Baseball
- April 8 – One-handed pitcher Jim Abbott makes his major-league debut with the California Angels, without spending a single day in the minor leagues. He went on to a 12–12 record for the season.
- August 10 – Ten months after undergoing surgery for cancer in his pitching arm, San Francisco Giants pitcher Dave Dravecky returns to the major leagues, winning his comeback 4–3.
- August 15 – Dave Dravecky's comeback bid ends when his pitching arm breaks in the sixth inning of his second start. Two years later, the cancer-stricken arm would be amputated.
- August 24 – Following an investigation that he gambled on baseball, superstar player Pete Rose is banned from baseball for life.
- World Series – Oakland Athletics won 4 games to 0 over the San Francisco Giants. The Series MVP was Dave Stewart, Oakland.
Read more about this topic: 1989 In Sports
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“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)