The End of the World Series Program As We Knew It

OCTOBER 1974: Gerald Ford was two months into his abbreviated presidency. The Muhammad Ali-George Foreman boxing match in Kinshasa, Zaire -- known as the Rumble in the Jungle -- was set for Oct. 30. 

Earthquake, in Sensurround!, starring Charleton Heston, Ava Gardner, Geneviève Bujold and Lorne Greene would strike America's movie theaters in November.

But something else was afoot, something far more subtle and pernicious, but to those of us of a particular bent: horrifically depressing.

Meh, before meh was even a thing.

Fifty years ago this month, Major League Baseball ended the era of team-produced World Series programs, subbing out the often charming, definitely distinct and occasionally iconic locally-designed and produced magazines for more uniform, corporate and nationally available... blah.

Yes, this is entirely about judging these books by their covers. But you only get one chance to make a good first impression. 

MLB's first cover art was a globe stand where the Earth is replaced baseball.

Inspired. Clever. Ooh. In other words, not good.

Who's playing in this series? Doesn't matter. And it wouldn't matter again for about 20 years and even then, well... feh.

Less than a decade earlier and from the same spherical starting point, the Los Angeles Dodgers had produced this bit of Project Gemini-inspired whimsy:

Truly out of this world.

Now artistry was banished in favor of mass produced, mass market product. At least they were up front about it, more or less.

"'1974 World Series marks an all-time first,'" the publication self-referentially declared on its page 3. "Previously the two teams involved in a World Series each published a separate program. '1974 World Series' represents the first joint World Series program. It is designed to tell the story of this year's major league baseball season and features both the East and West Division champions of the two leagues."

Yay.

It's tempting to say at least some of this was in response to frugal Charles O. Finley, then-owner of the then-two time defending champion then-Oakland A's.

The famously skin-flinty Finley just they year before had substantially just repurposed the team's joint scorecard and yearbook as its World Series program,  slapping American League Champions on the top left, New York Mets beneath "Oakland A's" at the top right, and re-labeling the bottom right "1973 World Series Souvenir Scorecard & Program."

The post-season publication was otherwise almost indistinguishable from its regular season predecessor.

 The regular season program

The not-so-different World Series edition

To be fair, the only somewhat less frugal Mets had repackaged one of their regular season game programs as their National League Championship Series program.

But when it came to the World Series, issued a new magazine with split screen cover, the left side featuring a pensive skipper Yogi Berra, the right a photo of predecessor Gil Hodges and the team riding down Manhattan's Broadway amid a ticker tape parade celebrating their 1969 championship. Now that program was special.

Retro-perspective

And retrospective

More likely, the shift from local pubs to national had to do with the money to be had from national advertisers, and from sales to a national audience to which the new mags could be pitched. 

It wasn't a change for the better. Not for the public and, to be honest, not for those of us who collect, as part of the fun of that hobby is collecting things that are scarce. 

Those home-spun programs spoke of the teams that created them, their personas and places they played. More importantly, they spoke to their fans. 

The new generation shifted the game program vibe from Main Street shop owner to chain store shopping mall: deliberately faceless, representative of any town and any team, one size fits all, or -- in reality -- one size fits none.

Just how generic?

In the early '80s, baseball pulled its own Finley maneuver, taking the artwork created for the 1980 World Series program, a contest between the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals, and re-using it three years later for the three-way AAA World Series involving the Tidewater Tides, Portland Beavers and Denver Bears.

From the grand stage...

... to AAA

Yes, the 1980 program artwork got demoted, and they didn't have to change anything about the image to do it.

They never really got better. In fact, as the years wore on, they got worse, more generic and more forgettable even as the digital publishing revolution allowed for tighter deadlines, more content, more recent content, contestant-specific covers and inevitably, higher prices.

Along the way Major League Baseball gained dominion over all the other post-season playoff programs, plus that of its mid-Summer classic, the All Star Game.

Product. Product. Product.

Montreal? Texas? Who knows?

Recognizably Pujols and Big Papi

Nowadays, we're kind of back to where we started: with team-specific looks, but they're soul-less mass produced representations of what once was, some with cover advertisements, and sometimes ironically shadowed by special stadium-only versions attempting to restore some of that old-time collectible exclusivity.

