Baseball
- 16 January – Former Yankees teammates Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford are inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Mantle becomes only the seventh player to make it in his first try. His 536 home runs with the Yankees ranked second only to Babe Ruth and he played in more games (2,401) than any other pinstriper, including Lou Gehrig. Ford was arguably the greatest Yankees pitcher of all time, retiring with more wins (236), more innings (3,171), more strikeouts (1,956), and more shutouts (45) than anyone in club history.
- Frank Robinson becomes the first African-American manager in Major League Baseball.
- 8 April – Hank Aaron hit home run# 715 in the fourth inning off Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Al Downing breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record.
- 4 June – The Cleveland Indians hosted "Ten Cent Beer Night", but had to forfeit the game to the Texas Rangers due to drunken and unruly fans.
- World Series – Oakland Athletics win 4 games to 1 over the Los Angeles Dodgers.
- 14 October – Shigeo Nagashima, a well known sports player from Japan, retires from the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo, after a 17-year baseball player career.
Read more about this topic: 1974 In Sports
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)
“Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.”
—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)