Baseball
- January 23 – Willie Mays receives 409 of 432 votes in the BBWAA election to earn enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.
- August 2 – death of Thurman Munson, New York Yankees catcher, in an air crash
- World Series – Pittsburgh Pirates won 4 games to 3 over the Baltimore Orioles. The Series MVP was Willie Stargell, Pittsburgh. The Pirates become the only team in sports history to come back from a three games to one deficit in a championship series twice, having also achieved the comeback in the 1925 World Series.
Read more about this topic: 1979 In Sports
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?”
—Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)
“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)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)