Yaz!

Celebrating Boston Red Sox baseball great Carl Yastrzemski.

Monday, April 02, 2007

The Glory of '67

Forty years ago ...
As 1967 dawned, the Red Sox were coming off eight consecutive losing seasons. They’d lost 90-plus games for three straight years, including a 100-loss disgrace in 1965. They hadn’t won an American League pennant in 21 years, and hadn’t seriously contended for one in 15. After Ted Williams retired in 1960, attendance plummeted; the average attendance for a game at Fenway Park in the six years from 1961-66 was 10,026. Like the Bruins of today, they had become irrelevant. Their existence barely dented the Boston sports consciousness.

“You couldn’t give tickets away — no one wanted them,” Rico Petrocelli wrote in his book.

And then Yaz and the 67 Red Sox changed everything!

1 Comments:

  • At 6:08 PM, Blogger Jim said…

    I was eight years old when Yaz and the RedSox won the pennant. I didn't become a Yaz fan until 1968 - although I do remember everyone listening to their radio and commenting how this Yaz kept on winning ball games in that magical year. In 68, I watched every game that was televised. No cable back then but still a decent amount of games. I also followed the morning newspaper to read the box scores. I remember one newspaper in August with the headlines. "Yaz reaches 300!" In hindsight - it's kind of strange, huh?

     

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