Toronto Blue Jays third baseman Josh Donaldson watches his first-inning, two-run home run off New York Yankees starting pitcher Luis Severino at Yankee Stadium in New York on Sept. 11.Kathy Willens/The Associated Press
A rainy Thursday in New York set up a perfect Saturday for baseball fans – an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned doubleheader in the Bronx between the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees in the middle of a pennant race.
With the first game starting at 1:05 p.m. and the second game starting 30 minutes after the first game ends, fans will have a good seven hours to savour a pivotal day in the fight for the American League East Division title. Somewhere the ghost of Chicago Cubs star Ernie (Let's Play Two) Banks is smiling.
This is not one of those doubleheaders foisted on fans in recent years thanks to Major League Baseball squeezing every cent of revenue out of the gate to pay those huge player salaries. This will not see one game start in the early afternoon with those fans shooed out of the stadium in favour of a new set of ticket-buyers for a night game.
No, this is an increasingly rare bird – the single-admission doubleheader. But it was created the way all doubleheaders are these days, through a rainout or other disruption to the regular schedule. The last scheduled single-admission doubleheader in the majors was July 16, 2011 when the Los Angeles Angels visited the Oakland Athletics.
However, there are baseball fans of a certain age – an advanced age to be sure – who can remember when doubleheaders were a regular part of the game, especially on Sundays. The golden age of doubleheaders went from the Second World War years through the 1960s.
According to figures compiled by baseball writer Chris Jaffe for the website The Hardball Times, the number of doubleheaders crested in 1956 followed by a slow decline. In 1956, 33.17 per cent of the National League's games were doubleheaders with the American League at 26.54 per cent. It was the last time either league's doubleheaders made up more than 30 per cent of the schedule.
By 1973, both leagues were just above 15 per cent and the pace of the decline picked up. This was no coincidence, as players finally gained the freedom to market their services as free agents and salaries exploded. The last time one of the major leagues was above 10 per cent was 1979 when the NL schedule reached a 12.77-per-cent mark in doubleheaders. By 2005 that was down to 1.54 per cent where it has hovered between there and a little over 2 per cent ever since.
This was simply due to money, as team owners saw no need to restrict two games to one set of gate receipts, especially since they were paying more out to the players.
In the Internet age of multitasking there is another reason why the golden age of doubleheaders is unlikely to return: Today's fans simply do not have the attention spans to sit through as much as eight hours of baseball. Today's average game is about three hours long, a terribly long time for some people to share with their smart phone.
The fastest doubleheader played lasted 2 hours 7 minutes for two games on Sept. 26, 1926 when the St. Louis Browns swept the Yankees. The first game went 1:12 while the second was 55 minutes, which still stands as the AL's shortest game.
But those willing to sit through all of Saturday's doubleheader between the Jays and Yankees, and recent television ratings show they are, will be accommodated by Sportsnet. The network will carry both games with its pre-game show, Blue Jays Central, starting at 12:30 p.m.
Given the appetite of Canadian viewers for the Blue Jays, Sportsnet host Jamie Campbell expects the network to run its baseball coverage non-stop through the break between games. The demand is such that Sportsnet did something it has never done before with the Blue Jays: It broadcast the pre-game show Thursday night even though the game was postponed because of rain an hour earlier.
"That's exactly how things are going [with viewers] right now," Campbell said.
There is also another reason to anticipate Saturday's doubleheader: The last time the Blue Jays played a twin bill, June 2 in Washington against the Nationals, they were a mediocre team going nowhere. There was even talk a Nats sweep would get Jays manager John Gibbons fired.
When the Jays lost the first game 2-0 to the Nationals this looked to be more than speculation. But they rebounded to win the nightcap 7-3 and that started an 11-game winning streak that arguably had as much to do with the team's turnaround as the blockbuster trades in July.