Who manages the Yankees? Or the Dodgers? By the conclusion of the 1977 World Series, managers Tommy Lasorda (Dodgers) and Billy Martin (Yankees) were household names.
So were the players. It's easy to this day to remember the 1977 Yankees including (but not limited to) Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, Bucky Dent, Lou Piniella, Willie Randolph, Goose Gossage, and of course Reggie Jackson. With the Dodgers it was Steve Yeager, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, Dusty Baker, and like the Yankees, many more.
The players were known because television during the time in question was largely limited to the three networks, PBS, and then if you lived in a large market like Los Angeles or New York, several local stations. Which means that in 1977, odds were high you caught a lot of the Series.
After which, it was the Yankees and Dodgers. As the great Jason Gay put it in the Wall Street Journal, "these two teams are a Hall of Fame unto themselves." To this day, Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson's three home runs on three pitches in the concluding game of the 1977 Series rates serious mention in any discussion of the greatest single-game performances in the history of sports.
So many saw what Jackson did live. See the nature of television then once again. Subsequent to the three home runs, a candy bar was released: the Reggie Candy Bar. How often does that happen today? Who is on the Wheaties box now? Do they even put athletes on them anymore?
About what's been written, this is not a comment about how things were better then. It's an attempt to make a case for free, competitive trade.
What's the baseball case? It can be made with the size of Jackson's contract ahead of joining the Yankees in 1977 (5 years, $3 million) versus those of Aaron Judge (9 years, $360 million) and Shohei Ohtani (10 years, $700 million), and how much of the recently concluded World Series did readers watch? Tick tock, tick tock.
Probably most didn't watch the Series. There are so many non-baseball choices nowadays, and not just on television. With the internet, and beyond, the range of ways we can entertain ourselves expands every day. Thank goodness for us, and thank goodness for baseball. Think about it.
While it's arguably counterintuitive, think how much healthier baseball is today despite its biggest annual event reaching a much smaller percentage of the total U.S. population. How lucky that America's former pastime lacked the juice to put up barriers to the myriad of entertainment options that ended the sport's days as a household concept.
If baseball could have shut off the relentless competition that has shrunk it in the national imagination, we'd all be much poorer. By extension, so would baseball be much poorer. The only closed economy is the world economy, and as baseball was hit with competition domestically and globally, the result was a surge of wealth domestically and globally. It's the genius of trade.
When people are largely free to exchange the fruits of their labor with anyone regardless of location, the odds of people getting to do the work most associated with their skills and intelligence grows. Productivity follows, and soaring wealth springs from soaring productivity. Basically, the freedom of exchange that shrunk baseball from its former perch as the national conversation enriched the world, and by extension, baseball itself.
While baseball is no longer the story, while it can claim a much smaller share of the U.S. entertainment pie, it's a much smaller percentage of an exponentially bigger pie. It's a reminder that people don't take wealth when they work to serve us, they create it. Since baseball thankfully couldn't block the evolution of a global economy that shrunk it in national importance, it couldn't block economic progress that has made its players and teams richer than ever.