Ten years ago, Dan Epstein followed up his book on 1970s baseball (Big Hair and Plastic Grass, 2010) with another focusing specifically on the Bicentennial Year of 1976. Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of 1976 is a rambling, rollicking account that’s primarily about baseball, but also about music, TV, politics and everything else current that year. Kirkus Reviews said, “A knuckleball ride through the wonderful and wacky year the nation celebrated its 200th birthday–and the national pastime changed forever… A must for everyone who still remembers when the White Sox wore shorts.”
Well, we don’t have to think about that, actually. But as the nation this year limped through its 250th birthday, I thought it would be fun to talk with Dan with a few years of perspective. Dan has written about baseball, music, pop culture and other topics for Rolling Stone, SPIN, Men’s Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. His Substack Jagged Time Lapse is always essential reading, and he is just one of the most interesting writers you will ever find.
What inspired you to write Stars and Strikes? Did the idea come after Big Hair and Plastic Grass, or concurrently? What was the publishing process like?
The idea came to me while working on Big Hair and Plastic Grass. While I enjoyed writing that book and am proud of how it came out (not to mention how well it was received), I was endlessly frustrated by how little space I had for each season; it was pretty much “just hit the obvious highlights and move on to the next one”. I found this especially frustrating while writing the 1976 chapter, because there were so many fascinating story lines that I couldn’t really do justice to in the space of a single chapter. So I already knew before Big Hair even came out that I wanted my next book to focus entirely on the 1976 season.
Happily, Big Hair was a hit right out of the gate, so my editor at St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne (Rob Kirkpatrick) was more than happy to go to bat for a sequel. And since I’d learned a lot about researching and writing a baseball book from my experience with Big Hair, and already had a ton of notes on 1976 in the can — plus, there were a LOT more old newspapers and magazines archived online by this point — the book was much easier and quicker to put together than Big Hair was. The whole process took me about two years, instead of nearly a decade like Big Hair had done.
Whom did you directly interview about that long-ago year? How did that go?
Very few people, to be honest. I quickly discovered while working on Big Hair that ballplayers have pretty terrible memories, at least when it comes to the sort of details I was looking for. Which is understandable; they by and large don’t process the season the way that fans and sportswriters do, and we were talking about things that happened decades earlier. To really capture the events and flavors of the year, I found it far more helpful to go straight to broadcasts, newspapers and magazines from 1976.
Name one player you would describe as the face of the Bicentennial season.
Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. Birdmania completely consumed baseball that summer, to the point that other teams were begging the Detroit management to send the rookie phenom to the mound against their teams when the Tigers came to town — a scheduled start by The Bird was a virtual guarantee of an extra 10,000 paying customers (and even more when he was pitching at home). And then, the fact that he never pitched another full season will forever make The Bird and the Bicentennial inseparable.
Sadly, he’s not on the cover of Stars and Strikes, even though he should be. I had a big fight with the St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne folks over that; their worry was that, since they’d already put him on the cover of Big Hair, consumers might confuse the two books and not buy Stars and Strikes if they’d already bought Big Hair. Ironically, the opposite seems to have happened, at least on occasion — I’ve had a few people tell me (or grouse on social media) over the years that they didn’t/wouldn’t buy Stars and Strikes, because how could a book on the 1976 season be any good if it didn’t have The Bird on the cover?
What would people today not recognize from the game back then?
The emphasis on running and “small ball” — where you put the fastest guy on your team at the top of the lineup, even if he has a .299 OBP — would seem pretty alien today, I think. Ditto for pitchers regularly throwing complete games. And affordable tickets — in 1976, a box seat at Dodger Stadium cost $3.50, which works out to about $20.50 in today’s money. I have no idea how a family of four can afford to go to a game these days.
I remember that Tiger Stadium seats were priced $4 box, $3 reserved, $2 grandstand and $1 bleachers. What was the craziest promotion for the Bicentennial? I have a special place in my heart for Bill Veeck dressing like a Revolutionary Era fifer.
