A few months back, I was wondering about books that never had been done. I recalled thinking, “Nobody’s written a book about the 1968 baseball season.”

Apparently, Tim Wendell had the same thought.

Currently on the shelves is Summer of ’68: The Season That Changed Baseball–and America–Forever. Written by Wendell, founding editor of USA Today Baseball Weekly, the book is about a unique season in baseball history during one of the most explosive years of American history.

It was “the year of the pitcher,” as Bob Gibson (1.12 ERA) and Denny McClain (31 victories) dominated hitters. It culminated in a Detroit-St. Louis World Series that was one of the best ever.

Yet there was so much more to that year both on and off the field.

In a book excerpt on his site, Wendell writes about a scene in the St. Louis clubhouse the morning after Martin Luther King was assainated.

The next morning, in St. Petersburg, Florida, the spring training camp of the St. Louis Cardinals was like most places in America: the King assassination the major topic of conversation. Gibson was devastated by the news and got into a heated exchange with his catcher, Tim McCarver. After telling McCarver that he couldn’t possibly comprehend what it was like to be a black person on this morning, and that it was impossible for whites, no matter how well intentioned, to totally overcome prejudice, Gibson turned his back on his batterymate.

 

 

To McCarver’s credit, he didn’t let the situation go. Undoubtedly, he realized that the last person Gibson wanted to hear from at that moment was a white man, who had grown up in Memphis of all places. Yet McCarver told Gibson that it was possible for people to change. If anything, he was Exhibit A. Back when McCarver was new to the team, Gibson and Curt Flood had ribbed him about his reluctance to share a sip of soda offered by a black man.  McCarver had seen a lot of truth in their teasing. Perhaps that’s why he wouldn’t let things drop after King’s death. In talking with Gibson, McCarver found himself in “the unfamiliar position of arguing that the races were equal and that we were all the same.”
Years later, McCarver wrote that “Bob and I reached a meeting of the minds that morning. That was the kind of talk we often had on the Cardinals.”

In a New York Times piece about the book, Wendell writes:

When I began “Summer of ’68: The Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever,” I knew I would write about two of the greatest teams in the Tigers and the Cardinals. What I did not expect to discover were athletes who were struggling like so many others in the country to find a way to move forward, to somehow come together.

Such stories were not restricted to baseball. By sitting with teammates of color at the Jets’ training table, Joe Namath helped guide them toward a Super Bowl championship that season. The Mexico City Olympics are best remembered for the raised fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. But those Summer Games should also be relived for the silver medal an ill-prepared Jim Ryun captured in the 1,500 meters at altitude. In basketball, the player-coach Bill Russell rallied the aging Boston Celtics past Wilt Chamberlain and the Philadelphia 76ers, then Jerry West and the Los Angeles Lakers for another championship.

“If anything, this was the biggest year in all of U.S. history,” said Robert J. Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that sports was right in the middle of the metaphoric pot of a roiling culture.”