The 2016 Series program,
Wrigley Field edition

The 2019 series program, 
brought to you by YouTubeTV

Handsome zombies. You can buy the one for this year's showdown between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers online, or just look at it for free. 

-- Follow me @paperboyarchive on the social network formerly known as Twitter

Starliner's Big Problems With Its Little Rocket Engines

THRUSTERS, those tiny, un-sexy, worker bee rocket engines that help spacecraft make little attitudinal adjustments to keep them from crashing into things, burning up or skipping off into the void. 

The wondrous six LP Time/Life Records
audio history of space exploration up to
Apollo 11.

Like baseball umpires, editors, and sanitation workers, they're pretty much taken for granted as long as they don't make a bad call, miss a glaring mistake, go on strike or, you know, FAIL.

We put men on the moon, we've sent unmanned probes to Mars, we routinely send men and women to the International Space Station and bring them back without incident, and hardly anyone -- outside the world's various space programs -- ever thinks about those little rockets used for steering ships in the right direction.

Until now.

Now NASA has a thruster problem, or more precisely its contractor, Boeing Inc., has a thruster problem, a big, unsightly one with its ambitiously named Starliner spaceship, one that's left astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded on the ISS. It was supposed to be a three-hour tour an eight-day mission starting June 5.

It's August, and they're still up there.

So, basically, it's Gilligan's Island in space, where Starliner plays the S.S. Minnow, and every solution that's supposed to bring Williams and Wilmore home, only seems to prolong their stay.

Professor? Professor!

Where is Roy Hinkley when we need him? The man could fix anything with just two coconut shells and a stick of bamboo. 

But that was in the 1960 back when... back when... we knew how to build thrusters?

Yeah, we did. Pretty much.

I mean, sure things sometimes went awry, like in March of 1966 when future moon walker Neil Armstrong and fellow star explorer David Scott's Gemini 8 mission was foiled by a stuck thruster that sent them tumbling, astronaut-over-tea kettle, just as they docked with an Agena target vehicle. 

Gemini 8 approaches the Agena target booster, docks,
then spins wildly out of control with a stuck thruster.
From the full-color, hard cover book accompanying the Time Life record set.

Canny retro-rocket fire stopped the pin-wheeling before they blacked out from the high Gs, but burned most of their ship's fuel forcing an immediate return home. Immediately, but more importantly, home alive and not like Major Tom.

But just before that, NASA did something really really cool -- especially considering it was only late 1965 -- and had two Gemini spaceships 7 and 6A fly in close formation over the Earth.

It all seems simple now, but back in the day, that never been done before. But they got the chance after the failure of another Agena target vehicle scuttled the original Gemini 6 mission.

The two ships -- the 7 piloted by Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, 6A by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford -- flew three orbits while maintaining fixed distances sometimes as close a single foot between spacecraft, snapping photos of each other all the while.

Schirra and Stafford even managed to circle around their colleagues before heading home, while Borman and Lovell stayed out there in their cramped little vehicle for 14 days.

Gemini 6A circles Gemini 7 high above the Earth in December, '65.
From Time/Life's To the Moon companion book.

Thrusters!

The USSR claimed to have done something similar with its Vostock III and VI in 1962, but it was really more of a 5-kilometer flyby, according to the Encyclopedia Astronautica, as the two ships were different orbital planes and lacked the ability to fly in formation.

US thrusters for the win! 

We went to the moon, and around the moon, and back, docked with Skylab and with the Soviets, ran the whole space shuttle program from start to finish, building the ISS. We had unforgettable, tragic losses along the way, but nobody got stranded out there because of bad thrusters... until now.

Gemini 6A's Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford
welcome home Gemini 7's Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.
From the Time/Life book

Somehow the knowhow of 1965 has -- at least for one aerospace company -- become the lost art of 2024, and Starliner's name is seeming ever more ironic than aspirational.

In the immortal words of legendary starship engineer Montgomery Scott, "the more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

Here's to Wilmore and Williams coming home safely and soon.

-- Follow me on "Twitter," @paperboyarchive