What Kind of Turning Point?
The 1967 World Series, played in October between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox, was not itself the start of a new era. It belongs to the end of an old one. Divisional play and the league championship series began in 1969, so the 1967 and 1968 Series were the last two decided under the older format, in which the winner of each league’s regular season met directly for the title. The 1967 Series is the one most often associated with that ending because it capped a famously close pennant race. The new era in the title is best understood as what followed.
The Old Format
Through most of the twentieth century, the American and National Leagues each crowned one pennant winner, the team with the best record over a full season. That team played the other league’s champion in the World Series. The system gave the regular season enormous weight, because only first place mattered, and it produced races like the American League’s in 1967, when four teams were still in contention on the last weekend. A team that finished one game short, such as the Detroit Tigers or Minnesota Twins, had nothing to play for in October.
The Series Itself
The Cardinals beat the Red Sox in seven games. The Series began at Fenway Park in Boston on 4 October, moved to St. Louis for the middle games, and finished at Fenway on 12 October. St. Louis won the deciding game, 7 to 2. The details of the games, the pitching of Bob Gibson and Jim Lonborg and the Boston story are covered in the other articles in this cluster. The relevant point here is that it was a dramatic end to a close season, and one of the last great October events under the older arrangement.
1968: The Year of the Pitcher
The structure was not the only thing about to change. The 1968 season was dominated by pitchers to an extent that concerned baseball’s officials. Bob Gibson of the Cardinals posted a 1.12 earned run average, and Denny McLain of the Tigers won 31 games, while Don Drysdale of the Dodgers set a record for consecutive scoreless innings. In the American League, Carl Yastrzemski won the batting title with a mark of about .301, an unusually low figure for a champion. Run scoring fell across both leagues.
The 1968 World Series, in which the Tigers beat the Cardinals in seven games, was also played under the old format. The first season to use divisions and a championship series was 1969.
Lowering the Mound
After 1968, baseball’s rule-makers decided to restore some balance. The pitcher’s mound was lowered from fifteen inches to ten, and the strike zone was reduced to run from the armpits to the top of the knees. These changes were aimed at helping hitters, and offence did recover in 1969.
That year also brought expansion. The National League added the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres, and the American League added the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots. With twenty-four teams, each league was split into East and West divisions, and the winners of each division met in a best-of-five league championship series. It was a big structural change, and it altered the way fans thought about a season. A team could now clinch a division without having the best record in the entire league.
Television and the Audience
The Series was part of a changing media landscape. In 1967, the games were shown on NBC, and many were played in the afternoon. Weekday day games were still common, and a sizeable audience watched on color television sets that were spreading through American homes. Later, when postseason baseball moved increasingly into prime time, the nature of the audience changed.
It is difficult to compare precise viewing figures across eras without reliable numbers, so this article avoids giving them. What can be said is that the World Series in the 1960s was still the sport’s main national event, shown for much of the country in the middle of the day, and that the playoff system introduced in 1969 added a new layer of televised drama.
A Boundary Year
Historians often treat 1967 as a boundary year because of the combination of factors: the last close pennant race of the old kind, a dramatic Series, and the pitcher’s dominance that prompted the changes that followed. The 1969 reforms, expansion, divisions, the lowered mound and a new playoff round, reshaped baseball in ways that still define it. Looking back, the 1967 Series sits at the end of one period and the beginning of another, even though no one at the time called it that.