those were good A’s teams.
They were the world champions when I beat ‘em in 1990. Beat Dave Stewart 2-0. Dave Stewart was obviously in the midst of winning 20 games for four or five years in a row. He was a great pitcher, but we got him that night. (note: box score, Rickey Henderson stole his 42nd base of the season that night. It was only July 13th. Also, Mark threw 140 pitches!)
Do you have any memories of the Coliseum back then?
Well, it was a dump then, so I can't imagine what it looks like now. The mound was monstrous, which is great. It was a great pitcher’s park and the ball didn't go anywhere at night. Jose Canseco hit a fly ball to right center off me that didn't reach the warning track. And he swears to this day that it would have been over the fence during the day. And he might be right, but that night it was a routine fly ball.
They were a gifted team: Walt Weiss, Dave Henderson and Ricky Henderson. McGwire and Canseco. They were tremendous, but we got them that night. But the Coliseum was a crappy place to play baseball. The fans were great there, I wish they would have found a way to get a new facility or upgrade that one to keep the team there. That's sad the way that all went down.
You faced them a lot. McGwire only went 3 for 15, no home runs off you.
Well, he got me in Spring Training the next year when I was with the Rockies. It was the last game I pitched in Spring Training for the Rockies before I got sent down to Colorado Springs in ‘93 to start the season. He hit one at Phoenix Muni Stadium that went into the zoo. But Mac’s a good man and I think he's got always gotten a bad rap because I don't know anybody, maybe with the exception of Nolan Ryan, I don't know if anybody worked harder in the weight room than Mark McGwire.
When he was a rookie, he was skinny, but he still had 49 home runs, so the man still knew he was doing. He was a great player in college. He was just a great player, period. It was not a product of steroids by any stretch.
You had success against him.
Guys who are big swing-and-miss guys, guys who were gonna swing all-out, were the easier guys to pitch to if you had your good stuff and you knew what you were going to do. If you're up there trying to throw the ball by him, just overpower, he's going to get you. Canseco’s the same way. You know, it's funny, if you go back and look at a list of the guys Mac hit his 70 home runs off of, there's not a huge number of big names. He just took advantage of guys, like he’s supposed to, that weren't the cream of the crop. And he hit ‘em pretty good, obviously. (note: here’s the list. Mark’s right, you tell me who the best pitcher here is, I’m thinking Livan Hernandez? He went 3/15 with no homers against Hall of Famers Maddux, Glavine and the Big Unit)
Did you see steroids in the late 80’s?
Yeah. We talked about it a lot with the trainers and everybody was afraid of them, to be honest with you. Everybody was afraid that the health repercussions were not worth it. Evidently that was not shared, because the steroids came in after I retired. But pitchers, especially, had no interest in getting big and bulky. The ligaments and tendons don't grow with the muscles. Tom Trebelhorn would always talk about if you can try to move the same muscle mass at the same speed and you got that much more muscle, your tendons and ligaments aren’t going to handle it. Pitchers were terrified in my era of using steroids. That changed, obviously.
It felt like later on, as the science got better, they were able to use it for healing more.
Yeah. And recovery. Obviously you can't get your legs too big and strong. So the science, you're right, the science got better and guys figured how to use things that at the time were not even illegal. But they were not welcomed. They became illegal, but at the time they weren't. Baseball hadn't advanced that far. Everybody's looking for an edge any way they can get.
It felt like it got way out of hand.
It did. No question.
My thought about that era is usually, when they say, ‘everyone was doing it’, and I usually say, if you're in the minors, and you don't want to do it because it is bad for your long-term health, and some guy gets ahead of you because of steroids, it feels like that's the advantage that's unfair.
Yeah, and that certainly happened. Certain guys refused to do it and didn't advance. And other guys did. Whether their improvements were short-lived or their careers were shortened, who knows. I don't think I would have done it. Knowing what I know now, I still don't think I would have done it. Just the long-term ramifications and for the fact that it really didn't fit the kind of pitcher I was anyway.
Why do you think you avoided any arm problems?
Well, part of it was good mechanics. I really worked on my mechanics and trying to make sure that I was doing things properly mechanically to take the stress off my arm. Everything shouldn’t be on your arm as a pitcher. You should be using your core to generate your thrust to the plate. Ray Burris was our pitching coach one year in Milwaukee and he used to talk about your arm being more like a buggy whip was how Ray would put it; just kind of the last piece to the puzzle. And if you did it that way and you took care of your arm, the day after I pitched I wouldn't throw, I never iced. I was not an ice guy, but I think I went to great lengths to stay healthy.
I was on the cutting edge of using chiropractic care. I started using chiropractic when I was with the Astros in 1986. I had a pitching coach who was a scout here in Denver, who when I went back on the disabled list with the Astros in ’85, he took me up to see his chiropractor. The guy cracked my neck and did some things to my muscles, never touched my arm, and all of a sudden my arm was better. Now every team has a chiropractor. Back then it was voodoo. But I did it on my own and I'm obviously very glad I did. Guys like Goose Gossage, who's a good friend of mine, we got Goose involved. We got him involved in it, put some years on his career. A lot of guys, Tony Gwynn and a lot of guys jumped into it after they found out about it. Don Baylor was a big believer in it.
I'm sure you were hoping to have a little bit longer stay in Colorado. I don't want to recite the stats that I'm looking up, but was it tough to pitch there in the majors?
I lived in a northern suburb of Denver called Broomfield. When I got sent to Colorado Springs, I decided not to get a place to live in Colorado Springs. I was driving back and forth 90 minutes each way when I was playing with the triple-A team. My wife was about to have triplets. And so it was very hectic time in my life and, honestly, I just got very tight and stressed out physically. I was not close to 100% when the Rockies called. I was going getting massages and chiropractic treatments in the mornings and trying to pitch in the evenings. I only had three or four outings. One of them was atrocious, just didn't get any outs. Gave up eight runs to the Braves without getting anybody out.
