Whole new ballgame: 9 ways baseball has changed since Yankees, Dodgers last met in World Series

It’s fun to play on the internet and encounter treasures like the full television broadcast of the 1981 World Series. Pearl Bailey sang the anthem. The lead play-by-play voice belonged to a man better known for his work on Saturdays, Keith Jackson. And because streaming was a concern reserved only for urologists, the game could only be watched on ABC. Whoa, Nellie!

Yeah, a lot has changed about baseball in the 43 years since the Yankees and Dodgers last met in the Fall Classic. But as we’ll see, one very important thing has come back into style.

1. RIP, multi-purpose parks

The No. 1 song on the Billboard rock charts in 1981 was “Start Me Up” off the Rolling Stones’ album “Tattoo You,” released in August of that year. Fitting, of course, because it’s exactly the kind of vibe you expect from most of the baseball stadiums of the era.

Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. These were concrete behemoths — “concrete donuts,” as the moniker went — with the most modest of frills, other than, of course, the state-of-the-art AstroTurf playing surface.

When the Athletics said goodbye to Oakland this season, it meant that just four major-league stadiums remain from 1981, including one of the parks in this series, the venerable Dodger Stadium. (The others: Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Angel Stadium and Kauffman Stadium.)

Twenty-one ballparks from that year are now deceased, a list that includes jewels like Tiger Stadium and Comiskey Park but mostly one fading genre:

The multi-purpose stadium.

With research help from The Athletic’s Tyler Kepner, we deemed that 18 of the 26 stadiums from 1981 played host to professional football games that year. (Don’t forget the Canadian Football League or that Milwaukee’s County Stadium hosted three Green Bay Packers games.) The list includes the Kingdome in Seattle and the Astrodome in Houston (the Metrodome in Minnesota was one year away) and classic venues like Shea Stadium in New York and Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

Today, Major League Baseball is dominated by retro parks built in the 1990s and 2000s and, with few exceptions, the game is played on natural grass. Speed is still a factor in 2024, but it’s nothing compared to the kind of pinball baseball played on turf in St. Louis, Kansas City and Cincinnati.

Dodger Stadium has been renovated over the years but still feels timeless, stuck in the late 1950s or early ’60s. Yankee Stadium — built to mimic the two versions of the previous iteration — is a pristine structure built to look older. But it does not feel like 1981.

2. Complete games haven’t completely gone away — but …

In 2024, pitchers started what they finished 28 times. In 1981, that number was 510. That’s even after a strike halted play for nearly two months from June 12 to Aug. 9, with some teams playing as few as 103 games for the year. That season, three teams got more complete games out of their starters than all of MLB this season. That list included the Detroit Tigers (33), Cleveland Indians (33) and the true outliers, the Oakland A’s. Their pitching staff logged a staggering 60 complete games.

It was part of what was known as Billy Ball, named after the cantankerous and sometimes brilliant Billy Martin. The A’s won the strike year’s first-half title, swept the Royals in the proto-Division Series, but got swept by the Yankees in the League Championship Series. Not a bad run. But what got lost: The team ERA jumped by a full run after the two-month strike break, perhaps due to Martin’s failure to adjust.

“They just were not the same after they came back from the strike of 1981 and that long layoff,” said Glenn Schwarz, who covered the A’s for the San Francisco Examiner at the time. “And then Billy is just encouraging them to just go out and throw more complete games, and they just weren’t ready for it after taking almost two months off.”

None of the four pitchers that logged double-digit complete games in the 1981 season were over the age of 30. But Rick Langford, Steve McCatty, Mike Norris and Mike Keough would all soon deal with arm problems that derailed their careers.

3. A surge in strikeouts per nine innings — whiff no end in sight

The ’80s were wild. You could smoke cigarettes on airplanes and TV broadcasts of baseball games did not feature immediate radar gun readings. So primitive! OK then, let’s look at another way to measure pitcher dominance: strikeouts. Pitchers throw harder and spin it harder and the poor hitters are left to deal with the consequences. Over the past decade, MLB front offices became obsessed with the idea of missing bats, so this stat should not come as a surprise.

In 1981, pitchers racked up 4.7 strikeouts per nine innings. In 2024, that number jumped to 8.6.

Chris Sale led the pack this season with 11.4 strikeouts per nine, followed by Sonny Gray at 10.98 and Jack Flaherty at 10.78. In 1981, that distinction belonged to Steve Carlton (8.48), Nolan Ryan (8.46) and the rookie sensation Fernando Valenzuela (8.42).

4. The highest-paid player on the field was rich. But now he has 700 million reasons to smile

The front page of The New York Times on Dec. 16, 1980, was loads of fun. President Ronald Reagan was about to appoint Alexander Haig as secretary of state, and a few months later, in the confusion following an assassination attempt on the president, Haig infamously proclaimed, “I’m in control here.” Technically, he was not. Also on the front page that day, the former No. 2 official of the FBI, Mark W. Felt, was forced to pay a fine for authorizing illegal break-ins. Decades later, Felt revealed himself to be Deep Throat, the source at the center of the Watergate scandal who essentially got Richard Nixon DFA’d from the White House.

On that busy news day, baseball also made an appearance on the front page. A photo featured a smiling Dave Winfield and George Steinbrenner, beneath the headline “Yanks Sign Winfield for Up to $25 million.” Big deal? You bet. How big? Very. The Yankees beat out the Orioles and … the Expos (!) to lavish upon Winfield what was at the time the largest contract in pro sports, making him the highest-paid player on the field for the 1981 World Series. These days the title belongs to Shohei Ohtani, the $700 million man, who even with deferments has a contract valued at $437.8 million in current dollars.

