Bobby Thomson is congratulated for hitting "The Shot Heard Round The World." Courtesy photo

SHEPHERDSTOWN — The times were much different. Major League Baseball had only 16 teams — eight in the National League and eight in the American League. Now days, there are 30 Major League teams — 15 in the National League and 15 in the American League.

Once, there were no divisions. All eight teams in each league hoped they would be embroiled in a pennant race that would be blanketed by what media there was. Daily newspapers covered every game. There were both afternoon and morning papers in every big league city. Television wasn’t a factor. But radio was, with every team, airing its games.

Pennant races received all-out coverage. The nation paid attention, even when no Major League team was located west of St. Louis and Kansas City.

Newspapers would often place pennant race game stories on their front pages.

In 1948, there was a three-team pennant chase in the American League between Cleveland, Boston and New York. All three teams had records of 91-56 at one time and the season had only a 154-game schedule. Cleveland and Boston finished the regular season in a flat-footed tie. In the one-game playoff, Cleveland won. The next season, another round of pennant fever gripped New York and Boston. The Yankees trailed the Red Sox by a single game with two to play. New York won both those games, to send Paul Revere and Samuel Adams crying into the Charles River.

Years later in 1967, there was a four-team pennant scramble in the American League. On Sept. 18, there were three teams tied for first place and the fourth contender only one game behind them. The White Sox and Twins eventually fell back and Boston edged Detroit for the pennant.

When black-and-white television was in its infancy, there was a famous pennant race in the National League between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The year was 1951 and both Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and the Polo Grounds high above Coogan’s Bluff, where the Giants held their home games, were alive with baseball passion.

The teams were tied when the regular season ended and the best-of-three-game playoff ensued. The teams split the first two games and a third and deciding game was necessary.

Brooklyn led early. The Giants rallied and, then, came the so-called “Shot Heard Round the World.” New York’s Bobby Thomson slugged a three-run home run into the yawning left field stands. And the New York comeback had won it. An all-New York World Series won by the Yankees.

Here in 2025, there are three five-team divisions in each league. Three wild card teams add more levels to the playoffs. To miss the intensity of a pennant race, any team has to be truly ordinary . . . or worse. In cities or areas where fans now bellow “Sell the Team,” there are no races at all. Those places are Pittsburgh, wherever the Athletics are playing, where pockets of Chicago White Sox diehards are still wishing for better times and in forlorn Denver, home of the Rockies.

Fans save their pennies and money for concessions for the multi-layered playoffs. Franchises promote the idea that the local team can reach those playoffs. After all, they are only three games behind for one of the three wild card berths.

“Pennant Fever” has been mostly extinguished by the unseen vaccines of bloated salaries given to players who will leave town as soon as their current contract is completed.

But as the fairy tales go, “once upon a time” there was loyalty in the land to the hometown team, so much so that people chased tickets to get a chance to attend an actual pennant race.