Oh yeah — I really love that one, too. Those Opening Day photos of Veeck on the field and in the dugout in his Revolutionary War garb never fail to bring a big smile to my face.
What stars of the future debuted in 1976?
Mark Fidrych was obviously the big rookie story that season, but 1976 was also the season where Andre Dawson, Dale Murphy, Bruce Sutter, Butch Wynegar, Garry Templeton, Joaquín Andújar, Lee Mazzilli, Rick Sutcliffe, Jason Thompson, Ruppert Jones, Willie Wilson, Pat Zachry and Glenn Burke all debuted.
Can you briefly summarize what the free agent draft was all about? Did it effect the competitive balance of certain teams? Has it changed meaningfully since?
The impact of free agency on baseball has been massive, and is probably the one event from 1976 that continues to shape the game as we know it. But the way free agency is handled these days is much different than how MLB approached it in the fall of 1976. While nowadays a player who has played out his contract (and is thus considered a free agent) is indeed free to sign with any club, back then the “Free Agent Re-Entry Draft” meant that players who had played out their contracts could only negotiate with up to 12 interested teams that had “drafted” them, and the teams themselves were only permitted to sign a maximum of two players. This was done in an attempt to keep the deeper-pocketed teams from scooping up all the talent, and defuse potential bidding wars. The “Re-Entry Draft” system was scrapped after the ’81 strike.
Since the World Series was kind of over and done that year (the Reds swept the NL Series and the WS in 7 games), can you summarize the batting title race in the AL?
It was an incredibly intense three-way race between Rod Carew of the Minnesota Twins (who was coming off of four straight AL batting crowns), George Brett and Brett’s KC Royals teammate Hal McRae. Brett and McRae had both come into August hitting in the .350s, but as they cooled off a bit over the last two months of the season, Carew gradually caught up with them. They came into the last game of the season — a Twins/Royals game, as luck would have it — with McRae hitting .33078, Brett hitting .33073, and Carew hitting .32945. Brett wound up winning the title on his last plate appearance of the game, when Twins outfielder Steve Brye misplayed an easy fly ball off Brett’s bat that turned into an inside-the-park home run. McRae came up next and grounded out; he then flipped off Twins manager Gene Mauch and accused him of instructing Brye to play in shallow left to give Brett a better chance of dropping a hit. McRae (who was Black) believed that Mauch (who was White) wanted a white player to win the title. No proof of any such conspiracy ever surfaced, however.
Describe young Dan Epstein’s year trying to follow the baseball news.
I began the year literally not knowing the difference between a run and a home run. But a screening of The Bad News Bears got me interested in the game, as did receiving several wax packs of Topps baseball cards as a party favor at a friend’s birthday. By the time my dad took me to my first major league game (May 30 at Tiger Stadium, where I saw Thurman Munson hit a home run and Billy Martin get kicked out of the game), I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, so I started reading the sports section of the Detroit News every day when I got home from school. Throw in Birdmania and my grandfather introducing me that summer to The Sporting News, and by the All-Star Game I was reading every sports page and magazine and absorbing every box score I could get my hands on. By the end of the World Series, I was so deeply obsessed with the game and its history my friends were calling me “the baseball egghead”. Which was one of the other main reasons I wanted to write Stars and Strikes — I wanted to pay tribute to the season that had transformed me into a baseball fan.
Do you have any thoughts about looking back at the book over the past decade? Is there anything you would cover differently?
I’m still really proud of Stars and Strikes — in fact, it’s my favorite of the three baseball books I’ve written, and it always makes me a little sad when people tell me they loved Big Hair and Plastic Grass but have never even heard of Stars and Strikes. On the other hand, it always fills my heart when someone singles Stars and Strikes out for praise.
And I’m not sure I would cover anything differently if I were writing the book today. I think I accomplished what I set out to do with it, and it still holds up well as a heartfelt (but also clear-eyed) love letter to a baseball season that was both deeply turbulent and profoundly magical.
Artwork from The Sporting News.