5. Four more teams! An expanded MLB universe

One thing that didn’t exist in 1981 was websites. More specifically: Sporcle, the online quiz/trivia site.. If it had, this quiz would have been 13.3 percent easier, because there were only 26 MLB teams in those days. In 1993, the league added the Colorado Rockies and Florida (now Miami) Marlins. Five years later, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays (now just Rays) debuted to bring the total to 30.

The previous expansion had come just four years before this World Series with the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays joining the league in 1977. Of those six total teams, all have played in at least one World Series … except the Mariners. Sorry, Seattle fans.

While we’re on the topic … Commissioner Rob Manfred has long said that he would like to expand to 32 teams, but not before Oakland and Tampa Bay’s respective stadium issues are resolved. It appears he did not remember to remove the monkey’s paw from the room before making these statements. The A’s are playing in a minor-league park in Sacramento for the next three years, and we have no idea where the Rays will play home games next year (though both teams could be sorted out by 2028).

There’s also one other holdup: the Regional Sports Network infrastructure is in the middle of a complete collapse/overhaul.

The Florida Marlins won the 1997 World Series in the franchise’s fifth season. (Eric Draper / Associated Press)

6. From a Division Series debut to playoffs upon playoffs upon playoffs

As much as we might try to forget 2020, the playoffs that year featured a new twist: a wild-card round. Due to the shortened 60-game season — or perhaps just to give baseball fans a little treat during those trying times — the league instituted a round of the playoffs that hadn’t existed before. Two years later, the “Wild Card round” became canon, and that’s where we’re at now.

The 1981 playoffs did something similar. In those days, there was only one round of playoffs. The winners of each of the four — yes, four — divisions would play in the ALCS and NLCS, with the winners advancing to the World Series. But because of the strike in 1981, baseball tried something a little new: They split the season into two halves, pre- and post-strike, and every team that won the division in one of those halves made the playoffs.

They called it the “Division Series,” and while it took a little longer to return, it did so once MLB went from two to three divisions per league. That would have been in 1994, but it was bumped to 1995 because another work stoppage wiped out the second half of the 1994 season.

Some interesting notes from the field of qualifiers in 1981: It was the only time the Montréal Expos ever made the playoffs. It also featured two teams that have since switched leagues: the Milwaukee Brewers (who went from the AL Central to the NL Central in 1998) and the Houston Astros (who moved from the NL Central to the AL West in 2013).

7. The designated hitter is now welcome at the World Series every year

As you likely know, the designated hitter became the standard in both leagues in 2022, ending decades of non-uniformity after American League owners approved the rule to boost sagging offense in 1973. But did you know it took a while until the rule would be consistently applied in the World Series? From 1973 to 1975, the DH wasn’t used at all in the Fall Classic. Then it got weird. From 1976 to 1985, the DH was used in even-numbered years, while the pitchers were allowed to help their own cause in the odd-numbered years, which is why the 1981 World Series featured Ron Guidry batting ninth even though the game was played in the Bronx.

That arbitrary weirdness came into play during Game 6. The Yankees angered their starter, Tommy John, by removing him for pinch-hitter Bobby Murcer in the fourth inning. Murcer flied out to end the threat, and the Dodgers beat up on the Yankees’ bullpen.

In 1986, the DH was used in AL parks, and pitchers hit in NL parks. With the exception of the 2020 World Series, that rule remained in place until the universal DH. These days, pitchers don’t hit at all, even though the best hitter on the Dodgers is actually … a pitcher.

8. The price of everything — especially a day at the ballpark — is up

At the risk of starting a different discussion in the comments, here is a handy chart to show the difference in prices for people who wanted to attend a World Series game in 1981 versus 2024.

Of note: There wasn’t an online secondary market for tickets in those days, but you could still deal with scalpers outside the stadium. (We sourced the scalper price from this article.) These days, unless you’re a season ticket holder or know someone in the industry with access to face-value tickets, you’re dealing with a secondary market site.

We included the inflation-adjusted numbers here, because it paints a more accurate picture. Sure, the price of everything has gone up since 1981. But — using a subway ticket in New York City as a good measuring stick compared to, say, baseball tickets — most of the latter’s price increase has less to do with inflation and more to do with “Oh, people will pay how much? OK, ha ha, wow! Well, that’s definitely the price now.”

9. But in some ways, baseball is still timeless

There is one thing about baseball in 2024 that is the same as 1981, and we’re not talking about home fans booing pickoff attempts by the opposing pitcher, though that is a timeless art.

Believe it or not, it’s the time of game.

The average game length in 1981 was 2 hours and 38 minutes, the exact same as it was in 2024. We can thank the pitch clock, which went into effect last year, for shaving 33 minutes from the average time of game in 2021, when game length hit its peak at 3 hours and 11 minutes. We can also thank, ahem, the extra runner at second base in extra innings.

If you parse the numbers a little more, you’ll see that the average time of nine-inning games in 1981 was 2 hours and 33 minutes, while the average nine-inning game in 2024 was 2 hours and 36 minutes. Today’s nine-inning games are a little longer, but the extra-inning ones are shorter.

We have lost the 17-inning game that goes into the wee hours of the morning, occasionally causing travel nightmares for the clubs. We also can’t say the game on the field looks all that much like 1981 baseball.

But the time spent watching it?

In this way, the 2024 World Series will feel like a throwback.

(Graphics: John Bradford / The Athletic. Top image: Sean Reilly / The Athletic. Photos: Chris Williams / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Richard Mackson / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images; Michael Zagaris / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images; Sport / Getty Images; United States Information Agency / PhotoQuest / Getty Images)