I did strike out Barry Bonds looking at Mile High Stadium. Threw one right down the middle. He took it. He was so shocked I threw him strike that he just took it for a strike. I can say I gave up my first Major League home run to Kevin Mitchell in Chase Stadium; I gave my last major home run to Kevin Mitchell in Riverfront Stadium. He gives me grief about that when I see him. I mean, I kind of sold out to get to pitch for the Rockies. I could have signed with somebody else and had probably an easier ride, but I sold out cause I really wanted to be part of the first team in my hometown. I wouldn't do it any other way. I'd still do it that way if I had to do it over again.
So you had the triplets after that season.
One week after I retired.
By then you probably could have kept pitching.
Yeah, they wanted to send me back to Colorado Springs. I said, my wife's a week away from having triplets. I've had enough. I threw my last pitch in the Major Leagues. That's going to be it.
Was the majors everything you thought it would be?
Yes, it was. On and off the field. You know, you get to travel to places. I don't know that I’d have ever gone to Boston any other way, or Vancouver, or Edmonton or who knows. So yeah, getting to see those places, getting to stay in five-star hotels, it was great. I loved every minute of it and I wouldn't trade it for anything. It was a great life experience.
Sports Writing and A New Book
When you retired, did you get right into writing and media?
I had a degree in journalism, Colorado State. I actually did some writing while I was playing still, I wrote something for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and for the Rocky Mountain News here a couple of times. I was looking forward to that. I started writing a column right away and ended up doing a lot of radio, some TV, worked for the Mountain West TV network for a long time, but writing was always my first love, so I've always been doing sports writing pretty much non-stop for the last 30-some years now.
What prompted you to write this book with Don August?
We were teammates and roommates for a long time. We stayed in touch a little bit after we retired, but when I retired, I was done playing. Don wasn't. Don got let go the same year from the Brewers that I did in ’91. 1992, he caught on with Detroit and played a little bit in Spring Training and then got cut midway through the season in the minors. Don still believed in his heart of hearts that he could pitch in the major leagues. If there was expansion then like there is now, he certainly would have. He never gave up trying to get back to the big leagues. He was going to take every avenue he could to get back. We took very diametrically opposite paths once we retired.
Don's a great storyteller. Dan Plesac will tell you that some of the stories that Don wrote or talked about in the clubhouse, he just had the whole locker room in stitches. He was hilarious. And so, going to play in the Caribbean, in Mexico, in Taiwan, and in Italy, the man spent eight more years playing pro ball, just trying to get back to the Major Leagues. And they're fascinating stories. Now, Don's not a writer, so Don had all these stories and he just kind of threw them all on paper and gave them to me. I turned them into a book.
The off the field stuff is far more fascinating than the on field stuff. And he dominated in Taiwan. He was the MVP of the league one year, he won a whole bunch of trophies. He was he was a dominant pitcher in that league. But the stories of what happened off the field with, you know, hurricanes and gangsters, you can't imagine. Just the stories of the food he had to eat turns my stomach. There's no way I would do what he did. It was great to read those stories and get a chance to put them down on paper. It's been a four-year project. We started during the pandemic, but we finally got it out. We're very happy.
Were there any stories that he sent you where you're just like, OK, that can't be real. Are you just making this up?
No, quite the opposite. Having known Don, having gone through a lot, I mean I’m in some of these stories. I was involved in some of this stuff, pre-foreign countries. So nothing that Don wrote was surprising. I think there are times he could have gone further and he chose not to. He said, I want my mom to read this book. If you know Don at all, they're 100% believable.
Here's something that's not in the book: he's still playing baseball. He's been playing old man baseball since 2000. The last 24 years, he's been playing old man baseball and coaching junior varsity baseball. He's won 300-some games as a junior varsity baseball coach. Will never coach varsity. He played with his son. He's played for 20-some years now, playing old man baseball after he got done. I mean, my arm would have fallen off by now.
I didn’t wanna break the interview into pieces writing it up like I usually do. It was just a great interview and Mark had so much to say about his career and baseball. Big picture, I feel like he says what we all already know: today’s generation is pitching too much and not developing into athletes, which is a top factor in the fragile state of pitchers today. Everyone knows this but no one can stop it, not with the amount of money people would lose by losing year-round baseball.
The other thing was that he pitched in Colorado his whole life and did just fine. Pitchers from the region just learn how to make their stuff work with low air resistance. And then you get to sea level and your curveball suddenly looks like Sandy Koufax’s. We talked at the end about Denver as a sports town, but that was mostly us going back and forth over whether Matt Holliday touched home plate in 2007 so it's on the cutting room floor.
I’m not linking to that play for like the 5th time on this substack, but I will link to this funny commercial I had never seen before:
And lastly, I’m excited to read this book he cowrote with Don August. There’s a lot of baseball books out there, but this one looks unique. It’s about a pitcher who chased that baseball dream through several foreign countries, three continents and a decade past his last big league pitch. I interviewed Don a little bit after Mark and they both said the book has some incredible and also hilarious stories that they didn’t want to spoil. Anytime a story involved hiking to a remote village in Mexico with baseball gear on your back, it has to be worth the read right there.
And of course I want to thank Mark for his time to talk to me amid a busy time with the book release and other events. I was a little nervous since this was my first time talking to a former Major Leaguer, and a stranger as well, but he was very generous listening to my questions and giving thoughtful answers. Hopefully it furthered my progress in proving that baseball is still America’s pastime.