I’ve been covering the greatest game ever pitched. This was a 16 inning complete game masterpiece thrown by Juan Marichal and Warren Spahn.

Here is some blogger named Zero, I think, doing an excellent job of covering the game. And you can click here if you’d like to watch Mr Marichal work.

Baseball is a beautiful game to play and to watch. It is an impressively unique game of non-movement that in fact requires some of the most amazing technical agilities in all of sports. It is a game of reactions and subtle pressure more than it is a demonstration of pure brute strength. In fact, baseball is one of the only games that allows great strength to exist but shows that it in and of itself is not everything.

This 16 inning dual for example absolutely took ridiculous physical stamina. Perhaps 60 years ago, when this game took place, pitchers were not looking for three digit velo and for sure, preparing to become a pitcher was not part of our technical education including video, graphics, statistical analysis and super slow motion photography. Most probably instead of reaching beyond human capability or to its limits as we do now, they followed a philosophy called stay within yourself. It means not pushing it until it pops but keeping things nice and easy so you can go to distance. But still, 16 innings and more than 200 pitches each?

When looking at pictures and films of games of this time, the first thing that jumps out at me is how quiet everything was. The uniforms were tight and sensible affairs. There were no advertisements or extra frills, bells or whistles. There were the home whites with the name of the team or an emblem and road grays with the name of the city across the chest. The numbers helped identify the players while they were batting but that was it as far as decorations were concerned.

Their bodies were also different. They weren’t perpetually on fire as today’s players seem to be. Nobody was really ripped. They seemed to be more sticks and less meat. They were skinny because it afforded movement but there were a couple of beefy guys as well who could hit the ball a country mile sometimes. It seemed that baseball did not require the physique of a god, just a batting eye, good reflexes and the staying power, the will, to stay in the game. That’s always been what it’s about. If you want to play, you’ve got to be good enough to make the team. And once you’re in, you get to fight against time. You can stay there either as long as you want or as long as you can, hanging on to it with everything you have. Or like Sandy Koufax, you just decide enough is enough and that it’s not worth the pain anymore.

Juan Marichal came into the league because of the door that was kicked open by a man named Jackie Robinson who was the first African-American, the first negro, the first black man, the first man with very dark skin to be allowed to play with what was considered the highest league in America. Ironically, this league was not known as the White Baseball League (WBL) or the All White Baseball League (AWBL) or the All White Professional Baseball League (AWPBL). At the time they had the National League (NL) who would play in isolation for the entirety of the season before meeting the winner of the American League (AL). If it means anything, Jackie Robinson played in the National League and the New York (The Bronx)/San Francisco Giants, the mortal enemy of the Brooklyn / Los Angeles Dodgers went all in. Orlando Cepeda, Willie Mays and William McCovey raised the Giants franchise to one of its three epic peaks. The Giants of the ’60s where as dominant as those at the turn of the 20th and 21st century, which puts them in the elite company of the greatest baseball teams of all time.

The Dominicans however were a slightly different kind of race issue. It is true, that people with darker skin come from places on the planet or where it is warmer and they spend more time outside, either working or playing or just living. White people come from the north where they must isolate themselves, quite happily I might had, during the cold months when it is a bit brutal to go outside and much easier to stay near the fire. I could talk about the paranoia, rage and jealousy of white people that created racism or the mentality and legalities of religious training that led white European Christians to believe slavery was ordained and natural and that they had perfect right to make use of anything they could on the planet for their own good. And they won so they got to write history and call it what they wanted.

The Dominicans were different. It wasn’t just the color of their skin, it was that they were not Americans.

What I was noticing about watching the films from the early 60s was the food and the effect it was having on the bodies of the baseball players. It’s not just history that dictates someone’s ability, it’s also the food that they eat everyday. There was also a big difference in body types between the black players who were born and raised in the United States and those players who came from the Dominican Republic.

The Dominicans were leaner, hungrier. The Dominicans were also raised on natural foods unlike their American counterparts which, by the 1960s, we’re well inoculated by factory cigarettes, alcohol and that good old meat based, high fat, high cholesterol American diet. And of course let’s not forget the baseball was played in cities during a time when the automobile was just beginning its job of making sure the planet was completely poisoned for the sake of earning profits for the oil companies. The Americans were already poisoned but the Dominicans had managed to grow up with less pollution. And of course, they broke the record book the first time they tried.

It seems the modern players play clean. This seems to be the brand. Baseball believes it needs to have a great policy against juicing. People who use chemicals to enhance their ability to recover from heavy workout are thrown away and no longer talked to. In fact, anybody who does anything out of the norm or attempts to be an individual in any way is thrown into the garbage to fend for themselves like Trevor Bauer. Not that Japan is garbage and I think he’s having the time of his life. I think they are enjoying having him too.

Today we have nutrition. Today we have our devices to remind us of the calorie counts. Today we go in and watch film and study our mechanics. Today we have people making careers out of being teachers. Today we believe in statistics and film. Today we believe that all technology is good and the results are beautiful to the eye. Human beings carved from granite. Every year they become stronger, faster, sharper and more perfect. Training regimens are no longer bologna sandwiches on White bread. Now, everyone counts macros.

Personally, I think all of this is propaganda selling a diet and a lifestyle that is pretty unsustainable in my opinion. Pitchers really don’t have the ligaments to throw 100 mph for 15 years. Players don’t really have the bones and ligaments to play baseball at the highest level. Human beings, we are talking about the other 99.999 of the planet Earth, simply can’t do these things for very long if at all. And that’s with or without a staff who has no other job to do but to make sure the player is ready for their next game.

And with all this new “let’s Max everything out” of playing, we don’t have that high leg kick anymore. We don’t have pitchers telling their managers how they felt anymore. We don’t have duals so much anymore, although Bauer had one in Japan a couple of weeks ago. And of course, if we’re talking about Judge or Ohtani or Big Ben Joyce or any of the other God level players we have these days, they weren’t giving people Picasso’s, Islands and European Banks to play ball back in the day. Back in the day, they weren’t elite people financially, there was not the media, hype, coverage or attention they have now. It wasn’t so much of a corporate business. They were just people that were really good at playing baseball.

Meanwhile, 75 years after Jackie Robinson, three score and 15 years since this particular racial breakthrough, we still haven’t come close to fixing the problem because we’ve never come close to having skin color not matter because white people never stop inflicting the wound. We still have not figured out how to get rid of societal sadism and slavery and we’ve never figured out that we’re supposed to let everybody have good healthy food.

We may have figured out biological mechanics and chemistry but we haven’t figured out how to live on the planet Earth. We are off the charts technologically, but we still have not figured out how to be good people.